Regulation Under Pressure: Why Staying Grounded Is the Real Advantage

Subtitle:

Examining how emotional regulation supports resilience, decision-making, and well-being during high-stress moments—and how therapy can help individuals build steadiness when life feels overwhelming.

  One of my favorite parts of being a therapist has been learning about the ways that other people think about and understand their emotions, especially when they experience them as extreme, heightened, or intense.  Many of my clients struggle to regulate their emotions, and coming to understand the reasons for the difficulty has been enlightening.  By hearing their stories and theories about their own feelings, I have gained a lot of insight into why some of us view regulating emotions as something impossible, unattainable, or even unnecessary.  With some clients, I have had to convince them that there are advantages to being in control of their emotions, often by assigning them homework to deliberately expose themselves to a stressor, after learning some skills to keep grounded. 

One of my favorite examples involved a young man who lost a job right after moving in with a friend.  Within days of being downsized, he started having anxiety attacks about initiating a conversation about the upcoming rent because he was convinced that it would lead to him getting confrontational, which would mean getting kicked out and the friendship ending. He believed this because it had happened before with a previous roommate.  We worked to understand that he was catastrophizing an outcome that may not happen. We then developed his affect management skills, including deep breathing, stress point touch, and the use of a grounding object. 

He scheduled the meeting with his roommate, recognizing and accepting his anxiety as part of the process.  The meeting happened, and he came prepared with talking points, a payment plan, and his grounding object.  He was able to stay calm, keep focused, and speak from a place of acceptance and candor, not defensiveness.  It was not an easy conversation, but the outcome was better than he had anticipated.  His friend expressed sympathy but also held him accountable, and the two were able to negotiate a tough couple of months in their new dynamic as roommates. 

Another client kept avoiding a difficult conversation with her parents about boundaries, specifically their habit of enrolling others in conversations when they felt she was being “unreasonable” or needed “to make better choices”.  She was convinced that her parents were doing this to pressure her or control her, so she was reactively doing the opposite of anything they suggested, sometimes to her own detriment. Once she got tired of dealing with the consequences of these damaging “choices”, she came to therapy to learn how to be less triggered and reactive with her family.  Part of that process involved exploring the beliefs that were driving her defiant decision-making and avoidance by using EDMR.  She came to understand that certain choices in her youth had left her feeling incompetent and unable to trust herself. 

Once we uncovered that, she was able to build emotional confidence and see her parents’ input as “support”, not “control”, and she could receive it as optional, insightful, or even useless.  This helped her to be less reactive, which reduced the drive to make quick, knee-jerk decisions to diffuse her emotional distress. Building her social support system reduced her reliance on her immediate family, so when the time came to have the conversation with them about boundaries, she felt confident, centered, and prepared to deal with any negative reactions.  There was some pushback, but it was minor, and the pattern did not change instantly.  We built up her arsenal of coping skills to deal with these moments and setbacks, allowing her to own her feelings and keep asking for what she needed directly and without anger.  Her family dynamic improved, and she felt validated.

When we become triggered and fearful, we do not show up as the best versions of ourselves.  This was the issues at work for the first client.  When we become emotionally overwhelmed, we often avoid taking action and turn our emotions inward.  That was the pattern for the second client. Both individuals needed support to learn how to become more grounded and less reactive to both others and their own emotions.  Both found different pathways to the same conclusions, which they embraced in their separate ways to maintain the stability of their lives and hold onto something they valued.  That is the purpose of therapy. 

Written by: Deanna Diamond, LPC