Do You Have a Regulation Partner?

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Everyday mental life is full of unexpected turns. Grief seems to ebb one day and then hit hard another. Anxiety feels manageable until one bad night of sleep and an argument with a spouse sets it off. We are all riding the waves of our experiences, thoughts, and emotions, and using whatever skills we have to cope.

If you are a searcher, like me, endlessly seeking new techniques to smooth out the waves, the toolkit can seem a little rote: Breathe deeply, meditate, journal, walk in nature, and so on. All of these actions are great, but there is one that is so hardwired into our neurology that we tend to overlook it: regulation partners.

Infants come into the world with a rudimentary emotional system. They cry. If they’re hungry, they cry. If they’re tired, they cry. If they want to be held, they cry. I found it startling when my son was born that he had no other expressions. Smiles and laughter took months to develop.

And such development was structured in large part around me, his primary caregiver. We teach infants that emotions can be soothed by soothing them. We expand their emotional vocabulary by reflecting emotions back to them and responding in ways that help babies distinguish anger from surprise from disgust. The idea is that by soothing infants, we teach them how to soothe themselves.

But what the literature of development fails to acknowledge is that we will always need soothing. When life gets hard and a new experience sends us reeling, our emotions often fall outside the bounds of anything we’ve ever experienced before. We feel scared and bereft. We are like newborns that have hit on a new feeling and have no idea what to do with it. We need a regulation partner to share how we’re feeling and figure out how to move through it.

To identify your regulation partners, read through the following questions and identify people or groups that best fit these descriptions:

1. I can be my whole self around them.
2. When I hang out with them, I feel better.
3. I know this person is not judging me.
4. If I cry or show emotion, they stay with me.
5. I feel that I can tell this person anything.

If no one person comes to mind, think more broadly. Have you ever been in an environment in which you felt so comfortable? Many people feel uncomfortable sharing with family and friends but feel a sense of connection in support groups, like Alcoholics Anonymous. Or, they called a hotline in a desperate moment and said that it made all the difference in the world.

Women tend to experience such connections more readily. When researchers examined gender differences in stress responses, they were surprised to find that men and women both exhibit fight-or-flight stress—but the women don’t respond quite like the men. Instead, they tend-and-befriend—they nurture those around them and seek out social networks to survive.

We all benefit from this reminder: to reach out to those with whom you feel you can be yourself and make those connections strong. To cherish those individuals or groups and derive strength from knowing that they are there.

Perhaps more urgently, we need the language of regulation partners to help resource the men and boys in our lives. Steeped in the masculine culture of stoicism and strength, many men perceive the vulnerability and emotion expression required for a regulation partner to be too risky or damaging. Indeed, in 2022, four times more men lost their lives to suicide compared to women, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. I wish masculine culture could reflect that we are human first and gendered second. It is not weak to reach out in a time of need: It is the strongest action anyone could do.

Whether we are considering ourselves or our children, family members, friends, or community members, we all need to know that regulation partners are a critical tool for weathering hard times. They can come in many forms—a parent, a friend, a teacher, a support group, a hotline, or even a beloved pet. It is together, not alone, that we thrive.

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If you or someone you know are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.