Emotion Regulation: Learning to Feel Without Reacting

I made two major mistakes in the long program at my final national championships.

After facing my fate in the kiss and cry, I walked back to the locker room and forcefully chucked my skating bag across the room.

It was a moment of release. I let the anger and disappointment take control and then, horrified with myself, quickly tucked those feelings away with a silent promise I wouldn’t let them out again.

I redid my makeup, brushed my bangs and walked out to the medal ceremony.

There usually isn’t an exact moment when an athlete adopts the belief that feelings are “bad,” but the implicit message that feelings are inconvenient and unnecessary can be constant throughout a career. Athletes strive to be robot-like, to seamlessly deliver under pressure what we have worked to perfect every day in practice. We can start to believe there’s no place for feeling in perfection, no place for needs. Physical and emotional pain are often viewed as a barrier, a potential enemy attempting to seize control of a career we are so carefully crafting.

In a subjective sport, any external display of emotion is often expertly curated, with an athlete’s image and others’ perceptions holding great importance. When a skater or gymnast falls short of the podium or misses a major element, we rarely see an uncensored display of emotion when their marks are read. Disappointment hides behind weak waves to the camera; anger at unjust scoring is masked by perfunctory head nods and curt smiles. On the outside, everything looks so calm, so controlled, but on the inside, feelings are demanding to be acknowledged.

And when those feelings aren’t acknowledged, and we aren’t educated on how to feel, we often end up in a feedback loop of reaction and avoidance.

Feelings give us information about our needs, and they are neutral. They are sensations experienced in the body that originate through internal or external stimuli. For example, if another driver changes lanes and just barely misses crashing into our car, we’ll likely feel a mixture of fear and anger. The other driver’s car is an external stimulus that elicits those feelings. The need behind these feelings is likely a need for safety, for a sense of security. To meet this need, we may start to pay closer attention to our driving and others’ and find ways to stay safe.

We will likely also have thoughts about the situation that just occurred, creating a mental story about the event. We may start to think, “That person is an idiot; they could have killed me! Was it intentional? What’s wrong with people?!” If this mental story goes on long enough, the anger and fear will continue to grow.

The goal isn’t to avoid feeling or to stop telling ourselves a story about situations that cause our feelings—that would be impossible. Instead, we want to learn to identify, validate and experience our feelings without attachment or reactivity.

When we react to a feeling, the feeling dictates our behavior; when we respond to a feeling, we give ourselves time to experience the feeling before choosing how we want to proceed. Many of us are afraid of our feelings because of what we’ve done, or seen others do, in reaction to feelings.

Going back to my experience at nationals, because I hadn’t yet learned to identify and respond to my feelings, I reacted to the anger and disappointment: I threw my skating bag across the locker room. This reaction (my behavior of throwing my bag in front of a room full of my competitors) reinforced my belief that feelings were “bad” and “shameful.” In reality, my anger and disappointment weren’t “bad”; instead, my reaction to my feelings was maladaptive.

So, how do we start to get comfortable feeling our feelings after years of intentional—or unintentional—avoidance?

We need to earn trust in our ability to feel by facing the fear that if we start feeling, we might be overwhelmed by our emotions. Just like a shaken soda bottle, we want to release the pressure gradually. That means starting by checking in with ourselves in a more neutral moment to identify what we may be feeling and becoming curious about what our feelings may be telling us about our needs.

If we’re struggling to name a feeling, the feelings wheel is a helpful tool for identifying and naming what we are experiencing. If we can’t name a feeling, just noticing whether the emotion is comfortable or uncomfortable is a great place to start.

To help externalize the feeling, we can quickly draw it, give it a texture, ask what color it might be and place space around it. The goal is to cultivate curiosity about our feelings and to sit with the sensation of the feeling. The feeling just gets to be there, joining us for as long as it wants to hang around. This is a skill we’re teaching ourselves, so just like learning anything new, we want to be patient with ourselves and consistent in our efforts.

Until we’re taught how to respond to our feelings, most of us have our own locker room moments, whatever form they may take. We can get caught up in shame about how we reacted to certain feelings, mistakenly believing our feelings indicate a character flaw.

Feelings are never something to fear or avoid in athletics or any other area of our lives. The better we get at responding to and experiencing our feelings, the more successful and confident we become. By consistently allowing our feelings and seeing them as a tool to better understand ourselves, the fear around feeling our feelings will lessen and greater self-trust will emerge.

The content on this blog is intended for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy. The content does not replace a therapeutic relationship with a licensed mental health professional.