Why Emotion Labeling is Critical for Well-being

We often hear, and I often tell clients, that the healthy way of dealing with emotions is to acknowledge and NAME the emotion before letting it go.

How did your parents handle your emotions as a kid?

Many of us, myself included, were forced to repress our emotions as kids. Perhaps our parents could not handle any display of strong emotions and would scoff or walk away whenever we tried to share how we were feeling.

Perhaps our parents criticized us for failing to display positive attitudes at all times. Perhaps our parents punished us for being dysregulated as children and “not behaving properly.” Perhaps our parents were emotionally dysregulated themselves, such that they became angry whenever we expressed anything other than a neutral feeling, or when we failed to comply with parents’ requests or demands. When parents are dysregulated, they fail to help kids co-regulate their emotions.

Co-regulation is essential for reparenting

Kids need to “borrow” emotional regulation from parents until they internalize the experience and are able to regulate on their own. For this reason, I continually raise the need for parents to figure out how to regulate themselves. That is the crux of the reparenting coaching work that I do: rooting out the developmental needs that parents did not get as children, and helping parents meet those developmental needs themselves as adults. With neuroplasticity, this is entirely possible.

Emotion labeling is critical for reparenting. Many adults spew their unprocessed trauma onto their loved ones, harming them in the process. An emotional overreaction may be perceived as a developmentally normal tantrum in an elementary-schooler. In an adult, this is often (rightly) perceived as an attack. A six-foot adult male displaying anger by throwing and breaking objects is abuse, whether or not those actions are the result of unmet developmental needs and childhood trauma.

Emotion labeling is critical for adult well-being

In the book The Upside of your Dark Side, the authors emphasize wholeness, including the acceptance of our negative emotions.

The authors cite studies that reflect that when we are better able to distinguish and articulate our negative emotions, we are less likely to be overwhelmed and incapacitated by stress.

In the studies cited in the book, when adults who were stressed were more able to describe their emotions in detail and nuance, they consumed 40% FEWER alcoholic drinks when they went to bars and parties.

When adults who were angry were able to label their emotions with a “rich vocabulary of emotion words”, they were 40% LESS verbally and physically aggressive to the person who pushed their buttons.

Adults who were rejected by a stranger during a ball-toss game, and who were able to describe and differentiate what they felt, displayed less activity in those regions of the brain associated with physical and emotional pain.

Teaching kids how to articulate, label, and describe their emotions in detail helps them be more resilient as adults. And this starts by us parents making sure that we have this ability for OURSELVES.

If you are a parent struggling to be emotionally regulated or who finds yourself overwhelmed by the demands of modern-day parenting, please reach out by booking a FREE introductory call with me by clicking here. Together we can formulate a plan designed just for YOU.