What even is "emotional regulation" during times of collapse and polycrisis?
The politics of "regulation", and a little exercise for integration.
We’ve just come to the end of a month-long contemplation of holding high sensation inside REWILDING.
We’ve been doing a bunch of work around expanding our body’s capacity for intensity — because revolutionary times are inherently intense. No getting around it, no “regulating” it away.
In our call this past Monday (we meet weeekly at 10am and 8pm AET each Monday — comrades in the US - this is every Sunday night for you), we were orbiting around this binary in a lot of mainstream wellness spaces around a “regulated” vs a “dysregulated” nervous system.
And how much that binary, and honest the entire framework around it, needs to be burnt to the ground.
We need to banish this idea that "emotional regulation" is synonymous with "cool, calm, collected, unaffected".
We need to burn the notion that a "healthy" and "optimal" nervous system is one that's totally chill and fine during live-streamed genocide and ecocide.
This is not what body literacy looks like, and fuck do we need true body literacy right now.
This is not "a regulated nervous system", and it’s certainly not the gold star you've been taught to strive for.
It's some colonised, dehumanising bullshit is what it is.
Who benefits when we buy into the idea that the standard we should be striving for is numbness and detachment?
Who benefits when we put so-called "regulated" (read - unaffected) into a hierarchy ABOVE "dysregulated"?
Please, let's put the whole binary of "regulated" vs "dysregulated" into the bin forever.
Binaries create hierarchies and hierarchies are colonised nonsense.
You are experiencing sensations, with varying degrees of intensity or discomfort.
That's it.
Not "regulated" or "dysregulated", just SENSATIONS.
TRUE intimacy with your body doesn't exist inside that binary.
True intimacy and body literacy is the ability to bear witness and HOLD the intensity of our sensations, in ways that make our bodies feel SAFE.
It's not about "getting rid" of so-called "dysregulation".
It's about making space for it.
Can you hold your fear, your dread, your panic, with enough tenderness and compassion, that the fear starts to feel safe?
Can you expand into it, breathe around it, so that it stops feeling like a gross terrifying thing you have to eject out of you as quickly as possible?
Can you welcome your overwhelm with enough love and grace that it starts softening at the edges?
Not leaving, not "fixing", not reacting… just softening?
This is what intimacy with our nervous systems looks like in revolutionary times.
Not "fixing". Not reacting. Not pathologising.
But rather HOLDING and SOFTENING.
Our dread, our rage, our overwhelm, our panic — they're here to stay.
True "regulation", now, in these times, is befriending them.
What would befriending your "dysregulation" look like?
How can you bring in more tenderness?
This is our work.
The politics of “emotional regulation”…
We’ve gotta talk about whiteness here.
We have to name it, because within this framework we’re talking about, whiteness is a main character.
We have to bring awareness to the fact that our colonised understanding of what health and wellbeing mean are deeply fucking entrenched with what whiteness has defined as optimal and acceptable.
Let’s look at a “regulated nervous system” for example.
(Fucking gross word by the way, when you think about it. As if you nervous systems needs regulation put onto it)
A “regulated nervous system” is detachment-coded. It’s a body that isn’t visibly reacting to the world around it. It’s a body that’s quiet, calm, “put together”, and quiet.
Hmm, where have we seen that particular set of values before?
(A note here: I know that obviously not all practitioners mean Whiteness when they say “regulated”. I know that this whole framework has been co-opted, like so much else, by colonial capitalism and white supremacy. I’m not coming at individual practitioners here, and if this framework has helped you, I’m not coming at you individually either. I am saying though, that collectively and culturally, the meaning of these words has changed. This is what the paradigm we’re living in does)
We also need to name that a “dysregulated nervous system” has been violently racialised.
Think of the toxic tropes that white supremacy normalises around people of colour, women and femmes particularly.
Loud. Brash. Angry. Uncontrolled. Dangerous.
In short: dysregulated.
Which is to say that someone who is dysregulated is someone who is not performing Whiteness correctly.
Reflect too on who is allowed to be seen in states of so-called “dysregulation”.
White women are allowed to rage and cry and wail, and they’re allowed to do it publicly. They’re seen as inspirational way-showers, wow she’s so brave, she’s expressing her feelings so beautifully. Or at the very least, they’re automatically met in their expression of their “dysregulation”. Listen to her. Comfort her. Soothe her. Poor thing.
(Not so much the case with white men, because of course, all emotions — apart from femicidal rage, which has been successfully rebranded by the menfolk as “not an emotion at all” — have been coded as “feminine”. This violent gendering of experiencing and expressing emotion is a whole other tragedy, and it’s been written on extensively by many cleverer people than me)
Now imagine, if you will, the response she would get if the person expressing these very same manifestations of so-called “dysregulation” was a femme of colour.
At best, she’d be silenced, ignored, pathologised, and shamed.
At worst, her very life would be in danger.
We cannot talk about so-called “emotional reglulation”, even about putting that whole framework in the bin entirely, without talking about who white supremacy has decided are allowed to be seen in their volatility.
For my fellow humans who have been racialised as white, and fellow humans who benefit from white supremacy:
As you are disentangling yourself from the binary binds of “regulated” vs “dysregulated”, and coming back into a framework of simply experiencing sensation to varying degrees of intensity…
…I’d like to invite you into some inquiry around the way you yourself respond to the intensity of others.
Notice the way your body responds to the intensity of other people racialised as white. Is there a default response of concern, sympathy, action?
Notice too the way your body responds to the intensity of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour. Is it the same as the way your body responds to the intensity of people who look like you?
Get really, really honest with yourself here.
There might be something for you to unpack.
An exercise for cultivating intimacy + literacy with your body during (inherently overwhelming) polycrisis and collapse:
Begin to separate sensation from emotion.
Yes, there is a difference, and it matters.
Sensation is what is physically happening inside of your body.
Emotion is sensation + narrative.
For example, fear is not a sensation. It’s an emotion. The sensation here might be a tightness in the throat, a coiled-spring type of feeling in the chest, a feeling of building pressure in the jaw or behind your eyes, head spinning, etc etc etc.
Fear is the narrative our minds have made to translate those sensations for us.
Building intimacy with our bodies and expanding our capacity for intensity means spending way more time with sensation, rather than emotion.
(Note: obviously emotions are incredibly valuable. No shade on the narratives we place on sensation whatsoever. They help us feel connected to each other, we can translate our experiences to each other in ways that make sense in context. But we often overlook the importance of literacy with sensation when we focus on emotion exclusively)
At least once a day, set yourself up somewhere quiet, close your eyes, and breathe deep.
Scan your body with your mind’s eye. Use your body’s awareness to attune yourself to each section of your body in turn.
Notice the sensations there.
Begin with your feet. How do they feel?
If nothing comes at first, keep probing. As you’re noticing sensation, get as specific as you can with it. Is it warm? Cold? Does it feel tight? Open? Harsh? Gentle? What is the texture of this sensation? Can you conjur an image in your mind of what this sensation might look like?
Remember numbness is a sensation too. How does your numbness feel? Is it jarring? Isolating? Does it feel hollow? Is it a disconnect, or does it feel more like a repression?
Just noticing.
Just witnessing.
Not attempting to make meaning, “find a lesson”, fix, or change in any way.
We are simply building our literacy of how our bodies experience and hold sensation.
Move up to your ankles. Do the same thing here. Then your calves, your knees, your thighs, hips, womb space, solar plexus, spine, chest, heart, shoulders, collarbones, neck, throat, jaw, face, and the top of your head.
As you’re moving through your body, see if you can use your breath to amplify the sensations you’re noticing.
On the inhale, expand into this sensation, whatever it is. Feel it getting louder, and more potent as your lungs fill. On the exhale, ground into this sensation. Feel your body landing in it.
How does it feel? What would it mean to hold this particular sensation with even more tenderness?
This is our work.
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