The Crucial Emotional Skill Most Adults Were Never Taught

Anger is a healthy emotion. The issue is most of us weren’t taught skills to effectively manage anger and we weren’t given a long enough runway to learn how to do that. In adulthood, a big part of reparing and this is some of my favorite work to do with parents is to start to reclaim access to healthy anger. I’m Dr. Becky Kennedy. I’m a clinical psychologist. I’m a mom of three and I am the founder of the online parenting platform called Good Inside.

How to regulate your emotions at any age.

There are things we can do to improve our emotion regulation skills. Number one is actually just realizing it’s a skill. I think parenting is a skill, too. That’s actually what everything we do at Good Inside is based on. We’ve been told forever, parenting comes naturally. You should just know what to do. I hear this from parents all the time. I’m struggling with my kid. They’re having these tantrums. I’m yelling them all the time. And then they say, “Yeah, I’m getting tips on Instagram. I read a book here or there.” But when you really realize, hold on a second. This is a skill. Any other area of my life that I really care about? I invest in learning skills. I get some professional help. I practice. That’s actually so empowering. That’s a sign of strength. It’s just that parenting has always been told to us. It’s something that just comes naturally, which is why we feel shame and we stay alone when we’re struggling. That’s actually the biggest thing I hope to change.

And so, yes, there are so many things we can do to work on our parenting or to work on emotion regulation, which is definitely a part of parenting. Attachment theory and emotion regulation are deeply connected concepts. Kids are born with all of the emotions and none of the skills to manage those emotions. That gap, right, explains why kids and adults act out. It’s when emotions are greater than skills. But the thing about these skills that’s different than some other skills is they’re rarely just taught in a textbook or in a classroom.

Kids learn skills to manage their emotions through their attachment with their parents. This brings up the concept of dysregulation and then co-regulation and then the thing we all want emotion regulation. So let me explain. Because kids are born with all of the emotions and none of the skills. They’re often in a state of disregulation. All that really means is my emotions are greater than my skills. So, my emotions come out as a tantrum, as a huge outburst, maybe as an I hate you, as flailing on the floor. That is a state of disregulation.

My kid is having big emotions but doesn’t have skills to manage. Okay. What’s co-regulation? One of the ways and the most powerful ways kids get from disregulation to regulation is through borrowing a parent’s regulation. So, let’s picture the scene. My kid is melting down. Why? Because I cut their grilled cheese into triangles, not rectangles. Classic meltdown. which is probably just representative of there have been so many things in my day that didn’t go the way I imagined and my bucket of frustration is full and the triangle of grilled cheese is just the thing that spills it all out. My kid is disregulated on the floor. How kids learn eventually to regulate even in the face of frustration or disappointment is that they experience over and over and over and over and over again a caregiver who was able to stay relatively calm in the moment the kid was disregulated.

It’s almost like here’s my disregulated kid flailing on the floor. Here’s my calm. And it’s almost like the calm can transfer from my body to my kids. And now my kid has this much calm. Not much, but it’s growing. You can almost imagine this is, well, when will my kid be able to stay totally calm? A big part of it is the repetition over and over and over. My parents stayed calm. I’ve absorbed through co-regulation enough of that calm regulation that it’s in my body and I can access it.

See, the scariest thing to a kid is when they get disregulated and overwhelmed, which is essentially like the feelings in my body are so scary that they take me over. That’s such a helpless state. But imagine your four-year-old in that helpless state and then they see their parent who they depend on for survival and see, “Oh no, the things that feel overwhelming to me are also overwhelming to my parent. My parent can’t stay calm with this.” That’s that situation where you’re freaking out when there’s turbulence and pilots freaking out when there’s turbulence. The way you’re eventually, even as an adult, going to feel safe amidst turbulence is actually probably going on flights over and over that have turbulence and absorbing the regulation from the pilot. You start to believe it yourself.

And so through a kid’s attachment relationship with a caregiver, they start to see things that overwhelm me might not overwhelm me forever. Things that kind of knock me off my rocker and feel intolerable actually are tolerable to my most important safest adult. And that over and over brings a kid from disregulation to co-regulation to that eventual state of emotion regulation. I should say that we never fully live in emotion regulation. All adults still need other adults in time to help co-regulate. That’s why when you’ve had a horrible day and you go out with some friends and you’re having dinner and they say, “Oh, that stinks. I’ve been there, too.” You’re like, “Wait, that’s so weird. Nothing about my day changed, but I’m actually feeling better.” We absorb some of the validation and calm, and maybe someone believes in us in a way we forgot that we could believe in ourselves. We still need co-regulation even as adults, but hopefully we’re not as dependent on it as often as our kids.

Our ability to hold opposing truths at the same time is one of the most important things for our mental health and successful adult relationships. I’ll explain both. Our feelings, our internal states are very complicated. Very rarely do we just feel one thing. For example, in parenthood, you might feel like, I love my kid in a way I’ve never loved anyone in the world. And you might also think, I kind of miss my pre-child life. If we’re forced to reconcile those two thoughts as if only one of them can be true. When I have the thought of, “Oh my goodness, I miss my pre-child life,” I start telling myself a story. I’m a horrible person. What kind of parent would say that? I had to do so much to get pregnant. I’m a monster. Good parents don’t think that way. You can imagine the negative downward spiral from there. As if having that thought means I don’t love the heck out of my kid. When we can say to ourselves, and this is kind of a good inside catchphrase, wait, two things are true. I love my kid more than I’ve loved anyone or anything in the world. And there are moments when I miss my pre-child life. I don’t have to reconcile those two things. I can just say they’re both true. I have a type of internal peace.

Now, being able to hold two seemingly oppositional truths is also critical for any successful relationship. Meaning, my relationship with my kid, my relationship with my husband, my relationship with my colleague, people see things differently. And when we need someone else to see things the exact way we see things, we get into really intense conflict.

Boundaries are what we tell someone we will do and they require the other person to do nothing. So, there’s like a two-part checklist. Boundaries are something we tell someone we will do and they require the other person to do nothing. Did I tell someone what I will do? And does the success of my boundary require the other person to do nothing? You have to have two yeses for it to count as a boundary.

So when I say to my kid in the elevator, don’t press all the elevator buttons. It’s very annoying to stop at all the floors. And then my son goes in and just presses all the buttons. So many parents would say, “My kid doesn’t respect my boundaries.” In both situations, did I tell my kid what I will do? No. Does the success of my boundary require my kid to do nothing? No. In both situations, I am making a request.

Hey, when we go into the elevator, I’m going to stand between you and the buttons. And sweetie, even if you lunge for the buttons, I will stop you. That’s a great boundary. I’m telling my kid what I will do and I’m not putting the success of my intervention in the hands of my four-year-old. And that actually gives you back your power. A true boundary gives you your power.

So, when we’re flustered, and parents ask me this all the time, what do I do when I’m really flustered to calm down? I often think of this being the equivalent of someone saying to me, “All right, I drove to a cliff. My car is on the edge of the cliff. How do I not fall off the cliff?” And what I would say to that person is, “Why are you driving to a cliff?” We’re asking the wrong question. The best question is, how can I recognize that I’m on a road that always ends on a cliff and try to exit that road before I get to the cliff?

Number one is we have to realize anger is a healthy emotion. I don’t just mean a normal emotion. It’s a healthy emotion. Anger tells us what we want and what we need. I actually wouldn’t wish the removal of anger on anyone. If we want to preserve any sense of self-esteem and self-worth, we have to have access to anger. Can you imagine someone saying, “I’m never angry.” That’s really a way of saying, “I never know what I want. I never know what I need.” That’s actually a really sad state of being. Having access to anger means you still have access to self-worth.

Here’s an example. I’m really overwhelmed at bath time. I think wish I had more help. You feel a little angry. If you’re able to recognize anger, hi anger. Well, that makes sense. Anger tells me what I want and need. What do I want? I want some help. I need some support. Hey, I feel overwhelmed around doing bath time by myself, and I really need more support. Can you let me know two nights this week that you can be home by 5:25 p.m.? I start with a feeling. I name a need and I am specific. Feeling, need, specific.

I think the simplest thing you can do is adopt this AVP practice. AVP is a basic foundational emotion regulation skill. Acknowledge, validate, permit. I’m not going to be able to regulate my feelings of anxiety or jealousy if I’m not able to say, “I think I’m feeling anxious. Oh, there’s that jealous feeling.” As soon as I can say hi to jealousy, then jealousy is a part of me and not all of me. Instead of jealousy being in the driver’s seat of my car, I’m in the driver’s seat of my car. I’m kind of like waving to jealousy in the back seat.

Validation is telling yourself why your feeling makes sense. That doesn’t have anything to do with saying your behavior about the feeling makes sense. Validation does not mean I agree with how you feel. When I say to my kid, I get it. You wish you could stay up later. No part of me thinks it’s a good idea for them to stay up later. But validation is so important because it’s kind of saying to someone else, I see your emotions as real for you.

Permission is just giving yourself permission to have the feeling. Sometimes I think our feelings would be saying to us, “Please just allow us to be there. Please just allow us to live in your body. We’re not looking for much more.” As soon as I can say to myself, I allow myself to feel jealous. I permit this jealous feeling. It also doesn’t have as much of a hold on us.

I believe you and I believe in you. You want to raise a resilient kid, especially in the face of some nervous or anxious feelings. You need both parts. One foot in validation, one foot in capability and hope. That combination — that’s resilience.

I think a lot about how screens both our relationship with screens as parents and our kids’ relationships with screens are affecting emotion regulation. Our kids, because of technology, there’s just a lot more ease built into their everyday life. If that circuit of work, try, stick with it, don’t get it, keep trying has not been developed in other parts of a kid’s life by the time they learn to read, it’s no wonder the kid looks like they’re essentially having a meltdown. There’s nothing more important in this day and age than teaching your kid frustration tolerance, which also means we have to increase our own frustration tolerance to help our kids do the same.