by Carmen Levey
We were privileged to have a talk at our parental support group last week, which was led by counselling psychologist, Trish Fiandiero. The topic? How to regulate our emotions. It was obvious this was a hot topic, judging by the turn out. The reason? Many of us are currently parenting children who are at an age where they are starting to express emotions in a big way, and where those emotions are leading to behaviors that trigger us. This has led to us parenting or reacting in a way that does not necessarily align with our parenting values.
I tried to summarize the talk into a one pager, but the topic just had far too many nuggets of wisdom, that I thought it deserved its own post.
This is such an in-depth topic, and I know from personal experience, that it can be a long, exhausting learning process. I am currently engaged with a life coach to work through my own journey of emotional learning and regulation. Having said that, the good news is that this is something that can be learned, and I have tried to summarize the good bits under headings that Trish provided. The advice Trish had for working through emotional regulation, whether it be with your children, spouse, partner, or parent is, that you can do it on your own, but should you get “stuck” and unable to move forward or make a positive change, that then it would be best to engage a professional to help.
So, let’s get down to it.
Top tips for regulating your emotions:
- Co-regulation
Emotional regulation is learned, and many of us were raised in a time where outward displays of emotion were not tolerated very well. Instead of being taught to regulate and understand our emotions, we were encouraged to suppress them or punished for the behaviors associated with them. We are trying to help our children regulate their emotions when in fact, we have no idea how to regulate our own. So, the way we can both learn this skill is through co-regulation.
What does co-regulation look like?
- Not joining in on their storm and remaining calm while they have a meltdown.
- Get down on their level.
- Be present/ stay in the moment and use some calming strategies like breathing: “We’re both really upset, I’m going to breathe now, and you can too”
- Put something in the gap to widen the time between stimulus and response where you can. Gap words and affirmations are helpful here. Saying things to yourself like “There is only one adult in the room” or “don’t join the storm” or “I can do this even though it’s hard”.
- Change the expectations: why do we expect our kids to be able to regulate their emotions when we can’t? Why do we think our children shouldn’t feel big emotions?
- In the moment of tantrums, particularly in public, it is helpful to remember that it is not the meltdown that is the problem, but rather the embarrassment. If you can navigate your own embarrassment, everything will sort itself out if you employ the above strategies.
2. Reparenting
Reparenting is the concept that we must go back and become to ourselves the parent that we needed or the parent that we never had. When we become parents ourselves, it is then that we notice the shortcomings of our own upbringings. This may be true for you as a sibling too. Some parenting strategies may have been helpful or fine for a sibling but harmful to you. Here is where we introduce the concept of “AND”: My parents did the best that they knew how, AND some of their strategies were not helpful to me. This is the point where we identify the things that we would like to do differently with our children.
It is ok to have conflictual feelings about how you were parented, and acknowledge that what we are doing is hard: parenting your children while reparenting yourself is very hard work. We are breaking patterns of generational trauma.
Note: If some of the strategies were truly harmful or abusive, this would be something that probably requires professional help.
Some strategies to work through reparenting could look like:
- Identifying your needs that were not met: physical, emotional, psychological, or social (journaling is good for this).
- Affirmations that “talk to” and connect your inner child.
- Letting go of the burden, shame, or guilt that you might feel.
- Learn what your parents couldn’t teach you.
- Create meaningful relationships and a support network that meets your needs.
- Practice self-care*, give yourself grace.
3. Identifying emotions
It is hard to regulate your emotions if you have a limited vocabulary around emotions. A common scenario is when we are triggered by our children and we have a big emotional response, but we have been missing the emotional cues leading up to the response. If we don’t have a good vocab around emotions, then those cues go undetected and lead to large emotional responses or outbursts. The trigger is often not really the problem. This is where the emotion wheel comes in handy (see below).
Tips for identifying emotions:
- Print the emotion wheel and start to recognize what feelings are popping up when they happen.
- Label emotions for yourself and for your children.
- Nuanced words help us answer the question: what am I actually feeling?
- When we identify the nuanced feeling, we can address the need that underlies the feeling.
4. Exploring triggers
Notice what happens when you get triggered: you lose your S*^t, have an emotional outburst and then you feel bad or guilty and the negative self-talk is ramped up. Or we become narcissistic or egocentric and blame the person for the behavior with talk like “you see, this is what happens when you don’t listen to me” etc. Once again, let’s get curious about this:
- What is it that actually sets you off? Is it being ignored? Unvalidated? Dismissed? The mess? The noise?
- When are you most likely to feel triggered? Is there a time of day that you are more sensitive? Is it because you are hungry, tired, cold or at the end of the day? Connect with your body: is there a bodily sensation that is uncomfortable?
- Who is most likely to trigger you? Your child, partner, parent?
- Why are you triggered? What is the underlying need behind the trigger? For example, when your child ignores you, is it because it makes you feel invalidated? If you can identify the why, then you can explain it to your child, partner, or parent. We don’t make them responsible for our emotional needs, but it is helpful for them to understand how their behavior is causing us to react in a certain way.
Tips for managing triggers:
- Reflect on your day and recall the times you felt triggered and try and identify the emotions and underlying needs.
- Understand your sensory profile: are you sensitive to noise, light, touch? Notice your body: where there warning signs that we were becoming emotionally or sensorily dysregulated? Where you already tapped out at your noise capacity before suicide hour? Did that cause you to overreact to the kids fighting at dinner time?
- Understand your social profile: are you an introvert or an extrovert? Have you had too much social interaction during the day, and haven’t accounted for the rest/ downtime you need to counteract that? Are you not getting enough social interaction and not meeting your social needs.
- Notice depletion: for an introvert this looks like not having emotional capacity to deal with interaction after a social engagement, and you are then more likely to be triggered. For an extrovert this looks like depression, sadness, hopelessness at not having enough social interaction or quality friendship time.
- Make provision for depletion and be intentional about rest/ recovery/ solitude if you’re an introvert, and quality social time as an extrovert self-care!*
*A note on self-care: self-care is very different to selfishness. Self-care means “I do this so that I can” (a better mother/ friend/ partner etc). Selfishness is “I do this because I want to for myself”. Self-care requires immense social maturity. It asks us to do hard things and be courageous and show up for ourselves, in order to be the person that others need us to be.
Takeaway tips
- Eating well, sleeping and exercise. These are the pillars of wellness. If you are not able to priories these due to circumstantial reasons, this is where supplements and medication can be helpful as an extra pillar. As our children ger older and health improves, we can focus on sleep, diet and exercise and supplements can fall away.
- Use GAP words/ strategies
- Affirmations and validation
- Communication is key: communicate your needs, and the reasons why you are triggered. Also notice when you are triggered, you are probably not in the best space to communicate your needs or emotions.
- Request forgiveness when you apologize.
- Apologize and repair when you need to. This models to your children and partner how to repair and is the biggest marker of relational success. Do this at the later when everyone is calmer. And remember not to address the behavior in the same conversation.
- BREATHE: when you or child is triggered, breathe.
- Change the expectations
Remember what makes up these emotional outbursts : underlying needs create emotions/feelings, and feelings create behaviours. Address the underlying need, and the behaviour will sort itself out!
Here are some very valuable resources in navigating this journey with your family and children:
The Peaceful Parent courses and podcast: https://thepeacefulparent.com/podcast/
Janet Lansbury and Unruffled Podcast: https://www.janetlansbury.com/articles/
Big Little Feelings blog: https://biglittlefeelings.com/blog/
You got this!
xxx
