Fostering Emotional Regulation and Growth Through Residential Mental Health Treatment

The process of learning how to regulate your emotions typically begins in early childhood, as children learn to recognize their own feelings and the feelings of others. “A child’s increasing ability to ‘regulate’ her emotions—to express her feelings in constructive rather than impulsive or hurtful ways—is now recognized as a critical factor in children’s psychological health,” says Dr. Kenneth Barish, Associate Professor of Psychology at Weill Medical College at Cornell University. Indeed, research suggests that children who are able to successfully regulate their emotions “are better able to resolve conflicts with their peers and show lower levels of psychological stress” while also being “more caring toward others.”

An essential piece of understanding emotional regulation is recognizing that it isn’t just another term for anger management or suppressing of negative emotions. It’s about experiencing emotions in non-destructive ways. “Emotional regulation means being able to think constructively about how to cope with feelings. We want children to have feelings, but not be overwhelmed by them,” Dr. Barish continues.

In my experience, children most effectively learn to regulate their emotions when they are confident that their feelings will be heard. When a child expects that her feelings and concerns will be appreciated and understood, her emotions become less urgent.

Of course, many people do not grow up in environments in which they feel heard, their emotions are valued, or they are able to observe healthy emotional regulation in others. When combined with the emotional dysfunction inherent to mental health disorders, the result is often a profound inability to successfully navigate your emotional landscape and modulate feelings in a productive way, stunting emotional growth and causing significant functional challenges continuing into adulthood.

Luckily, the opportunity to develop emotional regulation skills isn’t confined to childhood. Adults, even those with serious mental illness, can learn to successfully manage emotions and increase emotional agility throughout their lives. Learning and practicing these skills is invaluable, both in the midst of psychiatric crisis and after psychiatric stability has been achieved. These skills include:

• Identifying Your Emotions: This may seem like an easy thing, but many people don’t know exactly which emotion they are experiencing, particularly if they grew up in environments in which certain emotions were not tolerated. Are you angry or are you ashamed? Are you anxious or are you sad? Identifying your emotions is the first step toward understanding what you are feeling and how to take control of that feeling.
• Identifying Others’ Emotions: Learning how to read others is essential to emotional regulation. Without understanding how someone else is feeling, you cannot properly formulate a reality-based response and may react in an inappropriate way. If you’re not sure what someone is feeling, ask.
• Tolerating Distress: Emotional regulation doesn’t mean feeling happy or okay all the time; after all, the world of emotions is vast. It is normal to feel anger, disappointment, embarrassment, and sadness at times. Allowing yourself to feel these things without catastrophizing the experience is vital to learning how to have a healthy relationship with yourself and others.
• Communicating Your Feelings: Expressing your emotions, even difficult ones, is an important part of forming and maintaining meaningful relationships and fostering emotional growth. For people who grew up in families or have had relationships in which emotional communication was discouraged, this can be difficult and even frightening, but honestly talking about what you are experiencing is necessary in order to connect with others and have your emotional needs understood and met.
• Soothing Yourself: Developing strategies to comfort yourself in the presence of distressing emotions or situations is an invaluable skill that can foster self-reliance and confidence. It also decreases the likelihood that you will turn to unhealthy behaviors, such as substance abuse or self-injury, in order to cope with difficult experiences.
• Nourishing Positive Emotions: Emotional regulation isn’t just about managing negative emotions, but about creating opportunities for positive ones. Plan activities that bring you joy, engage in relationships that fulfill you, relish in the experiences that make you feel alive.

Developing emotional regulation skills doesn’t mean suppressing your emotions, but using them in a way that benefits you and helps you create a more stable, fulfilling life. As Dr. Amelia Aldao, assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University, says, “[E]motions have great potential for helping us navigate the environment. We just have to experience them at a level that is most optimal in each context.”