Self-regulation is not liberation (Part 2)
Part 2: what if “regulation” is not the goal?
When “self-regulation” is framed as a demand to be more palatable or productive for other people, it can deepen shame and disconnect. We might reclaim well-being instead through relational, embodied, and liberatory practices that honour our nervous systems without forcing conformity.
For many of us — autistic, ADHD, PDA, or simply chronically under threat —the phrases “self-regulation”, “regulation”, or “emotional regulation” feel like a threat in themselves. They are phrases that have been code, code for: “try harder”, “calm down”, “stop reacting”, “be better” or just “stop being you”.
Self-regulation is sold as the holy grail, not least in the world of coaching and neurodivergent influencing. “Just get out of fight-or-flight. It is your fault for staying there. All that is missing to unlock your potential is you.”
Ok. I mean, I am not averse to self-responsibility. Particularly not to changing the things that we can change. But what if you live in fight-or-flight all the time? Resmaa Menajam nailed it in My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies when he wrote:
“Trauma decontextualized in a person looks like personality. Trauma decontextualized in a family looks like family traits. Trauma decontextualized in people looks like culture.”
Resmaa Menakem
Specifically, for example:
What if you are a single mum navigating systems that treat your child’s identity as a problem?
What if you are in economic survival mode?
What is you are holding trauma in your bones?
What if your PDA wiring means “regulate” is a demand you can not say yes to?
What if your community is facing system ongoing threat and lack of safety?
Telling someone in these conditions to “self-regulate” adds new layers of shame. “Not only are you struggling. You are failing to manage how you are struggling.”
Who benefits from you ‘regulating’?
It is worth reflecting. Who wants you calm? Who wants you still? And why? Sometimes, the push to regulate is not about care. It is about making you more bearable to others. More productive. More palatable. In that sense, “self-regulation” is about making yourself small.
Is there something worth reclaiming?
That said, many of us do want to feel better. We do not want to suffer. Not to please others. But to survive - while moving out of survival mode, to connect, to feel less chaos, to allow ourselves to access joy and smell the daisies. So is there a way to reclaim ‘regulation’ on our terms? Maybe….? Maybe, but only if it is:
Relational: co-regulation not forced self-regulation
Liberatory: making space for joy, grief and rage as well as equanimity
Sensory and embodied: dancing, stimming, moving or other ways of returning to the body rather than abandoning it
Non-linear: a spiral not a staircase
Chosen by us, as a goal, not by others, as an imposition or expectation
Or… maybe the word is just too loaded
Or, maybe the term itself is too laced with compliance and infused with harm. Maybe the term itself has come to feel like a threat. Can we then find other ways of reclaiming our birthright states of being ‘happy, joyous and free’? Other phrases might feel less onerous and oppressive and more spacious and inviting. Maybe instead we should consider:
Reconnecting to aliveness (Malchiodi has written about arts therapies and the arts as a key means to do this)
Moving out of survival mode
Sensing and moving with the truth of the moment
Spiritual stillness, equanimity
Finding solid ground while flowing or floating with what is
or something else entirely… or something without words….
Even these terms may have become colonised and capitalised. But perhaps we could redefine safety as permission. To move, to cry, to feel, to stop holding it together. And, perhaps we can have some compassion for the process of undoing internalised ableism, which is ongoing, and continuous.
Final Words: you are not failing
If you are neurodivergent, or living under pressure that never lets up. You are not necessarily “disregulated”. You might just be “responding”. And perhaps, with the support of others, we can find our own way to stay in contact with our selves and our essence without the pressure of ‘regulating’ for other people.
