Dr. Becky Kennedy

It's not your ability to exit emotions or bring them to a zero.

It's your ability to manage emotions and feel like yourself and feel capable while you're having a feeling.

That's what it means to regulate emotions.

So many people think it means I'm not supposed to feel angry at people.

I would never wish that on anyone.

You want to feel angry.

Anger is a feeling that tells you you're not getting something you need.

Why would you want to not have that feeling?

It's the most important thing.

You need to know what you need.

Now, that's different than dysregulated anger, which comes out as yelling.

All that means is I have anger without skills.

But the problem isn't the anger.

The problem is the lack of skills.

So emotion regulation is our ability to have an emotion and have enough skills to be able to manage that emotion and be able to make good decisions.

So, so first of all, I just want to say to parents, we are, we are set up in such an awful way.

Most of us weren't really taught how to manage our emotions.

And now we're trying to teach our kids how to manage their emotions.

That's like a basketball coach who's never learned basketball.

It's a pretty hard gig, but we've been given it.