Emotion Regulation

If you have episodes where you have a hard time controlling intense negative feelings like panic, despair, or rage and these episodes are starting to create problems in your work or relationships, you might benefit from discussing your concerns with Dr. Kleinman. As a psychodynamic psychotherapist and board-certified psychiatrist, Dr. Kleinman can help you learn to slow down and understand your emotional experience in the moment, which can help you successfully navigate your emotions in the long run.

What is emotion regulation?

Emotion regulation is how you manage your thoughts, emotions, and moods when facing emotional distress. Problems with emotion regulation can lead to troublesome behavioral patterns, such as acting impulsively or destructively. Being able to manage and regulate emotions is vital for maintaining a balanced mind, strong relationships, and success at work.

What are the risk factors for emotion regulation issues?

Anyone may have emotions that feel intense at times and may occasionally struggle to manage them in the moment. Some factors are associated with a greater frequency of intense emotions that are hard to regulate, including:

• Feeling easily tearful or distressed
• Feeling easily irritable, annoyed or angry
• Having intense relationship conflicts
• Feeling bullied or harassed by others
• History of abuse or emotional trauma
• Loss of a loved one
• Ongoing financial distress
• Chronic pain
• Hormonal fluctuations
• Substance use problems
• Mental health disorder like depression or a neurodiverse condition
• Neurologic disorder or history of head trauma
• Family history of emotion regulation problems

Some people may manage their emotions well until multiple major stressors make it impossible to regulate their emotions in the usual way. Other people may have had difficulty regulating emotions since childhood.

Some people find that they can manage their emotions without difficulty when they feel calm in their life but not when they feel stressed. Others may grow up in families where no one can effectively regulate their emotions, and they may not realize this is a problem until they start living independently as adults.

How does Dr. Kleinman assess emotion regulation issues?

Dr. Kleinman can help you determine which forms of treatment are best suited to your unique situation after thoughtfully assessing how you experience your emotions. She conducts a full psychiatric evaluation, which includes asking about any past mental health symptoms and any prior mental health treatment. She also asks about your life history, family history, and lifestyle habits before customizing a personalized treatment plan that’s best suited to your needs.

How does Dr. Kleinman treat emotion regulation?

Dr. Kleinman offers psychodynamic psychotherapy with or without medication management to treat emotion regulation issues that are not associated with Head trauma, Autism, or Neurodiverse conditions. People with these diagnoses will have better results when they work with a condition-related specialist.

Psychodynamic psychotherapy is a talk therapy that meets once or twice per week. It can help you address emotion regulation issues by exploring the underlying forces that may be causing the issues in the first place. This includes exploring your sense of self and personal identity, reflecting on your experience of how the world works, and examining your patterns of interacting with and relating to other people. If needed, Dr. Kleinman can offer medication to help reduce symptoms that become too difficult for you to manage on your own.

Dr. Kleinman’s treatment approach can be notably helpful for people who have difficulty with emotion regulation that triggers suicidal thoughts. Her approach may help people who have had limited improvement after trying other courses of treatment or who have done well with treatment in the past but have not been able to sustain the improvement.

Dr. Kleinman tailors each treatment to your personalized needs and follows your progress closely to ensure meaningful improvement.