Emotional regulation tools for trauma in our self-care tool chest.

Emotional Regulation & Nervous System • December 22, 2024

What is the signal value of emotions and why should you respect it?

Signal value simply means the information contained. In other words, emotions are not random; they carry significant information about our internal states and our interactions with the external world. When we learn to pay attention to what information our emotions hold, we’re better equipped to take action.

Why this matters:

Understanding what your emotions are trying to tell you can help you address the underlying issues causing those feelings. For instance, anger might signal that a personal boundary has been crossed, while sadness might indicate a loss that needs to be mourned. You’ve now got more information to take the next appropriate steps.

How to practice:

Let’s take that anger example and flesh it out. First, we have to understand and honor that anger’s signal value means that we have a need that’s not being met or a boundary that’s being crossed. So, for example, if you’re walking away from a conversation with your sister-in-law and are feeling irritated/annoyed/grumpy but you don’t know quite why, check in with yourself: notice your anger and get curious about what may have happened in that interaction. Did she somehow cross a boundary of yours? Did you have a need in that relationship that didn’t get met? Is your anger a sign you may need to have a follow up conversation and/or set a boundary with her moving forward?

How do you learn to tolerate big, overwhelming feelings?

I intentionally capitalized the B and F of Big Feelings because for so many of us from relational trauma backgrounds, this is how it can so often feel. Capital B. Capital F. Our feelings feel huge because of the intensity of our triggers and the lack of our capacity (for now at least) to tolerate them.

Why this matters:

Learning tools to help cope with (and not react to) those big feelings allows you to process and integrate these experiences healthily, decreasing the emotional intensity and potentially reducing damage that may have come from acting out on those big feelings.

How to practice:

Here’s a highly effective tool derived from DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy):

TIPP (Temperature, Intense Exercise, Paced Breathing, Progressive Muscle Relaxation) is a DBT distress tolerance tool designed to quickly reduce intense emotions. Change your body temperature by holding your face in cold water, engage in short bursts of intense physical activity like running in place, slow down your breathing to a steady pace, and practice progressive muscle relaxation by tensing and relaxing each muscle group. These steps help to calm your nervous system, release emotional energy, and reduce physical and emotional tension.

How do you learn to express emotions in healthy, appropriate ways?

Expressing emotions appropriately (versus lashing out inappropriately) is essential for maintaining healthy relationships and achieving emotional well-being. This involves communicating your feelings in a way that is honest, respectful, and regulated.

Why this matters:

Appropriate expression of emotions helps prevent misunderstandings, reduces interpersonal conflict, and promotes emotional intimacy. It also allows you to assert your needs and boundaries effectively, preserving relationships versus damaging them.

How to practice:

In one of my older posts Three Tools So You Won’t End Up Like Schopenhauer’s Porcupine I shared a wealth of non-violent communication tools. Like framing conversations for success, pacing, and validating techniques. Please check out that older post for tools to support your “appropriate expression” of your emotions.

How can therapy help you build stronger emotional regulation skills?

Learning emotional regulation tools on your own can be powerful, but many people find that working with a therapist accelerates this process significantly, especially when relational trauma has disrupted your natural emotional development.

A skilled therapist provides what your nervous system may have missed in childhood—consistent co-regulation with someone who can stay calm and present even when you’re experiencing Big Feelings.

Through the therapeutic relationship, you’re not just intellectually learning about emotions; you’re experiencing what it feels like to have your emotions witnessed, validated, and contained without judgment or abandonment. This corrective experience helps rewire those early patterns where emotions may have been met with dismissal, punishment, or chaos.

For those ready to begin this journey, exploring 4 helpful tools when fear triggers your trauma can provide immediate strategies while you consider longer-term therapeutic support. The combination of daily emotional regulation practice and professional guidance creates lasting change—teaching your nervous system that emotions are manageable information, not catastrophic threats.

Wrapping up.

Now, this is just a handful of the hundreds of emotional regulation techniques you can supply the “Emotional Regulation Drawer” of your self-care tool chest with.

But my hope in sharing this post is that you see how multi-dimensional this drawer is. This drawer is about naming emotions, understanding what information they contain, tolerating them, and then, from there and if necessary, appropriately expressing needs or wants around them.

Again, this is likely not education those of us from relational trauma backgrounds received when we were young so I truly hope even this high-level overview feels helpful for you to hear.

Now I’d love to hear from you in the comments below:

What’s one of your favorite emotional regulation tools?

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Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,

Annie

When the Emotions Feel Too Big: Working With Dysregulation in the Moment

Knowing the theory of emotional regulation is one thing. Knowing what to actually do when you’re in the middle of a panic attack at work, or when you’ve just been in a meeting that activated something deep, or when the rage is so present that you can feel it in your throat — that’s a different kind of knowing, and it requires a different kind of preparation.

One of the most reliable first-line interventions for acute emotional dysregulation is what Stephen Porges, PhD, neuroscientist and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, identifies in his Polyvagal Theory as ventral vagal activation — engaging the social nervous system through physiological cues of safety. In practical terms, this means: slow your exhale. The exhale activates the vagal brake on the heart, reducing arousal. You don’t need a specific technique or a ten-minute practice. You need your exhale to be longer than your inhale. Do this five times, and your nervous system will begin to come down from the arousal peak.

Other first-line tools that work across different nervous system states: the physiological sigh (a double inhale through the nose followed by a long exhale through the mouth, which is the fastest way to offload carbon dioxide and reduce physiological stress response); slow bilateral movement (walking, particularly walking outside, activates bilateral brain stimulation that supports emotional processing); cold water on the face or wrists (activates the dive response, which rapidly decreases heart rate); and orienting (slowly looking around the room, naming five things you can see, which activates the exploratory nervous system and signals safety to the threat-detection system). None of these requires privacy, advanced skill, or significant time. All of them create enough physiological settling to allow the more reflective, regulated parts of your brain to come back online.

These are the first-line tools — the ones for acute moments. The longer-term work is different. It is building the capacity to tolerate emotional experience without needing to immediately suppress, escape, or act on it — what clinicians call “distress tolerance” — and the capacity to return to a regulated state efficiently after activation. This is built through practice, over time, with support. It doesn’t happen from reading about it. It happens from doing it, repeatedly, with enough self-compassion that the inevitable moments of failure become information rather than evidence of inadequacy. You are not behind. You are exactly where anyone would be, given the nervous system you were given and the experiences that shaped it. The work is available to you, whenever you’re ready to begin it. Working with a skilled therapist can help you build these tools in a relational context — which is, after all, where they were supposed to be built in the first place. You do not need to have figured this out already. You need to begin, with whatever support is available to you — and let the capacity develop over time, in relationship with a therapist who knows how to help you build it. That relationship is itself part of the healing — the corrective experience of being held while you learn to hold yourself.

Both/And: Your Emotions Are Valid — and Learning to Work With Them Is Still the Work

One of the most common misunderstandings I encounter in my work with clients learning emotional regulation skills is the fear that learning to regulate means learning to suppress. That if they get better at managing their emotional responses, they will somehow become less authentic — that the “worked-on” version of themselves will be a kind of emotional performance rather than the real thing.

The Both/And framing is this: your emotions are legitimate and informative AND learning to work with them skillfully makes you more yourself, not less. Emotional regulation, in the trauma-informed clinical sense, is not about becoming a person who doesn’t feel things. It is about becoming a person who can feel things fully — including the difficult, overwhelming things — without the feeling overtaking your capacity to respond to it wisely. The goal is not a smaller emotional life. It is a larger window of tolerance: more emotional experience you can hold, more nuance you can navigate, more presence you can bring to the moments that matter.

Elena came to therapy describing herself as “too emotional.” She cried at things she felt she shouldn’t cry at. She felt rage in situations where she wanted to feel equanimity. She was, she told me, embarrassed by her own responsiveness — by the way her body announced its reactions before she could decide how to present them. What she was experiencing wasn’t pathological emotionality. It was an affect regulation system that had never been given the conditions it needed to develop. The emotions were appropriate. The capacity to work with them had simply never been built. Learning that capacity didn’t make her less herself. It made her more herself — more able to choose how to respond rather than simply react, more able to experience the full range of her feeling life without the shame that had, until then, made every strong emotion feel like evidence of something wrong with her.

Both/And: your feelings are real and valid AND you deserve tools to work with them. Not to silence them — to partner with them.

The Systemic Lens: Why Emotional Regulation Is Harder for Some People — and Not by Accident

Emotional regulation is not simply a skill set that some people develop and others don’t through some mysterious process of individual variation. The capacity for emotional regulation is built — or not built — in specific relational contexts, shaped by specific cultural messages about which emotions are acceptable and which are not, and maintained or undermined by the environments we inhabit as adults.

Children who grow up in homes where emotions are welcome — where the big feelings can be expressed, named, and held by an attuned caregiver without disaster — develop affect regulation through the repeated experience of being emotionally regulated in relationship. The caregiver’s nervous system, in those moments of attunement, literally helps to calm and organize the child’s nervous system. This is what Dan Siegel, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and author of The Developing Mind, means when he writes about “co-regulation” as the developmental foundation for self-regulation. You can only learn to do alone what you first experience being done together.

For children who grow up in homes where emotions are not welcome — where big feelings are punished, dismissed, mocked, or simply ignored — the developmental process is interrupted. The child learns something very different: that emotions are dangerous, that they cannot be expressed safely, that the best strategy is suppression or performance rather than authentic expression. These adaptations are not pathological. They are intelligent responses to the environment they occurred in. But they are incomplete — and they produce the adult who sits in my office describing herself as “too emotional” or “emotionally unavailable” or “unable to access my feelings,” depending on which direction the suppression went.

The cultural messages compound the relational ones. Girls are often given permission to feel sadness and fear but not anger; boys, the reverse. Women in high-performance cultures are often implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) told that emotional expressiveness is unprofessional — that the price of being taken seriously is a kind of affective flatness that reads as competence. The driven woman who has learned to present as composed, decisive, and unaffected is not simply someone who has her emotions “under control.” She may be someone who has learned, at a very deep level, that her emotional life is not safe to show — and who has paid for that safety with a disconnection from her own inner experience that makes authentic relating, genuine pleasure, and genuine rest genuinely difficult.

Building emotional regulation skills, in this context, is not just a therapeutic technique. It is a reclamation — of the inner life that was taught to hide itself, of the emotions that carry real information about what you need and want and what matters to you, of the full range of human experience that belongs to you regardless of what you were taught about its acceptability.

Further Reading on Relational Trauma

Explore Annie’s clinical writing on relational trauma recovery.

• Narcissistic Abuse & Recovery Guide
• Childhood Emotional Neglect Guide
• Attachment Styles Guide
• Complex PTSD Guide
• EMDR Therapy for Women
• Inner Child Work Guide
• Trauma and the Nervous System
• Intergenerational Trauma

About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT #95719  ·  Relational Trauma Specialist  ·  W.W. Norton Author

Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

As a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719), trauma-informed executive coach, and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, she guides ambitious women — including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs — in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

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Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer