There’s a lot of talk about regulation in the therapy world, particularly, I think, in the context of schools and neurodivergent children. Or perhaps more accurately, there’s a lot of talk about dysregulation.

But if we want to talk about dysregulation, we need to talk about regulation. And if we want to talk about regulation, we first need to understand what regulation actually is.

What strikes me is that we tend to assume regulation is the same as being calm.

It’s not.

Let me explain.

Regulation is about being connected to ourselves.

And by that I mean being connected to our own experience, recognising what we’re feeling and allowing ourselves to feel it, whether we’re angry, sad, frightened, happy, excited or any number of other things.

I often say to my clients, ‘You’re allowed to feel whatever you feel.’

There are no bad feelings. Feelings are information. They’re data, not facts.

And there’s an important distinction here. Feeling something doesn’t necessarily make the story we attach to it true. I can feel rejected without actually being rejected. I can feel frightened without necessarily being in danger.

But the feeling itself is real.

And we don’t want to gaslight ourselves out of our own experience.

This is where self-validation comes in. Being able to recognise and acknowledge what we’re feeling, without immediately judging it, explaining it away or looking to somebody else to tell us whether we’re allowed to feel it.

Because what happens when we’re constantly waiting for other people to validate our experience?

They can’t know our experience for us.

When we’re outsourcing validation to others, we’re outsourcing our internal state to others. And that’s a precarious place to be, particularly when the people around us might have very different interpretations of what’s happening.

Of course, other people can validate our feelings, and that’s enormously important. But validation isn’t agreement. We don’t have to agree with somebody’s interpretation of events to recognise that what they’re feeling is real, that this is their experience right now.

And the same applies to ourselves.

So what does any of this have to do with regulation?

I have this image of the Pentagon, with its sophisticated defence systems monitoring the skies.

An unidentified object appears on the horizon.

What is it? Is it a plane? Is it a bird? Is it Superman? Or is it a missile about to explode our world?

Until we’ve identified it, we don’t know what we’re dealing with. And when our job is to detect threats, an unidentified object is potentially threatening.

Identification matters.

I think there’s something similar happening when we’re experiencing feelings we can’t recognise or make sense of. We know something is happening, but we don’t necessarily know what it is. And that uncertainty can add to our sense of threat and overwhelm.

And there’s a biological reason why this matters.

‘No one in the history of the world has ever calmed down by being told to calm down.’

When we’re in danger, our brains have rather more urgent priorities than remembering our Shakespeare.

We need to respond to what’s happening, right now.

Fight, flight, freeze, shutdown, fawn, flood, fatigue, faint, all the Fs. It’s quite literally a case of what the F when the shit hits.

When our survival systems are activated, including the amygdala, our capacity for complex reasoning can become significantly reduced. The brain shifts its priorities towards detecting danger and responding quickly.

And that makes sense.

If there’s a lion coming towards us, we don’t need to stand there wondering what it had for breakfast, how hungry it might be, or whether we ought to consider its perspective.

We need to respond.

So when somebody is already overwhelmed, telling them to calm down, reason things through or look at the situation logically may be asking them to access precisely the capacities that are hardest to reach in that moment.

And this is why I think recognising and validating our own experience is so important.

By identifying what we’re feeling, we can begin to give it a place.

‘I’m feeling sad.’

There it is. Sadness.

It doesn’t mean I have to do anything about it immediately. It doesn’t mean something is terribly wrong, or that I’ll feel like this forever.

I’m feeling sad right now.

And here’s something else that’s important: feelings have a lifespan.

When we allow ourselves to feel them, rather than continually trying to resolve or explain them, feelings can move through us surprisingly quickly.

Now, this is not a challenge to process our emotions as fast as possible so we can get rid of them. The last thing we need is another thing to get good at!

And I can already hear some of you saying, ‘Hang on a sweet frigging minute. I’m perfectly capable of holding on to feelings for days!’

Of course. And sometimes feelings genuinely do last a long time. But there’s also a difference between feeling something and ruminating about it.

Rumination is when we keep returning to something, going over it, trying to make sense of it, resolve it, find an answer. And that process can keep the emotional experience going long after the original event.

But what does it actually mean to feel a feeling?

I think we can make this sound far more complicated than it needs to be.

Literally, it can be as simple as acknowledging, ‘I’m feeling sad.’

That’s it.

You don’t have to perform some magical voodoo to feel your feeling. You can simply identify it, validate it, allow yourself to recognise that this is what’s happening right now.

‘I’m feeling sad.’

Or ‘I’m feeling angry.’ ‘I’m feeling happy.’

A little nugget of self-connection.

There’s a whole other article to be written about how long feelings last, and probably another about anger, and another about mapping our emotional experiences, which Brené Brown explores so beautifully in Atlas of the Heart. My backlog of articles is becoming a little ridiculous.

But back to regulation.

Validating our feelings doesn’t mean getting lost in them.

Quite the opposite. It’s about coming back to the now.

I know where I am. I know what I’m feeling.

And from there, I can begin to recognise what I need.

What capacity do I have right now? Do I have capacity for anything else? Do I need to build capacity? Do I need to remove myself from the situation?

This is particularly relevant to neurodivergence, I think, because so many of us describe a sense of not really knowing who we are, or even what we’re feeling.

Interoception, our ability to recognise and interpret what’s happening inside our bodies, can be challenging. We might struggle to recognise hunger, thirst, tiredness or other internal signals.

But I think there’s something beyond the sensory experience, too. We can also become detached from our sense of self, from recognising what we’re feeling, what we want, what matters to us.

And when we’re already taking in and processing so much of the world around us, there’s a question of how much capacity we have left.

I talk about the distinction between capability and capacity. We can have the ability to do something without having the capacity to do it right now.

The same applies to regulation.

We may understand perfectly well what regulation is, and still struggle to recognise what we’re feeling when our nervous system is overwhelmed.

And that’s where I think we need to start with the capacity we actually have, rather than the capacity we think we should have.

We develop that connection to ourselves. We practise recognising our experience, validating it, noticing what happens when we become overwhelmed, and what helps us find our way back.

Regulation isn’t about not feeling. It’s about being connected to what we’re feeling.