What Factors Prevent Healthy and Adaptive Emotional Regulation?

Fortunately, in more recent stages, talking about mental health and placing emphasis on promoting the factors that can favor it are becoming normalized. One of these variables refers to providing developing people, infants and adolescents, with an adequate and accessible level of emotional education, which allows the learning of effective adaptive and healthy emotional regulation resources and strategies. Thus, emotional intelligence is defined as the ability to recognize one’s own emotions and those of others, manage them appropriately, distinguish them and use that information to guide thinking and actions

What is emotional intelligence for?

Emotions, both the most pleasant and those that are not so pleasant, are present in everything we experience daily and condition our moods, our thinking, our actions and how we relate to others. For this reason, emotional intelligence is so important, since it facilitates adequate personal and social development, especially in children and adolescents, who are in the most significant stage of the psychological maturation process.

Low emotional competence in adolescents can sometimes lead to maladaptive behaviors such as substance use, eating disorders, gender violence or other acts of violence in general. In addition, emotional intelligence plays an important role in decision-making, motivation and the prevention of risk factors in the classroom.

As a society, sometimes we have important deficiencies in the area of ​​emotional education, becoming adults with low emotional awareness. This translates into having difficulties in sustaining the discomfort or unpleasant emotions of others, expressing an avoidant pattern regarding emotional experience, and having certain limitations in healthy emotional regulation skills.

Dysfunctional forms of emotional management

As we usually explain in therapy, when we consider working on emotional management, before starting to address the resources or tools to incorporate, we must learn to identify, deautomatize and abandon the dysfunctional emotional management patterns that are still present and that have a self-destructive nature.

Some of the dysfunctional emotional management patterns that do not help us correctly manage our emotions are the following:

It has been observed that the biggest problems that exist with emotional management do not refer to the lack of regulation strategies, but to the large number of ineffective forms of coping that are carried out, which worsen the emotional state itself. Obviously, many of these dysfunctional patterns are not carried out consciously and, precisely for this reason, it is so important Know what helps and what doesn’t to be able to choose more consciously what behaviors should be stopped and what strategies it is advisable to incorporate

Dysfunctional thought loops

As you can also imagine with everything mentioned, going over and over the same situation or emotion is not a helpful mechanism either. In fact, what it does is amplify that emotion and intensify it, giving us the feeling that what we feel is very intense, it overwhelms us, and we cannot do anything with it. It is expected that our head will try to understand and look for the “why” in various situations.

However, It is important to remember that there is not always a single reason or cause and that we deserve to feel and attend to that emotion, even if we do not find “justification” or reason for being In fact, this struggle (rumination) usually starts from a basis of judgment towards this emotion, judging whether it should be here or not, with what intensity, etc. This takes us away from the main objective, which is to observe that emotion in a neutral way, let it be felt, attend to it and take care of ourselves when it appears until it fades away.

More effective ways of emotional management

It is natural that, when we come into contact with certain emotions, it makes us uncomfortable. Many emotions are certainly unpleasant. However, it is necessary to remember that all emotions are important and they all have their function. Starting from this basis, it is expected that sometimes, avoiding feeling a certain emotion will relieve us at first; But, even if we don’t feel it, that emotion is not going to disappear. In fact, it returns, at the same time, with the problem that generated it unresolved and us feeling less capable of handling it.

Something that can help us begin to get in touch with the emotions that cost us the most without overwhelming us can be to observe the emotions from a distance. That is, allowing ourselves to feel them without immersing ourselves in them, observing them from the outside and following their curve and their evolution until they disappear, without trying to do anything with those emotions The exercise of imagining the emotion with a color or a figure or by using metaphors such as equating emotions to the process of a cloud that moves with the wind or a train that we let pass can help us.

This approach is closely linked to not judging one’s own emotions. That is, observe them as spectators without trying to alter them and without categorizing them as “good or bad”, “I should feel it or not”, etc. These judgments are what frequently lead us to feel guilt or shame for feeling the way we do, and these emotions feed a lot of the secondary suffering associated with the emotion itself. It is important to learn to identify when we are judging and redirect ourselves towards an observation that is as neutral as possible; which we can later accompany with a compassionate dialogue with ourselves. It can help us, for example, to think about what we would say to someone we are very fond of if they were feeling that way; Surely the message would not be aimed at shaming or making you feel guilty.

The importance of the internal belief system

The dialogue that is established in these moments also has a lot to do with each person’s negative beliefs, which, in turn, is what usually leads us to compare ourselves with other people. It is important to remember that no matter how true and strong our beliefs about ourselves may seem, they are simply thoughts that were formed based on experiences we lived throughout our life history. It is of great importance to remind ourselves that all beliefs can and have to evolve, be questioned, submitted to judgment, etc This is a work that is regularly carried out in therapy: questioning everything that defines one’s own identity or what we believe we are, until reaching more realistic and empathetic approaches to oneself.

Author: Carla Carulla, child and adolescent psychologist at Elisabet Rodríguez – Psicologia i Psicopedagogia (Granollers).