Therapy for Emotional Regulation: How to Stop Feeling Controlled by Your Own Emotions

Therapy for emotional regulation is where you learn to notice your feelings sooner, settle your body when it spikes, and choose how you respond. At Tri Lotus Psychotherapy, we teach these as practical skills, in person in Calgary and online anywhere in Alberta, for adults and teens.

Key Takeaways

• Emotional regulation refers to how you notice, understand and respond to your emotions, including how quickly you settle afterwards.

• Most people learn regulation skills from the adults who raised them, and adults can keep building those skills through practice and therapy.

• In studies by psychologists James Gross and Oliver John, people who regularly pushed their feelings down reported more negative emotion and felt less close to others than people who regularly looked at upsetting situations from a new angle.

• A UCLA brain imaging study found that putting a feeling into words reduced activity in the amygdala, the part of the brain that reacts to threat. In everyday terms, naming what you feel may help take some of the intensity out of it.

• Tri Lotus Psychotherapy offers therapy for emotional regulation for adults and for teens 12 and up, in person at our southwest Calgary clinic and online anywhere in Alberta.

What Emotional Regulation Actually Means and Why It Is a Learnable Skill

Emotional regulation means being able to feel an emotion fully and still choose what you do next. It covers how quickly you notice a feeling, how strong it gets, how long it lasts, and what you do while it is there.

Emotional dysregulation refers to the opposite experience: emotions that arrive fast, hit hard and take a long time to settle, often followed by words or actions you regret later.

Children learn these skills by watching the adults around them and by being comforted when they are upset. If the adults in your home were overwhelmed themselves, or if feelings were ignored, punished or never talked about, you may have reached adulthood without anyone showing you how. You can learn them as an adult, with teaching and repetition.

Many of the adults we see at Tri Lotus are calm and capable at work, then snap at their partner over dinner or cry in the car on the drive home. Regulation tends to slip first with the people closest to you and on the days you have the least left.

How the Nervous System Drives Emotional Dysregulation

Emotional dysregulation starts in the body before it shows up in your words. When your brain reads a situation as a threat, your stress response speeds up your heart and breathing, tightens your muscles and narrows your attention. In that state, the part of the brain that plans ahead has less say in what you do.

Psychiatrist Dan Siegel named the zone where you can feel a strong emotion and still think clearly the window of tolerance. Above it, you feel flooded, panicky or furious. Below it, you feel numb, flat or shut down. Everyone leaves the window sometimes. When it happens often, or over small things, your window has usually narrowed.

What Narrows the Window of Tolerance

• Short or broken sleep, skipped meals and long days without a break.

• Months of built-up stress, such as caregiving, a demanding job or money pressure.

• Past experiences that taught your body to stay on alert, including trauma.

• ADHD, which commonly affects how fast emotions rise and how hard they are to bring back down.

• Big hormonal shifts, such as the months after having a baby.

Please note: this is not an all-inclusive list of what narrows your window of tolerance.

This is why regulation work at Tri Lotus usually starts with the body. Telling yourself to calm down rarely works once your heart is pounding. Slowing your exhale, changing your temperature or moving your body gives your nervous system a different signal to respond to.

The Therapy Approaches That Build Lasting Regulation Skills

For many people, the therapy approaches that build lasting regulation skills teach what to do in the moment and why certain situations hit so hard. At Tri Lotus, your therapist draws from the approaches below based on what you describe, and most people use more than one.

• Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) was developed by psychologist Marsha Linehan and is organized around four skill sets: mindfulness, distress tolerance (getting through a crisis without making it worse), emotion regulation and interpersonal effectiveness (asking for what you need while protecting the relationship).

• Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) looks at the thoughts that feed an emotion. One of its core skills is reappraisal, which means looking at a situation from another angle before you respond.

• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) teaches you to make room for a hard feeling without it overwhelming you or letting it choose your next move, so you can act on what matters to you while the feeling is still there.

• Emotion Focused Therapy helps you understand what a feeling is telling you and reach the emotion underneath the one that shows up first, such as the hurt beneath anger.

• Compassion Focused Therapy works with harsh self-criticism and shame, which keep many people stuck feeling bad about how they felt.

• Mindfulness-Based Therapy builds your ability to notice a feeling early and meet it calmly, while it is still small enough to work with.

In a set of studies by psychologists James Gross and Oliver John, people who tended to look at upsetting situations from a new angle reported more positive emotion, closer relationships and greater well-being. People who tended to push their feelings down and hide them reported more negative emotion and less positive emotion, and felt less close to others.

What Emotional Regulation Skills Look Like in Everyday Life

Emotional regulation skills in everyday life are small and specific. They look like pausing before you answer a text or noticing your clenched jaw before a hard meeting.

• Naming the feeling. Saying "I'm anxious" or "I'm embarrassed" to yourself, even silently. In a UCLA brain imaging study, putting feelings into words reduced activity in the amygdala.

• Catching the early signs. Learning your own warning signals, such as a hot face, a tight chest or a sudden urge to leave the room.

• Settling the body first. A few slow breaths with longer exhales, cold water on your face, or a short walk before you try to solve anything.

• Taking a planned pause. Agreeing with your partner or your kids on a phrase that means "I need a break and I'm coming back in 20 minutes," so everyone knows the break has an end.

• Checking the story. Asking what else might explain what happened before you act on your first reaction.

• Repairing afterwards. Going back after a blow-up to name what happened and own your part.

In sessions at Tri Lotus, we often ask you to walk us through the last time an emotion took over, minute by minute: what happened just before, what you noticed in your body and what you said. That slow replay shows us where a skill would fit and gives you something specific to practise between sessions.

Therapy for Emotional Regulation at Tri Lotus Psychotherapy in Calgary

Therapy for emotional regulation at Tri Lotus Psychotherapy is available for adults and for teens 12 and up, in person at our southwest Calgary clinic and online anywhere in Alberta. Which clinicians can see your teen depends on their age. Most people start with individual therapy for adults or teen therapy in Calgary, and regulation skills are part of both.

Across our team of Registered Psychologists and Registered Provisional Psychologists, training includes CBT, ACT, DBT, Emotion Focused Therapy, Compassion Focused Therapy and Mindfulness-Based Therapy. If big emotions come alongside trouble with focus and follow-through, ADHD therapy with us includes emotional regulation skills. If your reactions are tied to past experiences, some of our therapists are also trained in trauma approaches such as EMDR or Accelerated Resolution Therapy.

Sessions are 50 minutes and cost $220 to $235 depending on the clinician. You can meet the therapists on our team, use our therapist matching tool, or book a free 20-minute consultation call to talk through who might be a good fit.

Frequently Asked Questions About Therapy for Emotional Regulation

Starting Therapy for Emotional Regulation

If your reactions feel bigger than the moment calls for, or you spend a lot of time apologizing after them, you do not need to know which approach fits you, or have a diagnosis, before you reach out.

A free 20-minute consultation call gives you time to describe what has been happening, ask how therapy for emotional regulation works at Tri Lotus, and decide on your next step, with no commitment to book. Navigate the hurt. Unravel the pain. Find a way through.

Land Acknowledgment: I gratefully acknowledge and honour that where I live, work and play is within the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta, which includes the Blackfoot Confederacy (comprising the Siksika, Piikani, and Kainai First Nations) as well as the Tsuut’ina First Nation, and the Stoney Nakoda (including the Chiniki, Bearspaw, and Wesley First Nations); and Métis Nation of Alberta, Region 3. The traditional Blackfoot name of this place is “Mohkinstsis”, which is also known now as Calgary.

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