Learning Self-Regulation Through Self-Attunement

hey guys heidi preep here welcome to my channel if you are new welcome back if you are not new on this channel we talk about myers-briggs personality types attachment styles and any other systems that help us understand ourselves and other people better today i wanted to talk about the topic of self-regulation so i want to first let you know that there are different ways to talk about self-regulation there is in the moment self-regulation when you are experiencing let's say a trigger that is not what i'm talking about today so today i am not talking about what to do in very intense high pressure moments when you are feeling overwhelming feelings and need to self-regulate i probably will talk about that in the future but what i want to talk about today is how to self-regulate in a more long-term fashion okay because i actually haven't heard that much about this but this is the basis of what true self-care is right when we understand what our needs are and how to give them to ourselves consistently through the ups and downs of life that is when we can truly say we are caring for ourselves the way that a parent would care for a child but those of us who are insecurely attached or who grew up insecurely attached don't always know how a healthy parent would care for a child because maybe that was not an experience that we had modeled for us so in this video i want to talk about what self-regulation is what attunement is and how we can use attunement in the process of re-parenting ourselves in order to give ourselves some self-regulatory strategies that work in the long term so first of all what is self-regulation self-regulation is the ability to manage your emotions in a way that is appropriate to the context that you're dealing with okay so this definitely does not mean don't ever feel your emotions it does not mean don't ever show your emotions it just means that when you do become aware of a feeling you're having you know what the appropriate way of dealing with it is and that way of dealing with it helps you get more of what you want out of life not less of what you want out of life so emotional dysregulation often happens when either we have a trigger response around something so we have a very very strong emotional response to something that doesn't necessarily warrant that level of an emotional response and that happens because the past and our unresolved trauma lives in our bodies right and when a trigger point comes up for us that past can suddenly project itself onto the present and we can be reacting as though something in the past is happening now without realizing that that's what we're doing so that's one way of becoming emotionally disregulated and that can obviously happen on a huge gradient so you can have a very big trigger you can have a fairly small trigger and the way that those triggers show up in your body and in your mind are going to be very different and probably need different strategies for coping with them but we aren't necessarily triggered when we're emotionally dysregulated sometimes we are just kind of emotionally out of whack and a lot of the time again especially for those of us who are insecurely attached when you're feeling out of whack you might not be aware of why you're feeling that way so it can be difficult and at times kind of overwhelming to try to figure out what to do with your emotions if you don't understand why they're showing up for you in what context they're showing up for you and what is going to help you feel calmer and more at peace and the way that we can get to a place where we have a lot more of that emotional self-awareness is through the process of attuning to ourselves the way a parent would attune to a child so what is attunement attunement is the process of tuning in to what's going on for someone else and allowing our internal state to react to their state so if you have a child and the child starts crying the secure parent might pick the child up and they're gonna see oh my baby's in distress maybe they'll make kind of a sad face back at the baby and rock it a little bit and soothe it until it calms down but that baby is going to see initially that their inner state is mirrored in the parent's face right when the parent kind of gives them a sympathetic look they're showing to the baby i see your pain i'm acknowledging it and now i'm going to help you soothe it that's attunement when we are able to identify what someone else is feeling reflect it back to them accurately and make that connection with them a lot of how insecure attachment forms is when parents are not adequately attuned to their infants so let's say every time you're sad as a baby your parent who might not have a high threshold for tolerating sadness in themselves might pick you up and put a huge smile on their face and try to rock you back and forth and convince you that nothing's wrong and that you feel great that parent though they are well-meaning is not necessarily attuned to you properly therefore you're going to grow up with a sense of confusion about your own internal states are you happy or are you sad because we learn who we are through our parents helping us make sense of our emotions very early on in life so an attuned parent helps their child understand themselves in a very straightforward and true way but an unattuned parent distorts the child's experience of what's happening for them internally and they get confused now when this was our early experience often the problem is that we don't know how to attune properly to our own internal states as adults so if you think of yourself as kind of the observing self so the part of yourself that's able to be mindful and notice what's going on for you and the experiencing self so the self that reacts to things physiologically before you have the chance to understand or to become conscious of those reactions you can kind of think of yourself as two different parts right emotions arise in the body before they arise in the conscious mind so we don't always get a lot of choice about how we're feeling but we do get a choice about how we will deal with and process the feelings that do come up for us so let's say you have an avoidant attachment style avoidantly attached people are very biased towards thinking that if my emotion does not make sense i must be wrong about the emotion right so if i don't think that it makes sense for me to be angry in a certain situation but my body feels kind of angry and agitated i might attribute it falsely to something else and go oh well i just had too much coffee today or oh i just need to get a little bit more exercise and on the flip side of things those who lean a little bit more anxious might assume that there is nothing they can do to change their feelings so once a feeling is happening they might think that the only option they have is to let it run its natural course and they might almost feel like they're at the mercy of their emotions when they come up right so those on the anxious side of the spectrum tend to be really identified with that body sense of felt emotion emotions feel very strong and overpowering a lot of the time in your body but those on the avoidant side of the spectrum are very disconnected from their emotions and are often trying to tell themselves that they are not feeling something that they truly are feeling and in both cases the truth is in the middle right so where avoidance tend to struggle is with validating their feelings i'm gonna make a whole video just on this but basically the cole's notes is if you are feeling something you are feeling that thing it doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense all that matters is that it is in your body because emotions live in the body right so if you think i shouldn't be jealous of this person but jealousy is showing up in your body that is what's happening unfortunately whether it makes sense or not now this does not mean that you have to act on that feeling right feeling something does not necessitate how you're going to deal with it in the real world but the feeling is there so for avoidance the work here lies in being accurately attuned to their own emotional experience what you are doing to yourself if you have an avoidant attachment style is what a parent might be doing to a child who is crying who they pick up and put a big smile on their face and reflect back to them no no you're not sad you're happy it's confusing for the child and it is still confusing for you inside of your body when you try to convince yourself this thing that is truly happening in my body is not happening it creates this very bizarre divide between brain and body that can in many cases show up later as psychosomatic illness because what's left unprocessed in the body does not go away in many cases it gets louder and louder until we have to stop and listen to our bodies and on the flip side of things if you have an anxious attachment style you might be good at recognizing and identifying your feelings but what you are missing out on in this process is the part of the process where the parent yes picks up empathizes with and sees the baby's emotion but then they also help the baby figure out a constructive solution right so when we're using an avoidant attachment strategy we're missing the attunement piece and when we're using an anxious attachment strategy we're missing the solution piece right so there is a process that needs to happen from either end of the spectrum of one becoming aware of what you're feeling and accurately name that feeling when it shows up in your body and then figuring out what you need to do to work with that emotion and by working with that emotion avoidance i do not mean getting rid of it i mean integrating it and figuring out what it's trying to tell you and also how you can solve whatever problem it's alerting you to okay so you need accurate naming and also accurate solutions and the first step in this process is learning to take your feelings seriously acknowledge them even if they don't make sense to you and name them as they come up so an app that i really like that i discovered in the past six months and this is not at all sponsored but dalio if you're watching this and you want to sponsor me i'm happy to continue formally recommending you guys um the app is called delio and basically you can set it to notify you multiple times a day and every time it notifies you you stop and do a check-in where you say how you're feeling so it gives you a list of different emotions and you can customize it and add your own and then a list of actions so what's going on for you in different areas and over a long period of time it tracks what you're feeling with which activities you were engaging in when you were feeling those things and so you end up getting some really cool data like i have data on my phone right now about if i am feeling really depressed which activity is the most likely to get me out of that depressed state so for me there is usually a considerable increase in my low mood when i get a long sleep go for a walk and talk to a friend and the app has actually compiled that data and now it's almost like there's an action plan for what i can do when i'm feeling low energy so you don't have to use an app to do that i find it really easy to but that's an example of what emotional self-attunement looks like becoming aware of our own patterning and figuring out what we're feeling when as well as which feelings tend to be paired to which activities are which things that happen to us in life and in some cases you might be surprised i tend to think that my life is ending every time i don't get enough sleep for like one day right and i think i am this super emotionally complex human being now i need a good sleep and i need it to be sunny out and that is literally it that is all it takes to make me happy okay maybe a conversation with a friend but it's not as complicated a lot of the time as i think it is so that's step one is learning to attune to yourself don't tell yourself you're being pathetic if what you're actually feeling is sad because those are two different things saying you're pathetic implies that you are inventing your sadness when you feel it but if it's in your body if you feel sadness in your body it's real and not naming it for what it is is detrimental to your ability to handle it properly so if you can name i'm sad and you can just sit with that and log it when it comes up eventually you will figure out what helps you get rid of that feeling of sadness if and when you decide that it's time for you to do that and so the second part of this process is figuring out how to take care of yourself not the way a child would take care of themselves but the way an adult would take care of a child who they were deeply attuned to so a loving caring attuned parent recognizes when their child is in distress they recognize their children's needs and they're able to provide space for that child while also gently pushing them towards a solution to the problem that's going to be holistically helpful for them and a holistically helpful solution is pretty much never ignore your feelings pretend they're not happening and barrel on anyways but sometimes it is acknowledge that you're feeling sad right now recognize that there's something you need to get done anyway find a way to compartmentalize for a little bit get those things that you promised to yourself you would do done and then let's make an appointment with ourselves later to revisit that feeling that we were feeling and spend some time with it so in this case we are neither dismissing our emotions nor are we getting endlessly lost in them and sidetracked by them and i find that individuals on each side of the spectrum tend to really fear that being the consequence like avoidance really fear that if they feel their feelings they're going to kind of fall into this endless pit of emotion where they will never be able to be productive or get anything done again and those on the anxious side of the spectrum tend to fear that if they ignore their feelings for even a second the world will fall apart because they will not be attending to something that feels incredibly important and neither thing is true right there's balance in the middle of both things but in order to self-regulate like that over a long period of time we have to be aware of what we're feeling moment to moment and also aware of what helps us navigate those emotional spaces when we get caught in them so for example in this past week i was really struggling with a very low mood one day i had a lot that felt very overwhelming going on in my life and i wanted to wallow in that like i wanted to sit there and just feel endlessly sorry for myself but i was thinking to myself okay this is no longer feeling productive right i think if we're listening very closely to our bodies we know when sadness kind of crosses a line and it's no longer helpful for us to be processing and i was able to think critically about what tends to help me get out of a persistently low mood and into a better mood and implement action in that direction but to do that i had to have a strong self-awareness about my own inner emotional experience and what that landscape looks like the first place so it's a balance between knowing ourselves and knowing how to lovingly parent ourselves when we are caught in any particular direction and knowing where you're starting from so if you lean more anxious struggling to get out of your negative moods or more avoidant struggling to acknowledge your negative moods that gives you a little bit of awareness of where you might need to do more of the work or what part of the process might not come as naturally to you but the brilliant part is that if you can learn to do this properly it will save you so much time and energy because when we are working with our true emotions as they show up in our body when we are in tune with our natural energy we are able to get more of what we want out of life because we are not fighting ourselves in the process right even if we're ignoring and denying and pretending that our emotions are not there and just barreling on forward often we are going way past the point of burnout and we are not getting the results we want because we're not listening to our natural limits which our emotions tell us and on the flip side if we are only following our emotions and only doing what our emotions are telling us to do we're gonna get stuck in a lot of loops that we think we can think or feel our way out of when actually we need to act our way out of but all of this requires us having that adult self really online in our minds taking the emotional information that our body systems are giving us seriously and responding to it the way a wise adult would because we all have that adult in us somewhere part of this for the anxious side of the spectrum is also going to be not getting lost in your stories so when i feel sad maybe i feel sad for like one afternoon but if i spend that whole afternoon telling myself a story about my own sadness i'm going to continue to pull that feeling back into my body over and over and over again because i'm so entrenched in my own story right so we have to actually be very attentive moment to moment day by day hour by hour about how we're feeling in our body and what's showing up for us in the present moment because often we don't even realize when we're telling ourselves those stories right so check in with your body first and foremost not your mind in order to figure out what it is that you need and use your adult self to develop a strategy around getting that for you without running the rest of your life off the rails in the process so this is obviously all a product of learning to be a healthy parent for yourself who is both sensitive to your own needs and responsible and capable of providing you with the concrete things you need to live a stable and secure life and that is no small feat right especially when you're coming from an insecurely attached place because it means integrating one side of the spectrum either emotional or cognitive that you missed out on a healthy development process around early on in life so it's going to require building a lot of skills and that's why attachment healing takes such a long time but developing that self-attunement and that ability to self-regulate over a consistent period of time is gonna get you way further along the route to developing a secure base within yourself then sticking with that outdated strategy well that only ever looked at one side of the coin at a given point in time all right that is all that i have to say for today on emotional self-regulation through self-attunement that is a mouthful let me know in the comments what your thoughts are which aha moments or which things are coming up for you as you go through these videos as always i love you guys i hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and i will see you back here again really soon [Music] you

Channel: Heidi Priebe

Views: 157,349

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Id: TplLHhDRqAQ

Length: 16min 52sec (1012 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 07 2022