Untaught Emotional Skills Are at the Root of Many Modern Crises

A critical harm prevention skill, emotional regulation is often overlooked in favor of more tangible skills. However, the ability to manage emotions is essential for resilient relationships and safer societies.

Emotional regulation is not just a ‘soft skill’; it’s a vital tool for preventing harm. By teaching emotional regulation, we can help individuals and communities develop healthier relationships and respond to challenging situations in a more constructive manner.

The first step towards healthier emotional responses is naming emotions. By acknowledging and recognizing our emotions, we can begin to manage them more effectively. This process involves becoming aware of our emotional state and understanding the underlying causes of our feelings.

Teaching emotional regulation is essential for building resilient relationships and creating safer communities. By learning to manage emotions, individuals can develop the skills necessary to navigate challenging situations and respond to difficult emotions in a more constructive manner.

Years ago, I had a client who sat across from me, clenched jaw and fists, struggling to refrain from trashing my office. The anger towards his job, partner, and parents had been building for months, and it felt like it was about to erupt. Nobody had taught him how to manage his emotions, and it was clear that he needed guidance.

Emotions are one of the fastest forces within us, registering in thousandths of a second. Thought often takes a quarter to half a second to catch up, which means that emotions can run the show before we’ve even formed a coherent thought. This is not a metaphor; it’s the nervous system doing what it has evolved to do.

Emotions are also crucial data, revealing that what is happening matters: danger, loss, injustice, or disconnection. This is why I refer to emotions as an inner GPS, orienting us before our thinking mind can catch up. Emotions are also how we connect with each other, most of the time, before a single word is said.

So why are we so bad at managing our emotions? Because we were raised in a culture that treats emotions like a problem to manage rather than essential information. We’ve been taught for generations that the feeling itself is the malfunction, not what happens when one has not learned what to do with it.

Naming what you feel is a first step towards managing emotions. Naming your anger can already make you a little less angry. Awareness gets you past the starting line, and regulation is the work you do after that. Effective, intentional emotion regulation is crime prevention, and it’s also addiction prevention and suicide prevention.

Emotion dysregulation is consistently tied to greater substance use, and strengthening that regulation may be one of the more reliable levers for reducing it. Emotion dysregulation is also a major, global public health issue, and it travels. When caregivers can’t regulate their own emotional storms, their children tend to absorb the pattern and carry it forward.

Teaching people how to feel and what to do with what they feel is essential for building healthy, resilient relationships and creating safer communities. By learning to manage emotions, individuals can develop the skills necessary to navigate challenging situations and respond to difficult emotions in a more constructive manner.