Emotion regulation therapy to address emotional experiences that feel overwhelming or out of control, such as anger or loneliness, and provide mental health support to live a more fulfilled life.
Our emotions communicate our values, which show us where the experience of life is most accessible to us. So, emotions are the felt experience of where life is moving in us. We can become too emotionally distant or too emotionally attached – being numbed from, or controlled by, our emotions.
In our therapy for emotional regulation session, we help you learn to build a healthy relationship with your emotions. Once we have a strong understanding of your emotional experience, we can work together to learn skills and tools to connect with yourself and life in a meaningful way.
Every person experiences emotions, some of which feel pleasant, such as happiness or confidence, others can feel unpleasant or unwelcomed at times, such as overwhelming anger or loneliness. We help people build a healthy relationship with emotions and values.
Anger is an emotion that often communicates our boundaries have been crossed. Our anger may be felt and seen, or hidden and bottled up. Sometimes our anger becomes uncontrolled or violent, compromising our values. Sometimes we give in to the power anger has and justify it, instead of taking responsibility for communicating our feelings in more relational ways.
In existential therapy, we try to understand what type of anger is present and the nature of your anger. Do you need to set a boundary, get out of a negative situation, process other emotions or communicate your values? As with other emotions, we build a relationship with anger so that it can inform our lives – not take it over.
Loneliness also communicates our values and experience of life. Sometimes our loneliness is caused by wanting to share life experiences with others, but also pushing them away at the same time. Maybe it’s them? Maybe it’s me? We may be too impulsive with our words or actions, but struggle to control ourselves socially. Sometimes we feel lonely in a crowded room because we don’t feel seen, heard or understood.
We help people build healthy relationships with their emotions and values. We start with having a strong understanding of your emotional experience, what it’s like for you to feel the emotion and how the emotion points to life. Then, we experiment with new ways of meaningful living.
Existential therapy or existential analysis can be a powerful framework for emotional regulation—not by teaching quick techniques to “control” emotions, but by helping you face, understand, and make meaning out of them. It focuses on deep, philosophical questions about freedom, responsibility, meaning, isolation, and mortality, and encourages clients to engage authentically with their emotional experiences.
