Help Explaining Emotional Dysregulation to Children & Youth

Helpful analogies for understanding those big feelings

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Regulation

Being “regulated” doesn’t always mean being calm and quiet. Being regulated means our energy matches the situation we’re in and helps us to be successful in whatever we’re doing.

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Emotions are part of being human

Everybody has emotions. Everybody has times when they feel really happy, really mad, really sad, and many other different feelings. Emotions are very important. They give us messages about what we’re experiencing and let us know when something is wrong so we can take action.

Emotions can be hard sometimes. When we feel very sad or very angry, it can be uncomfortable and distressing. Sometimes we act in ways we regret because we felt scared, mad, or hurt.

Imagine if we didn’t have emotions. We wouldn’t know how we felt about things. We wouldn’t feel safe and comfortable when someone we love hugs us. We wouldn’t feel happy or excited when doing something fun. We wouldn’t know when something was unsafe if we didn’t feel fear or anxiety.

Even though some emotions don’t feel very good, they still give us necessary information. We feel bad when we do something that upsets or hurts someone else. Guilty emotions don’t feel very comfortable, but feeling bad about an action helps us remember to try not to do it again.

When someone we care about is sad, we might feel sad too, or we might be worried about them. Those emotions help us understand what others are experiencing and often makes us want to do something to help them feel better.

Our bodies and brains are built to respond to things in our environment to help keep us safe. When we feel scared, anxious, angry, or sad, that tells us something is wrong and we should do something to change it.

Sometimes our brains and bodies are telling us there’s danger when there’s not. That’s also part of being human, but this can cause us to behave in ways we wouldn’t normally behave.