Emotional dysregulation: What it is and how to deal with it

People who have problems with emotional dysregulation have overwhelming, intense emotional shifts or mood swings, and have problems with emotional control and coping with emotions. They often have trouble understanding emotions and expressing emotions as well. Emotion regulation problems are a key symptom of borderline personality disorder, but people who do not have this disorder can also struggle with them.

It can be really distressing to not be able to regulate your emotions effectively - your feelings are so strong and can come on so suddenly that it's frightening, and once you're stuck in an emotion you feel completely consumed by it. This can really damage your relationships (by causing you to lash out or upset others), as well as your self-esteem, and can even make you want to feel nothing at all instead of so much emotional pain. For some people, this can be really extreme, but many people suffer from emotional regulation problems to some degree at some point in their lives.

Photo credit morning-theft

What causes emotional dysregulation?

There are a number of things that can cause emotional regulation problems, and it really depends on the person. Everyone is different and often it's a combination of causes that produce serious emotional dysregulation.

There is evidence that some people simply experience emotions more strongly and quickly than others (called high emotional reactivity). These people are especially vulnerable to emotion regulation problems because their emotions are more likely to overwhelm them.

People who struggle with emotional dysregulation also are more likely to be pessimists and have low self-esteem. A history of trauma is common, such as being abused as a child or having experienced sexual or physical violence.

Perhaps the most frequent thing people with emotional dysregulation have in common is growing up in an emotionally invalidating environment. This means that your emotions weren't valued as a child - e.g. you were often told not to cry or punished for being sad or angry, nobody cared how you felt about things, or your performance was what was important no matter how much stress and pain it cost you to achieve success. Children growing up in this sort of environment learn to suppress and ignore their feelings and so emotions can become more confusing and scary to them.

People with emotional regulation problems experience this confusion and fear of emotions all the time as adults as well. Often, they ignore and suppress low and medium levels of an emotion until these hidden emotions reach a critical level – which feels like a crashing wave of emotional pain trying to drag you under. Because emotions are so overwhelming when you finally do feel them, there's a lot of reason to try and not feel emotions – which just maintains a cycle of suppress-overwhelm-suppress that is very hard to break out of.

What can you do to deal with emotional dysregulation?

• Work on understanding your emotions. This is a very important step, because most people who have poor emotion regulation skills are also poor at identifying and understanding their emotions, and you can't change what you can't identify or understand
• Give yourself permission to feel. Your emotions are a part of you, not a threat. Try simply feeling an emotion without judging it or trying to fix it – harder than it sounds! But when you do this you'll notice that the emotion is very rarely anywhere near as scary as you thought it would be. Often just letting yourself feel an emotion without trying to do anything about it is enough to really diminish its power
• Pay attention to your self talk about your emotions – are you invalidating yourself, dismissing your own well-being in favor of helping others or being successful, or otherwise putting yourself down for having emotions?
• Try to use coping skills and express emotions when you first start feeling a negative emotion, instead of waiting until you're in an emotional crisis. This can be really hard because you're probably so used to waiting and hoping the feeling will go away – but suppressing it will only make it worse
• If you do end up feeling overwhelmed by an emotion, don't be hard on yourself. That will just make you feel worse and won't help. Try to do something positive or at least distracting, but don't just try and make the emotion go away or do something harmful. The feeling will pass eventually, and probably sooner than you think! When you're really overwhelmed is not the time to figure out the cause of the emotion or what went wrong to make you feel so overwhelmed – wait until you feel a bit more stable
• Dialectical behavior therapy is a kind of psychotherapy focused specifically on helping with overwhelming emotions, which I would really recommend for people who have serious emotional regulation problems, and/or who want more structured help dealing with emotions

It is possible for you to feel negative emotions and not become overwhelmed by them. Following the suggestions here should help, but it will take a lot of practice to get used to facing your emotions. Fortunately, the more you practice this the easier it gets, as with anything, and finding yourself able to deal with situations that would have made you have an emotional breakdown before is really rewarding. Break the cycle of suppressing and being overwhelmed by your emotions to get control of your emotional health.

Return from Emotional Dysregulation to Towards Emotional Health Home