A Simple 3 Step Strategy to Self Soothe and Regulate Your Emotions

Have you ever fought with your partner and built a story in your head of how they’re approaching the situation compared to you?

Feelings of being dismissed and, later on, loneliness overwhelm you.

You know the feeling.

Anxiety, presumptions, and misguided emotions due to issues in your relationship consume your mind.

What if you knew some techniques to self-soothe, manage your emotions, and regain power. It would go a long way to helping, wouldn’t it?

This puzzle that you are trying to piece together is less complex than you think. Some factors create this overwhelming feeling, paired with some simple solutions.

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Needs and Boundaries

The struggle you experience attempting to tame your spiraling emotions is caused by lacking recognition of the origin.

Yes, some actions would cause some people to respond emotionally, but your reaction is through your needs and lack of boundaries set around them.

For example, you might need intentional time to feel connected to your partner but have not yet identified that need. A minor emergency or event can come up, and if your partner chooses that activity, you feel like a secondary priority.

In this example, you have started the snowball; you have made this change personal to you when the core of the situation is an emergency or minor event.

After your assumption, you build the snowball by looking at defects within yourself that would cause your partner to prioritize something over time with you.

The first step in the deconstruction process is identifying the need that leads to your emotional response. Do this by removing your partner from the equation. Then think of what has upset you. In this case you feel alone.
Next, think of ways you can meet that need independently. An issue you deal with is looking for resolutions to your needs through others curing them for you.
A way to combat needing others to meet your needs is to build a method for meeting that need by yourself. What is an action you could take for intentional time with yourself? Is it meditation? Maybe it’s a book?
The next step is to build healthy communication of your need, and this is how you form a boundary. Avoid making your boundary your partner’s job or responsibility, or it will feel like an attack.
A healthy form of communication is to voice how your needs without inserting a person into the equation.

An issue couples often see is they hear a need, but they don’t know how to act it out because it isn’t clear. For example, “ I need a marker.” What color marker? Thick or thin tip? The same can aligns with needs. “I need intentional time” needs to be broken down into a visual.

That visual becomes the boundary and builds a structure for others to follow. Remember, your needs are not universal.

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Storytelling

Have you ever called a loved one or a friend and they didn’t answer? Maybe you were texting back and forth, and boom, all communication suddenly stopped?

What is your immediate response? You think of all the negative reasons why they didn’t respond. “They don’t care about me, or they’re too busy,” etc.

Observe how quickly you have turned a missed call or text into a horror story about your long-term relationship with someone. You’ve applied deep meaning to what is most likely a coincidence.

You then build a story about the strength of your relationship with this person who could “carelessly ignore you.”

Another mental snowball we create in our lives is the stories we tell ourselves when we feel hurt. We search for the external factors that produce these feelings when there needs to be an internal focus.

The most important resolution to this issue is to separate thought from awareness. Your negative thinking is from past issues and traumas you have felt.
Your attachment style creates mental barriers due to the imprint on your subconscious.
The story you have created is not due to how the other person generally treats you; it is about the fears in your mind and what they could mean for how they treat you.
There are too many factors that go against the thought you are building. Pause and recognize that any item of your story that you do not have direct proof of is false. It is that simple.

You resort to personalizing external issues around you. “This happened specifically to hurt and disrespect me.” Your story most likely isn’t backed by truth. You are amplifying your fears and projecting them onto somebody else.

Your fears come from your attachment style, and your needs have developed it. You can deconstruct the thoughts around your attachment style and learn the source of your needs and how to soothe the fears you’ve built.

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The work

The ultimate goal is to train your brain to support itself and build trust internally. You do this by learning to self-soothe and regulate your emotions.

Self-soothing develops as you learn to meet your own needs and effectively communicate them with others.

Regulating your emotions is a result of self-soothing. You are shifting away from the emotional reaction of your needs not being met.

Steps:

Know your needs, strategies to support them, and what that looks like for you. Rember the marker example from the needs section. It is not enough to need affection.
Break your needs down and identify how you can meet them internally, and understand what that need looks like in action. Effectively communicate that action to others so they can address your needs.
Recognize when you are storytelling without facts. Understand the parts of your story that are due to the fears around your attachment style.

Once you have done this, you will see that you have a less intense reaction to others because you have not made your need solely their responsibility. You have also avoided building a story about others.

Right now, you have an outside-in approach. “What external factors cause me to feel this way.”

Using the steps above, you will transition to an inside-out approach. “What internal factors have caused me to react to external forces.”

Do not use this technique and develop a, what is wrong with me, approach. The method is to identify the snowflakes that turn into a snowball. The goal is to consistently empower yourself and create a better view of others.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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