How to become emotionally regulated

Strong emotions are not inherently dysregulating. When emotions are dysregulated in my experience it’s usually because of a few things:

1. You habitually invalidate your own feelings (which is incredibly dysregulating because it’s like self-gaslighting).
2. A historical memory is triggered that has not been processed (an emotional flashback).
3. What you are feeling is connected to some sense of threat, like when you get the news someone died. This invokes your natural fight/flight response to threat.

There are two skills that are essential to resolving habitual emotional dysregulation:

1. Learn how to self-validate. I have a long article covering this over here on Joy Ninja. This alone completely changed my relationship with my emotions.
2. Learn to be with your emotions without drowning in them. Sometimes this means the artful application of compartmentalization so you titrate how much emotion you are trying to process at once.

How to not freak out

There is a phrase I learned from Crappy Childhood Fairy: “keep the plane on the ground”. If you imagine your emotions ramping up as a plane taking off, the work is to keep it grounded, or get it back on the ground. Pull back, take a breathe, take a walk, distract yourself, do something comforting—whatever you have to do to keep the plane on the ground. Practice this over and over and you will soon be able to do it automatically.

In some cases this is impossible, like when you are triggered into deep attachment wounding. In these cases, you have to just cry it out while saying loving things to yourself. At least I have not found any other way to deal with it. The good news is that it gets less and less intense each time. This is basically trauma processing which I talk about over here.

How to grow up emotionally

If you tend to say things in anger or upset and there is some part of you that is like, “They deserve to hear how I feel” or “If they just knew how much pain I was in, they would ___”, write down all the consequences of that behavior. You know it damages your relationships. Write down exactly how. Becoming conscious of the real cost (without shaming yourself).

Then write down how many times it really helped you or got you what you wanted in the long run. It is a form of emotional immaturity and refusing to take responsibility for your impact on others. I know you don’t really want to be like that. It’s just a matter of accepting that you do it and doing the work to stop. If this is a big pattern for you, you might want to read my article on healing fantasies and wanting to be rescued.

Emotional immaturity is not an insult. It’s just the result of having a childhood that didn’t fully help you grow up. That means you have to grow yourself up. It’s not fun or easy but it’s worth it because feeling like an adult while being an adult is much better than acting out like a child while being an adult.

About the Author

I wrote this for autistic, AuDHD, or ADHD people who are tired of vague advice or self-help that is clearly written for neurotypical people. It is distilled from 20 years of self-help being my special interest.

If you like this, check out Self-Liberation Society, my neurodivergent personal growth community.

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