What is Emotion Regulation? A Therapist’s Guide to Feeling Safer, Calmer, and More in Control

Do you wish you could stay calm when triggered? This is called Emotion Regulation.

Do your emotions ever feel too big to carry? 

Avoiding or pushing away big feelings is not a sign of weakness. It’s your nervous system doing its best to protect you.

Feeling disconnected or overwhelmed does not mean you’re broken or failing. That includes reacting in ways you don’t fully understand, especially in your closest relationships or while parenting.

You’re likely carrying patterns your nervous system learned long ago to keep you safe. Maybe you learned to shut down, stay quiet, stay busy, or always be “the strong one.”

These were brilliant survival strategies at the time. But now, they hinder the connection, peace, or presence you deeply crave.

The good news? You’re not stuck with those patterns forever.

Your brain and body are capable of learning something new. 

You’re allowed to:

• move from survival mode into healing — and even joy.
• parent differently
• love differently
• show up for yourself in a way that feels safe and true.

What is Emotional Regulation?

Emotional regulation isn’t about perfection. It’s about creating enough inner safety to pause, feel, and choose something new.

In addition, it’s not about being calm all the time or ignoring how you feel. It’s about being capable of noticing what you’re feeling. You name it and choose a response that honors your needs. This avoids reacting in a way that later feels regretful.

We learn how to regulate or dysregulate our feelings through relationships. 

Why Is it So Hard to Regulate Emotions?

As children, we don’t come into the world knowing how to regulate ourselves. We learn it through what’s called co-regulation: when someone else stays calm and connected while we’re falling apart. A caregiver’s warm presence literally teaches a child’s nervous system what safety feels like.

But many of us didn’t grow up with consistent emotional presence. Maybe we had loving caregivers who didn’t have those tools themselves. Big emotions were seen as bad, dramatic, or weak. You were praised for being “strong” and quiet or shamed for being sensitive.

Emotional regulation is the ability to notice, process, and respond to one’s feelings in a helpful, not harmful way. It doesn’t mean numbing. It means staying connected to oneself while one feels and accepts one’s emotions.

From a brain-based perspective:

• Your amygdala acts like a fire alarm, alerting you to danger or discomfort.
• Your prefrontal cortex is your wise owl, helping you pause, think, and respond calmly.

When those two parts aren’t communicating well, emotional regulation breaks down. This isn’t just theory. It shows up in everyday life when you overreact to a comment. You go numb in an argument or you feel flooded just walking into a room.

If you feel skeptical because this sounds like something you “should already know how to do,” that’s valid. 

Yet, most of us were never taught how to regulate. We were taught how to suppress, smile, or stay silent. 

That’s not regulation. That’s survival.

Your nervous system is like a car alarm. It doesn’t just go off when you’re in danger. It goes off when it remembers danger. 

Learning emotional regulation is like giving that alarm system a reset button. This button ensures it doesn’t scream every time a leaf falls on the hood.

🧠 What’s Happening in Your Brain When You Feel Triggered?

Something emotionally intense can happen… a fight with your partner, your child melting down, or even just a harsh comment. When this happens, your amygdala lights up. 

Think of it as your brain’s alarm system. It reacts in milliseconds to help you survive. That’s helpful if there’s a real threat… but not so helpful when you’re just trying to have a calm conversation.

This is where the prefrontal cortex comes in. It is the part of your brain responsible for decision-making, logic, and long-term thinking. 

Our most creative selves and personality is in the prefrontal cortex.

Ideally, it regulates your emotions by calming the amygdala and helping you respond instead of react.

In a well-regulated nervous system, these two brain regions work together. 

In people with chronic stress, trauma histories, or burnout, that connection can be weak or underdeveloped. That’s when emotional dysregulation takes over.

Here are some signs you’re feeling hijacked by emotions, to name a few…

• Reacting to someone you love and feeling guilt after
• Shutting down or numbing out in the middle of a difficult conversation
• Feeling like you’re drowning in your own thoughts
• Wanting to cry but not being capable of accessing the tears
• Feeling numb, frozen, or like you’re watching life happen from the outside

🔬 What the Research Shows

A 2021 meta-analysis published in Neuropsychologia examined dozens of studies examining amygdala–prefrontal connectivity during emotion regulation. 

Researchers discovered that effective emotion regulation leads to stronger communication between these two areas of the brain. There is literally more neural coordination when people pause, think, and make conscious choices about how to respond.

📚 You can read the study here: Amygdala–prefrontal connectivity during emotion regulation: A meta-analytic approach (2021)

This isn’t wishful thinking—it’s observable brain activity. And the best part? These regulation pathways can strengthen over time with tools like mindfulness, somatic practices, therapy, and nervous system education.

Here is the difference of what we say to ourselves when feeling triggered:

• Regulating emotions → “I noticed my trigger, paused, and responded with care.”

• Dysregulating emotions → “I snapped before I could think, then shut down completely.”

“You were never too much. You were never not enough. You just needed safety. And you can build that now.”

Lucinda Loveland

🌿 Why It Happens — Even If You Had a “Good” Childhood

Emotional dysregulation doesn’t only come from obvious trauma. It can also come from what was missing.

Maybe your caregivers were loving. But they didn’t know how to name emotions. They couldn’t sit with them or guide you through them.

Maybe your big feelings were met with silence, discomfort, or subtle pressure to “be okay.” You learned to be the calm one, the helper, the achiever — because that felt safer. And now, as an adult, it’s hard to stay present with your own emotions.

That doesn’t mean you’re broken. It means you were never taught how.

Emotional regulation is a skill, and if no one modeled it for you, of course it feels unfamiliar now.

But you can learn it in your own time. You’re not behind and you’re not too much. You’re just learning a language that should’ve been spoken to you long ago.

And it’s not too late.

💞 What Co-Regulation Can Look Like

With Children:

Your child is having a hard moment — screaming, crying, melting down — and instead of reacting, you sit beside them and say:

“You’re feeling a lot right now. I’m here. We’ll figure it out together.”

You don’t try to fix it. You just stay. And that presence is the healing part.

You catch your voice rising — and pause instead of spiraling. Take a slow breath, soften your tone, and model what calm can look like.

Your child watches you… and begins to settle. You hold your child close. You breathe slowly, not to “calm them down.” Instead, you sync — heart to heart, nervous system to nervous system.

They feel your steadiness. And that’s what helps them regulate.

In Adult Relationships:

A friend is crying, and your first instinct is to say something helpful — but you don’t.

You simply sit with them and say, “I’m here. You’re not alone in this.”

That quiet presence becomes deeply regulating for both of you.

Your partner is overwhelmed, and instead of taking it personally, you stay grounded. You place a gentle hand on their back and say:

“Let’s slow down together. We’re safe. We’re okay.”

That moment shifts the entire energy between you.

What Self-Regulation Can Look Like:

(Especially when no one else is there to help you co-regulate)

You feel your chest tighten in a conversation — and instead of ignoring it, you pause.

You ask yourself gently:

“What am I feeling right now? What do I need?”

You stay curious instead of critical. 

You’re anxious and tempted to scroll or checkout. Instead, you walk outside, place a hand on your heart, and breathe.

You say: “I’m safe right now. I can be with this feeling.”

You don’t spiral into shame after a moment in parenting you’re not proud of.

You practice compassion and say:

“That was hard. I was overwhelmed. I’m learning. I can repair.”

And in doing so, you model healing — not just for yourself, but for the next generation.

💞 Practicing Emotion Regulation

Regulation can sound overly simple — like something you can skip because it feels too basic. 

But the truth is, the physiological shift it creates in your body and brain is profound. 

Breathe slowly or pause before reacting. This changes your vagus nerve response and slows your heart rate. It teaches your amygdala that you’re not in danger.

Research shows that even a few minutes of slow, deep breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system. It lowers cortisol levels and increases prefrontal cortex activity. This part of the brain is responsible for reflection, not reaction.

You may not feel it instantly, but over time, your body learns. 

Healing becomes more than a mindset; it becomes a felt experience.

The goal is to:

• Practice slow breathing when you notice a trigger
• Speak to yourself with the voice you needed as a child
• Learn to pause instead of react (it’s a skill, not a trait)

However, it takes practice. As you don’t take your first driving lesson on the freeway, you don’t start practicing breathing when you’re triggered.

You need to practice breathing and regulating your heartbeat to avoid overreacting or underreacting when triggered.

You’re thinking, “Really? Breathing? That’s it?”

I get it. It sounds too simple to matter — especially when the pain runs deep.

But here’s the truth: your breath is one of the only parts of your nervous system you can consciously control. 

When you change your breath, you change your brain chemistry.

Slow, intentional breathing isn’t about “relaxing.” It’s about sending a signal to your body that you’re safe. It’s how we shift from fight-or-flight into healing. It might be simple — but it’s not small.

Simple doesn’t mean ineffective. 

Even small practices can help retrain how your brain and body respond to stress when repeated compassionately.

If this blog resonated with you, you’re not alone. Many of us were never taught how to feel safe in our emotions, let alone regulate them compassionately. 

If you’re ready to start healing today, I’ve created a FREE therapist-guided audio training. It will help you feel more seen, loved, and connected — right where you are.

✅ Download my free audio: Feel More Seen, Loved & Connected

Healing in emotional regulation isn’t about becoming different, changing who you are, or losing control of yourself. 

It’s about returning to who you are underneath the panic, pressure, or perfectionism.

You were never too much and never not enough. You just needed safety. And you can build that now.