By Melisa De Seguirant, LPC, LMFT ~ Jan 2025
Rethinking Emotional Regulation / Nervous System Regulation
What is emotional regulation?
In the Western psychotherapy world, emphasis is often placed on emotional regulation. When I talk about emotional regulation with my clients, what I am really referring to is nervous system regulation.
But let me be clear– in many situations regulation is not reasonable to expect.
When does dysregulation make sense? How can application of the idea of emotional regulation be harmful?
How do we honor our emotions, but regulate our nervous systems? When is having the capacity to regulate our nervous systems helpful?
Check out the slideshow to get you started, then continue the post below!
Let’s make the concept of regulating emotions more approachable.
Imagine you have a sort of emotional container inside of you, flexible, like a balloon. Instead of getting filled up with air it gets filled with the emotions that you experience. Some people’s balloons might be bigger than others, but all balloons reach their breaking point. When we take in and hold on to too many emotions without releasing or processing them, we eventually pop.
We need to routinely release some of our emotions in order to avoid popping our balloon. How we release those emotions is also important, because if we vent or dump them all over the place, our balloon becomes untethered and unwieldy, and we get lost in an emotional spiral.
Regulating our emotions, then, just means being mindful of our emotional capacity and intentional about how we tend to it.
Our nervous systems are designed to dysregulate when experiencing extreme distress, in effort to keep us safe.
In addition, it is important to consider the variations in the size of each of our windows of tolerance based on different factors such as systemic oppression, neurological variances, trauma and adverse childhood experiences.
Nervous system regulation might be better understood as a skill to build & strengthen, rather than a goal-state to strive to continuously exist within.
Nervous system regulation does NOT involve:
- Suppressing emotions (even anger!)
- Tone policing
- Silencing victims
In the context of the window of tolerance model, nervous system regulation can be understood to involve:
1. The ability to identify where one’s activation level is in the present moment in relation to the windows of tolerance
2. The ability to identify and engage with strategies designed to reduce dysregulation and bring the person back into the window of tolerance
In mindfulness terminology, nervous system regulation involves the skill of witnessing our present-moment experience, non-judgmentally and without agenda to immediately change it, avoid it or even react to it.
Nervous system regulation allows us to respond to our emotions, rather than impulsively reacting to them.
Space to respond rather than react allows us to be more choiceful and tactful as we process what we are feeling and decide how to move forward. Oftentimes when given a moment to pause and reconnect with the present moment, we are more effective in how we proceed.
Believe it or not, it is possible to feel extremely intense emotions in our nervous systems and bodies, and still remain grounded in our window of tolerance. What I’m talking about here is distress tolerance… our capacity to experience emotional intensity without dysregulating, “spinning out” or shutting down.
If we can build and strengthen our ability to regulate, we can reduce our time spent in dysregulated states so that our acute suffering may be alleviated as much as possible.
So regulate your nervous system, but honor those emotions!
Sometimes the intensity of our emotions doesn’t match the intensity of our circumstances.
This can be especially true with neurodivergent people, or others who struggle with emotional regulation.
Therapeutic strategies can work on skill building without pathologizing neurodivergence. Reasonable goals might include strengthening the ability to recognize and modulate emotional responses, building awareness of the impact of emotional responses, and developing strategies to self-soothe.
Where therapy can miss the mark, is when it blindly enforces a normative expectation on people who do not fit that mold.
The “why” of strengthening the ability to emotionally regulate is important. If the “why” is simply to assimilate to a social norm, directly address that. Hold space for all of the emotions that arise in relation to that agenda. Notice how it changes motivation. Maybe the “why” is instead to increase social connectedness and the viability of relationships… try that “why” on and notice how it’s different. Same thing if the “why” is to ensure better sustainability in the workforce. What comes up around that?
While assimilating to a social norm may be an important means of survival, the emotional impact of that agenda ought to have a space to be processed.
#regulation #emotionalregulation #nervoussystemregulation #mentalhealth
Melisa is a licensed psychotherapist practicing in the states of Oregon and California, and specializing in working with individuals within the queer, polyamorous/ ethically non-monogamous and neurodivergent communities.