Emotional Regulation and Attachment

Guest Blog Post by Mirel Goldstein

Parents who have good emotion regulation tend to have children with healthy, secure attachments. What’s the connection?

Emotion regulation means the ability to manage our feelings in healthy ways, to be able to control our responses to our feelings, to be aware of our feelings, and to separate our own feelings from other people’s feelings. Children are very reactive and responsive to the emotional feedback they get from their parents. Children learn about emotions and what to do with emotions by seeing this role modeled.

When a parent has emotions that are out of control, it becomes very confusing for a child to learn the difference between their own emotions and the emotions of others in their environment. This can lead to a kind of boundary confusion — a blurring of boundaries — where it becomes hard for a child to separate their own feelings from the feelings that are all around them, in the air, in the emotional climate of the home.

Also, when a child has a set of feelings or reactions to an event — for example, if they fall down and feel scared and start to cry, or if someone hurts their feelings at school, or they get a bad grade on a test and are upset at the teacher — and the parent reacts in an overly emotional or uncontrolled way, this causes the child to get distracted from processing their own feelings and instead become lost or caught up in the feelings of the parent. It also increases the child’s emotions, because the parent’s emotional reaction heightens their own emotional reaction.

What happens then is that the child develops an internal sense that when they share emotions with other people, their emotions are going to escalate. They may also develop a pattern where, when they start to talk about their emotions, they get lost in them, become overactivated, and don’t develop good emotion regulation themselves.

The opposite problem happens when parents are dismissive of emotions. When parents don’t make room for a child’s emotions in their life, they may tell the child to get over it, not to cry, not to be upset, or they may try to fix it right away. Fixing may feel helpful — for example, if your child comes home upset about something and you offer a solution, you might think you’re helping your child by trying to make them feel better — but your child may experience it as though you can’t really handle their emotions or their feelings.

Being able to help a child process their emotions by naming them, talking about them, and having your own reaction be separate from your child’s reaction is very important. This means you are able to mirror back to your child what they are feeling without having the same feelings yourself. This helps children develop an internal sense of a boundary between themselves and others.

It also helps children develop the feeling that when they talk to other people about their experiences, struggles, or something that hurt their feelings or made them feel scared or vulnerable, the other person will be able to hold their emotions with them, share it with them, comfort them, and soothe them. Over time, this helps a child develop their own internal sense of self-soothing, as well as the ability to turn to others and trust others for support when things feel difficult.

Here are a couple of examples.

Elisheva came home crying because two girls at school had teased her. Her mother got very upset and angry and said she was going to call the girls’ mothers and complain about the way they were treating her daughter. Elisheva felt very dysregulated by this. She felt like her mother was overreacting, and she didn’t really want her mother to call her classmates’ parents and make a whole big deal out of it. She tried telling her mother that it was okay and downplaying her own experience as a way of getting her mother to stop overreacting. In the end, she had to take care of her mother’s feelings and couldn’t really get help processing her own.

Another situation was Yassi. He came home from school one day very upset because his teacher had criticized him in front of the class. His mother told him, “That’s okay, be strong, don’t be so sensitive.” She was trying to make it better for him by telling him not to have the feelings he was having. But what he started to feel instead was that he had to detach from his emotions, that his emotions weren’t okay, and that he was weak or ashamed for having them — as if he was overreacting.

In both of these scenarios, the parent is not helping the child metabolize their experience. They are not holding it. They are not offering comfort and soothing. They are either trying to dismiss the emotions or change them, or the parent is getting overly emotional themselves. Neither of these responses is helpful.

So what is helpful?

It’s called marked contingent mirroring. It’s when you respond to your child’s cues, try to understand what they are looking for from you, and show them that you are not lost in the feelings they are having, but you are also not dismissing them. You are able to handle talking about it, help your child name what they are feeling and experiencing, and stay emotionally regulated yourself.

This is a huge part of helping a child develop a secure attachment — where they trust other people, feel emotionally safe in relationships, and develop strong emotion regulation skills themselves.

About the Author

Mirel Goldstein is an award-winning psychotherapist practicing in NY and NJ. Her website is Goldsteintherapy.com