Emotion Regulation vs. Emotion Triggering

Nietzsche’s famous quote, “What doesn't kill me, makes me stronger,” holds less often than, “What we avoid makes us weaker.”

Emotion regulation makes us stronger. Put simply, emotion regulation is calming yourself down when upset and cheering yourself up when feeling down, so you can act in your long-term best interests. Unlike suppression, which can have disastrous effects on health and well-being, emotion regulation changes the experience of emotions — what they feel like and what they move us to do — by changing the perceptions or judgments that activate them.

Systematic skill in emotion regulation strengthens the sense of self to the point of self-validation. This renders it immune to diminishment through insult or injury and independent of what other people say or think.

Pain, Regulation, Avoidance

The most dreaded emotional pain stirs doubt about personal adequacy or worthiness, creates feelings of powerlessness, and directly threatens the sense of self. The experience of self-diminishment is so distressing that the mere possibility of it makes us seek a sense of confidence and personal power, however temporary they may be.

Deficits in emotion regulation skills create elaborate strategies to avoid self-diminishment, usually through blame (anger, resentment) or denial (entitlement, alcoholism, drug abuse, workaholism, perfectionism). All avoidance strategies weaken the sense of self by spreading it too thin or by casting it in narrow and rigid response patterns that inhibit growth and well-being. Enhanced emotion regulation skill takes some of the ego out of dedication to causes, such as social justice. It replaces anger at what is wrong with passion to make things right.

Regulating emotions is much easier and more beneficial than avoiding them. Regulating emotions takes seconds; avoiding them can take a lifetime.

Regulation vs. Triggers in Attachment

People who live together inevitably find little irritations in their different sensibilities, habits, and routines. In troubled relationships, partners view the irritants as triggers. Family members develop automatic defenses, which, in fact, make them less tolerant of what were formerly minor irritants, now blown out of proportion. This can easily occur because attachment relationships serve as mirrors of the inner self. We learn how valuable and worthy of love we are through interactions with attachment figures. A distressed or misbehaving child can seem to make us feel like failures as parents and thoroughly unlovable. A distracted spouse can make a partner feel disregarded, devalued, rejected. A raging or withdrawing parent can make a child feel inadequate and unworthy of compassion, trust, and love. The anger these feelings stimulate is to punish loved ones, not for their behavior so much as for the diminished sense of self they seem to reflect. But in punishing the mirror for the reflection, we implicitly accept the validity of the reflection, no matter how distorted, inaccurate, or superfluous to the true sense of self.

Attachment abusers (my clinical specialty) try to enhance the sense of self by manipulating or coercing the mirror. They lack confidence in their ability to sustain attachment emotions (interest, compassion, trust, intensity of affection, intimacy, commitment) in those with whom they nevertheless desire attachment. Any sustained attempt at attachment can stimulate overwhelming guilt, shame, and abandonment/engulfment anxiety, all of which produce severe feelings of powerlessness, usually blamed on victims: “They make us feel bad!” “They should make us feel good!” The addition of blame to any vulnerable or powerless feeling produces anger, with its pain-relieving (shame-reducing) and energizing effects. The temporary feeling of power provided by anger comes with a potent motivation to warn, threaten, or intimidate.

Emotion regulation skill replaces the guilt, shame, and anxiety that causes resentment, anger, and contempt with compassion for self and loved ones.

Treatment

In the 1970s and 80s, there was a major effort to prevent cancer by eliminating carcinogens from the environment. It seemed like each day there was something else we needed to avoid. Eventually, researchers accepted that there were simply too many carcinogens to avoid them all, and public health emphasis shifted to building immunity to them. We now find ourselves in a trigger-rich environment that causes enormous emotional reactivity, in the storms of which no one can act in their best interests or effectively achieve their goals. The emphasis must shift from controlling or avoiding emotional carcinogens — what other people think, say, and do — to building internal immunity to them. We permanently ameliorate the painful effects of emotional triggers only by building immunity to them, through emotion regulation practice.

Emotion regulation treatment is content-free; it’s not about what gets you upset or depressed. It works on an internal process level (protecting the sense of self), rather than an external trigger level. The goal of emotion regulation treatment is immunity to the trigger-rich environments in which we live, so that nothing in the environment has the power to diminish the sense of self.

Free of self-destructive revenge, stonewalling, and other avoidant behavior, we’re free to act in our best interests and effectively pursue our passions.