Emotional Regulation: What Happens When Someone Can't Regulate Their Emotions?

In today’s world there are all kinds of challenges that people are having to face. And some of these are relatively easy to handle, while others can seem to be more or less impossible to solve.

These can range from global, societal and personal problems. In a way, they can all affect each other, and at the same time one doesn’t always have to be affected by what others are doing in their society or the world at large.

And this includes the economy and the environment when it relates to societal and global challenges. When it comes to personal problems, the economy and the environment are going to have the potential to cause problems, and there will also be other things.

The areas in ones personal life will be: relationships, physical health, mental and emotional health and their financial situation, amongst other things.

Attention

Each of these areas is important and needs to receive the right amount of attention in one’s personal life. One can’t change the economy or the environment by themselves, but what they can do is play their part in the grand scheme of things. Each and everyone one of us has a part to play, one only needs to realise it.

When it comes to someone’s personal life, a lot of their attention is going to be placed on their finances. And most societies are the same, with success being measured by how well their economy is doing and not based on peoples mental and emotional wellbeing.

Society focuses on the importance of physical health and one is likely to have the same outlook. This means that one will need to eat well and to engage in some kind of exercise on a regular basis.

Emotions

What are generally overlooked in society as a whole and in peoples individual lives are emotions. And as society doesn’t encourage people to learn about their emotions, it means that they are largely ignored.

If learning about them was part of the education system, then this would not be the case. So instead of creating awareness around the importance of emotions, society pretends they don’t exist.

Forgotten

However, just because they are overlooked by society and the people in it, it doesn’t mean that will be the end of it. Human beings are inherently emotional beings and while ignoring them won’t necessarily cause one to die, as it would if they stopped eating, there will be consequences.

Relationship

Some people will have a better relationship with their emotions than others. And this will often go back to what happened in their childhood. How their caregiver/s responded to their emotions will have played a big part in how one responds to them in their later years.

With ones time as a baby and a young child being the time where one will have learn how to regulate their emotions and therefore, will have formed a healthy relationship with them. Or this can be a time where they didn’t learn how to regulate them and as a result, formed an unhealthy relationship with them.

Emotional Regulation

At such a young age, one wouldn’t have had the ability to regulate themselves. So through a caregivers mirroring and attunement, one would have been able to regulate how they felt. As one internalised this and developed the ability to regulate themselves, this external support would not be as important.

This would allow one to have a reasonable amount of emotional control and to not feel all at sea when certain emotions appear. Being able to just be with them would then be possible and if it wasn’t, one would feel comfortable enough to ask for assistance from others.

The Challenge

The challenge is when this external support was not their enough when one was a child, or wasn’t there at all. This is going to lead to problems in later life, unless one seeks some kind of assistance and even then it is not going to change overnight.

One is then not going to find it hard to experience emotional control and they could be taken out by their emotions. Simply being with their emotions is going to be a challenge. And as there is very little they can do internally, they are going to find it hard to experience emotional stability.

Consequences

So on one side there will be inner unrest and on the other side there will be outer consequences. These will be the things that one does externally in order to regulate their emotions. And while these won’t always be healthy or functional, if one hasn’t got the ability to regulate how they feel, they might seem like the only options available.

Examples

Addictions are a big problem in today’s society and while they often lead to problems, they allow one to regulate how they feel.

Violence is another challenge and this also enables one to regulate how they feel through causing external destruction for instance.

Alcohol when taken to the extreme causes inner problems and external problems. But even though this is the case and is self evident, it settles ones emotions down.

Food is something that everyone needs and yet it can also be used as a way to regulate ones emotions. So one then ends up eating and not because their hungry, but because they need to sooth themselves. This could go back to their childhood, with food being the only way they were able to feel better; with love being absent.

Society

This shows that as individuals are affected by it, the world at large is also going to end up being affected. How someone feels will define how they behave and if they have no emotional control, then all kinds of things are going to happen.

Sometimes this might lead to an addiction that won’t harm another and at other times, this could be an act of violence that ends up harming many people. The importance of emotional awareness and education can’t be stressed enough.

If emotions were part of the education system, it is fairly clear that the world would change. And this is unlikely to be a few changes here and there, but change that will make a significant difference.

Awareness

As emotions are rarely looked at in today’s world, it will generally mean that one will have to take matters into their own hands and to seek the assistance they need to deal with this area of their life.

One reason why people can’t regulate their emotions is because they have an emotional build up. This means that they have trapped emotions in their body that may have built up since the moment they were born; these will need to be released.

Another thing that one will need to experience is the mirroring and attunement that they didn’t receive as a child. This can be provided by a therapist or a healer. Through this, one will be able to internalise this and gradually build up their ability to regulate their emotions.