Why Am I SO Emotionally Dysregulated?
Barbara Heffernan • October 2, 2025
People who are emotionally dysregulated frequently feel shame... and they certainly can be shamed by others. This dysregulation is not your fault AND you can improve your regulation.
Have you been labeled as "too emotional?"
Or even too unemotional?
Or even too unemotional?
People who struggle with emotional dysregulation often wonder: why is regulating my emotions so much more difficult than it seems to be for others?
Here's what I want you to understand: none of us are born with emotional regulation.
Emotional regulation is learned, and we primarily learn it from our early caregivers.
If you've spent any time with infants, you know that humans aren't born with an innate capacity to regulate their emotions. Infants are incredibly emotionally dysregulated. Toddlers as well. Caregivers help infants and toddlers regulate their emotions in a number of ways:
- By satisfying their basic needs for food and sleep (essential for emotional regulation!)
- By soothing the baby when it is upset
- By calming the baby down when it is time for sleep
- By energizing the baby when it is time to be active
Many parents and caregivers do this automatically, instinctually. They change their facial expressions and modulate their voices. They rock and move in a way to help the child emotionally regulate.
But if your caregivers were not emotionally regulated themselves, this doesn't happen. If your parents lacked strong emotional regulation skills and techniques, learning these capacities would have been exponentially more difficult for you.
How We Learn Emotional Regulation
There's a natural and instinctual process through which infants and toddlers learn emotional regulation techniques. They absorb it by "osmosis" rather than through direct instruction such as "This is what I do to regulate."
When someone slows their breathing and we're in their presence, we generally slow ours as well. For an infant being held by someone who slows their breathing, this effect is even more pronounced.
Through this natural process, toddlers and infants learn these techniques. As children grow older, they learn what emotions are from their caregivers. They learn to identify emotions, to manage them, and eventually to problem solve—if they have guidance and support.
For those of us who weren't raised by parents with strong emotional regulation, learning these skills is significantly more challenging.
We can still learn them—absolutely—but it requires considerably more time and effort than it does for someone raised by emotionally regulated people.
Eliminating the Shame
I want to share this information for several reasons, but my primary goal with this blog is to help eliminate the shame that accompanies dysregulation. **
It's not your fault, and it's not your inherent personality.
Others might perceive our personalities as heavily influenced by our emotional regulation, but that's not truly who we are.
I'm also sharing this to convey hope: you can change. The skills and techniques are learnable.
What About Emotional Suppression?
Emotional suppression is also a type of emotional dysregulation. Emotional suppression creates numerous problems, including physical health issues and problems in relationships.
I recently discussed this in a video on parentification and emotional regulation. Many children who are parentified somehow manage to develop emotional regulation techniques that appear effective. They do this to take care of a parent or family member who is not emotionally regulated.
However, these children have actually learned to suppress their emotions rather than to truly regulate them. They've learned to suppress their own needs, wants, and desires so that they can survive. Their survival depends on keeping a parent or other family member functioning.
In these situations, it can appear that the child is MORE emotionally regulated than the parent. And they might be MORE regulated than their parent, but it is not true emotional regulation. Next week's blog and video will be on the Hidden Costs of Emotional Suppression.
Factors That Impact Emotional Regulation
Several factors affect your capacity to learn and implement emotional regulation techniques. Here are the key factors that disrupt our ability to emotionally regulate:
1. Trauma, particularly during childhood, though also later in life
2. Living in an extremely stressful environment, particularly during childhood
3. Our biology and neurobiology
For example, people with ADHD have significantly more difficulty (this is neurological) regulating their emotions.
HOWEVER, regardless of why learning emotion regulation techniques was difficult for you, or why implementing them is challenging now, the process of learning emotional regulation remains the same. AND the need to practice these techniques regularly is also the same.
Whether the cause is biological, neurobiological, experiential, or trauma-related, you can learn these techniques.
Resources for Your Journey
I want to direct you to several other resources, and then I'll address one more point about the difficult parenting you may have received.
This blog is part of a comprehensive series on emotional regulation. In the last couple of weeks, I've released two blogs that can help expand your understanding: Emotional Dysregulation(what it is and what you can do) and Emotional Regulation Skills, which reviews scientifically proven effective techniques.
I'm currently working on videos and blogs that address emotional suppression and how trauma impacts emotional dysregulation (so stay tuned!).
Moving Beyond Blame
Returning to the issue of poor parenting: we can become stuck blaming our parents for their failures and their own emotional dysregulation. But these patterns are passed down through generations.
While a period of blame or anger may be necessary for growth and processing, remaining stuck in that blame for too long will not improve your emotional regulation.
I'm not focusing on the concept of forgiveness here, which I believe is complex and often misunderstood. Instead, I'm emphasizing understanding—recognizing that your parents may have experienced the same deficits in their own childhoods. This understanding can help redirect your energy toward your own healing, which is where it needs to be.
One Last Resource
I have a free PDF called **Transform Your Negative Core Beliefs**. Many people have found it extremely helpful for identifying beliefs that become ingrained when we experience inadequate parenting. This resource may be valuable for you as well.
Please let me know your thoughts and any questions you have. I'll see you next week.
Blog Author: Barbara Heffernan, LCSW, MBA. Barbara is a licensed psychotherapist and specialist in anxiety, trauma, and healthy boundaries. She had a private practice in Connecticut for twenty years before starting her popular YouTube channel designed to help people around the world live a more joyful life. Barbara has a BA from Yale University, an MBA from Columbia University and an MSW from SCSU. More info on Barbara can be found on her bio page.
Share this with someone who can benefit from this blog!
"Just stop thinking about it" doesn't work. However, the Attention Training Technique from Metacognitive Therapy has been shown to help lower anxiety and rumination.
Does your brain drive you nuts going over and over the same thing—the mistake you made, the difficult conversation you had....anything you are worried about? This is rumination and it is driven by the Default Mode Network of the brain. Understanding this can help you change.
Social anxiety often has a trauma root — understanding the connection can help you heal.
Overloaded and Overwhelmed? You are in the right place. Here's help.
overwhelm has a cruel side effect. It shuts us down. Right when we feel like we need to get more done, not less, overwhelm makes our mind go blank or puts us into a freeze stateUnderstanding how overwhelm manifests for you can really help you calm it down.
Terrified to make eye contact? Constantly worried about what others think of you? You're not alone. These experiences are fairly common and often point to social anxiety disorder, which IS treatable. This blog explains this connection, provides treatment options and 3 self-help tools.
Interoceptive exposure can be transformative for people with somatic anxiety, specifically panic attacks, PTSD, OCD and health anxiety. Interoceptive exposure is a technique used within CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
If you view your emotions as something to be avoided, squashed or feared — you are activating your your amygdala, and setting off internal alarm bells. This makes everything worse. Research has shown there are six beliefs that drive emotional dysregulation. Which one is yours?
Emotional distress : its intensity and duration is driven by certain beliefs. Learn 3 tools to help regulate your emotions. This has substantial research behind it – and an expert explains.
The main thing that drives rumination is actually the BELIEFS we have about the FEELINGS that come up from a difficult situation. Rumination is driven by the habitual patterns of thinking combined with our judgments about whether we can handle the emotions, both of which can be changed to experience relief.
