The Place We Find Ourselves #20: Affect Regulation: Why It’s Critical for Everyday Life

Understanding and mastering affect regulation is the single most important skill needed for great human connections. So says Adam Young, and I (James) have become convinced he is right. That is why I commend this podcast episode.

Let me restate Young’s claim. We become great partners, reliable friends, cherished parents or respected pastors and employers by mastering the ability to come out of dysregulated states. A dysregulated state is either one of excessively high energy (e.g. fight, flight, rage, panic) or excessively low energy (e.g. freeze, shame, hopelessness), and happens when we are triggered by any sense of threat.  

But here's the rub. The ability to come out of these dysregulated states and back to optimal energy (where great human connection happens) is linked to whether we mastered this skill in childhood. And that depends on whether our primary caregivers did this regulation for us in infancy, so we could co-learn the skill with them, and thus develop the neural architecture needed in our brain.  

Young gives a great explanation of why this skill is so important now, and discusses how to develop the awareness and responsiveness that we need to become master connectors with the people important to us.