Lesson 3: How to Regulate Your Emotions Without Shutting Down
Audio Transcript
Let’s start with a simple but often misunderstood truth: emotional regulation is not the same thing as emotional suppression. You are not more emotionally mature just because you keep a straight face, remain quiet in every argument, or walk away from hard conversations. In fact, some of the most emotionally shut-down people in the world are the ones who appear the calmest. Because when regulation gets confused with repression, we lose access to the very signals that are trying to help us navigate our emotional lives.
So today, we’re going to untangle that confusion. We’re going to look at what it really means to regulate your emotions—not silence them, not deny them, but hold them in a way that doesn’t overwhelm you or harm your relationships. And I want you to know from the outset, this is not a performance. This is not about learning how to seem stable while feeling lost inside. It’s about developing the internal skills to stay present with yourself in moments of discomfort, intensity, or emotional reactivity. That’s what emotional regulation is. It’s staying with your feelings without being consumed by them.
Now let’s acknowledge something else: this is hard to do. For many people, emotional regulation feels elusive because they weren’t given models of it growing up. Maybe when you cried, you were told to stop being dramatic. Maybe when you were angry, you were punished instead of asked what was going on underneath. Maybe no one ever showed you that it was possible to feel deeply and still remain connected—to yourself, to others, to the situation in front of you. And so what happens is, you learn to survive your feelings instead of engage with them. You either shut down, lash out, over-apologize, withdraw, or numb. These are not failures. They’re adaptations. But they are adaptations we can evolve beyond, once we learn that emotion doesn’t have to mean danger.
One of the first things I teach students and clients when we explore emotional regulation is that emotions have a beginning, a middle, and an end—just like waves. They rise, they crest, and they recede. But when we panic in the middle of a feeling, or resist it altogether, we trap ourselves in that emotional moment indefinitely. We try to control the tide by pretending we don’t feel it. But emotional regulation is not the absence of emotion. It’s the practice of riding the wave without drowning in it.
A few years ago, I worked with someone I’ll call Miguel. Miguel was a senior leader in a high-pressure corporate environment. On the surface, he was composed, thoughtful, and decisive. But privately, he was struggling. Every time there was conflict at work—whether it was a performance issue, a tough conversation with his team, or feedback from his superiors—he would completely shut down. Not visibly, but internally. His body would go cold, his mind would freeze, and he would become robotic in his communication. He described it as “disappearing into a shell.” He didn’t yell. He didn’t argue. But he didn’t stay present either.
When we traced that response back, we discovered that Miguel had grown up in a household where anger meant danger. His father was volatile and emotionally unpredictable, and so Miguel learned early on that strong feelings, especially his own, had no safe place to go. His nervous system adapted by withdrawing. As an adult, that same protective shutdown would kick in anytime tension entered the room. From the outside, it looked like calm. But inside, he was bracing for impact.
What Miguel needed wasn’t better communication strategies. He needed to feel safe enough to stay present in his own body when emotions were high. That’s where regulation begins—not in your words, but in your physiology. The body is always the first to know what you’re feeling. Your heart rate changes, your breathing shifts, your muscles tense. And until you can recognize and work with those signals, it’s almost impossible to choose a regulated response. You might want to be calm. But your body is already preparing for battle, or for escape.
One of the most effective tools for emotional regulation is learning how to ground yourself in the moment. Not to talk yourself out of a feeling, but to give your nervous system enough support to stay present. That might mean placing a hand on your chest and slowing your breath. It might mean standing up and feeling your feet firmly on the ground. It might mean naming what’s happening—internally and externally—so you can orient yourself to reality. “My stomach is tight. My jaw is clenched. I’m in a meeting, and someone just questioned my decision. I feel defensive, but I’m not in danger. I can stay here.” That kind of inner narration isn’t dramatic. It’s regulating. Because it brings you out of the reactive past and into the conscious present.
But emotional regulation also requires honesty. There are people who try to regulate by bypassing. They’ll say, “It’s fine, I’m over it,” when they’re not. They’ll spiritualize their discomfort by saying everything happens for a reason, when really they’re hurt and need to name it. They’ll shut down difficult conversations in the name of being “mature,” when what they actually feel is fear or shame. That’s not regulation—that’s avoidance. And avoidance, while temporarily soothing, erodes trust over time. Both trust in ourselves and trust in our relationships. If you consistently silence your feelings in order to seem regulated, you don’t become strong. You become brittle. Because you’ve built your composure on denial instead of resilience.
Real regulation invites you to stay connected to yourself, even when your emotions are strong. Let me offer a very different example—someone I’ll call Brianna. Brianna was a school counselor, and one day she came into session after a particularly emotional week. She had lost a student she’d been mentoring for years—an accidental overdose. She told me, through tears, “I still showed up for work, I still sat with kids, I still listened. But I’ve been crying in my car every morning and every night. It doesn’t feel like I’m falling apart, though. It feels like I’m staying connected.”
And she was. What Brianna was practicing was not emotional instability, but emotional regulation. She was honoring her grief, making room for it, staying functional without shutting herself off from what she felt. That is the very heart of emotional maturity—not holding it together by pretending nothing’s wrong, but staying emotionally engaged while still living, still leading, still loving.
Of course, this kind of regulation is more difficult in relationships where emotion is shared, like during conflict or vulnerable conversations. In those moments, our instinct is often to protect ourselves—by getting louder, withdrawing, deflecting, or turning the focus to someone else’s faults. But every emotionally charged moment is an opportunity to regulate in real time. You might say, “I’m getting defensive right now, and I don’t want to shut down. Can we pause?” Or, “This is bringing up a lot for me. I want to stay in the conversation, but I need a moment to collect myself.” That is regulation in motion. That is what it looks like to stay emotionally present and grounded, even when things feel messy.
This kind of regulation also changes how we see other people. When someone else is dysregulated, instead of mirroring their panic, we learn to co-regulate. That doesn’t mean absorbing their feelings or rescuing them. It means staying steady in our own bodies, in our own breath, and becoming a source of calm energy instead of adding to the chaos. When you practice regulation consistently, you become emotionally trustworthy. People feel safer around you—not because you never get upset, but because you don’t use your emotions as weapons or as a reason to disappear.
So, if you’re someone who tends to shut down emotionally when things get hard, I want to offer you this: your body did that to protect you. And that was wise, for a time. But now you’re being invited into a new kind of strength—the strength of staying. Of breathing through the discomfort. Of choosing presence over protection. And you don’t have to be perfect at it. You just have to start noticing when you’re starting to check out. That moment of awareness is where the door opens. You step back in. You ground yourself. You regulate.
Emotional regulation is not a trick. It’s not about appearing calm for the sake of others. It’s about staying honest with yourself and choosing to meet your feelings—not as threats, but as data. When you stop shutting down, you don’t become more emotional. You become more human. And in a world that often asks us to mute ourselves or perform stability, the courage to feel and stay present is one of the most powerful things you can offer—both to yourself and to those around you.
As we close this lesson, I invite you to think of one recent moment when you shut down emotionally. What were you trying to protect? What feeling felt too big? What would it have looked like to stay, just a little longer, with that feeling—without judgment, without panic? This is the practice. Not perfection. Not control. But the slow return to presence, breath by breath. I’ll meet you in the next lesson.