How Your Relationship With Your Parents Shaped Your Ability to Regulate Your Emotions

The thing that influences the development of your brain more than anything else

Do you get easily dysregulated? Or struggle to get back to a regulated state when you are dysregulated?

There’s a reason for that.

Do you know that your present experiences of dysregulation are directly connected to your relationship — or attachment — with your primary caregivers when you were growing up? In this week’s Faith & Feeling episode, you’ll see how the emotional environment that you were raised in, and the ways that your parents interacted with and responded to you, shaped the way your brain learned to regulate emotions.

I also talk about what secure attachment is, how to know if you developed a secure attachment bond as a child, and how the presence or absence of this bond is directly linked to to your ability to self-regulate (and reach out for help) today:

Or listen to the episode on Spotify here.

Anxiety vs. dysregulation

What is dysregulation? Regulation is about being in balance. When we get dysregulated, something stressful is happening –inside or outside of us – that takes us out of balance. Dysregulation can feel like anxiety in our bodies, but I love how Chuck DeGroat differentiates the two:

“Managing anxiety is different than managing dysregulation. The first is an attempt to manage and relieve uncomfortable symptoms. The second curiously explores underlying nervous system states and responses born of ways we learned to cope and survive growing up in a fragile world.”

What are some behaviors that are code for dysregulation?

• Using food/alcohol/drugs to numb

• Mindlessly scrolling through social media

• Withdrawing or isolating

• Needing to/being unable to text back

• Simple tasks feeling hard or impossible

Relationships shape our brains

If I were to ask you what you think influences the shaping of our brains more than anything else, what would you say? Maybe the first thought that comes to mind is nutrition. Maybe sleep. But this is actually not the case. The number one thing that influenced the development of your brain was relationships.

Maybe you’ve heard of term “secure attachment.” This term describes the healthiest kind of emotional bond that we can develop with our parents. When our relationships with our parents are secure as children, our brain forms — on the neurological level — with the capacity to self-regulate and to reach out for help when we’re dysregulated.

So how do we know if we developed a secure attachment bond as a child? The following 3 questions often indicate secure attachment:

#1 Did you feel felt by your parents?

Were your parents aware of what was happening inside of you? Did they notice & invite your big emotions, especially difficult emotions like anger or sadness?

#2 Did your parents notice & respond to your needs?

Were you hugged when you wanted to be hugged? As a baby, were you put down when you wanted to be put down? Were you fed when you wanted to be fed?

#3 Did you feel delighted in by your parents?

As a child, did you feel a sense of being liked when you were with your parents? Did you experience them as someone who was glad to be with you?

If you didn’t develop a secure attachment bond as a child, it is possible to develop earned secure attachment as an adult (we’ll talk more about this next week). But for now, know this: if you get easily dysregulated today, there’s a reason for that. And that reason make sense.

Journeying together,

Taylor Joy