My girl friend sent me a text that read something along the lines of “My therapist said I need to work on emotional regulation, but that’s like gaslighting myself into feeling better”. Her text gave me pause because my perpetual motto is “fake it till you make it”.
The definition of gas lighting is “psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one's emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator” (Merriam-Webster, n.d.).
So then, is what my friend is saying true? I could see where she was coming from.
A quick google search of emotional regulation will tell you that it is a process that involves taking action to alter the intensity of an emotional experience. You may find cute infographics displaying all the things you can do to emotionally regulate yourself, with the explicit or implied message of you will feel better - better, often equating to happier, stress free or whatever “easy” feeling we might be trying to obtain. Individuals who are feeling overwhelmed, stressed or anxious and don’t know what to do about it could find “altering” to be a difficult concept, let alone an action one should be taking.
I’m not disagreeing that emotional regulation is important it is a skill we can all learn and practice to better support ourselves. But yes, it can come off as dismissive and minimising to what is truly being felt. How can we go from emotional regulation as faking happy till you’re happy or gaslighting yourself into feeling something different?
Here’s my take:
Emotional regulation starts by bringing awareness to your experience and what its being felt. Labelling the feeling allows us to identify the feeling and then give us an opportunity to decide what to do about it. This could be to continue to feel the feeling. It may be negotiating with the parts of yourself that have this feeling on what would be more manageable for the whole system to avoid being overwhelmed and/or shutting down. This can support you in Identifying tangible and useful ways to soothe the feeling and decrease the emotional activation to a level that is acceptable. It can mean shifting a level 8 stress reaction to a 6 instead of a happy 0.
Emotional regulation allows you to make a conscious assessment on how you allow the emotion being felt to affect you.
References:
Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Gaslighting. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved October 31, 2023, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gaslighting
Monica Lau
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