If you’ve experienced relational trauma, emotion regulation may be something you really struggle with.
Emotion regulation is being able to acknowledge and accept your feelings, to make sense of them without becoming overwhelmed or shutting down, and to respond in a way that aligns with your needs and values.
There are three elements to emotion regulation
- Acknowledging and accepting: Recognising that emotions are valid and deserve attention.
- Making sense of emotions: Understanding why you feel a certain way and where it might come from.
- Responding intentionally: Choosing how to act on or move through the emotion rather than reacting impulsively or avoiding it.
Here is an example of someone who emotionally regulates
Imagine your partner forgets an important date, like your anniversary. You might feel hurt, disappointment, or anger. Emotion regulation starts with acknowledging and accepting these feelings: recognising, “I feel hurt because this date was important to me,” and letting yourself feel it without judging yourself for being upset. Next, you start making sense of the emotion, asking, “Why does this hurt so much? Is it just about the forgotten date, or does it bring up deeper feelings from the past, of being unimportant or unseen?” By understanding the bigger picture, you can avoid reacting impulsively. Finally, you focus on responding intentionally: instead of yelling or shutting down, you might take a few breaths to calm yourself and then share your feelings with your partner, saying, “It really hurt me when you forgot today—it feels like this date isn’t important to you. Can we talk about it?”
Common ways we struggle to emotionally regulate:
- Suppressing emotions: Pushing emotions down, pretending they don’t exist, or avoiding them altogether.
- Numbing: Using distractions like TV, food, alcohol, or social media to avoid feeling emotions.
- Explosive reactions: Lashing out in anger, yelling, or becoming overly reactive when emotions feel overwhelming.
- Emotional withdrawal: Shutting down, becoming distant, or detaching completely from feelings and relationships.
- Overthinking: Getting stuck in cycles of rumination, trying to “think” your way out of emotions instead of feeling them.
- People-pleasing: Ignoring your own feelings to focus on making others happy or avoiding conflict.
- Perfectionism: Trying to control emotions by overachieving, setting impossible standards, or avoiding mistakes.
- Self-blame: Turning difficult emotions inward, feeling shame or guilt for experiencing them in the first place.
- Avoiding triggers: Structuring your life to avoid anything that might bring up difficult emotions, even when it limits your experiences.
- Self-harm: Using harmful behaviours like cutting or restricting food to cope with or express overwhelming emotions.
For trauma survivors, emotion regulation can feel particularly challenging when the past keeps getting triggered in the present. Unprocessed trauma often causes intense emotional reactions because the brain and body haven’t fully integrated those past experiences. Instead, the emotions tied to the trauma—like fear, anger, or shame—can surface in an unregulated way, as if the danger is happening all over again. This makes it harder to manage emotions in the moment, even when the triggers might not be obvious or seem small to others.
Emotion regulation is something that therapy will help with. Remember those three steps listed at the start of the article?
- Acknowledging and accepting your emotions
- Making sense of your emotions
- Responding intentionally to your emotions
As you process more of your trauma in therapy, these steps will gradually become second nature. Over time, you will feel more grounded and in control of your emotional world.