Coregulation is a word that gets thrown around quite a bit but how well do you know what this process is? We often think about it when we think of a parent comforting a distressed child, however coregulation is a process that can be very adaptive at any stage and not just between parents and young children.
I remember sessions with my mentor and clinical supervisor many years (/decades) ago when I was newly registered as a psychologist. He had a strong influence on how I thought about things. The best thing he did for me was showing me how to approach difficult or complex situations, not necessarily what strategies I should employ with my client. He would often pause, and calmly replay it back to me and start talking through options. He showed me that when the going gets tough, the tough stay calm and take a curious approach, without becoming overwhelmed or catastrophising. It felt like the opposite of catastrophising… decatastrophising! The feeling of being this calm, sturdy lighthouse in the storm stuck with me and I felt myself adopting this stance, unknowingly mimicking him. What a gift. It is certainly something that I hope to pass on to my supervisees and that they find it as helpful as I did early in my career.
In fact there is a pretty mind-blowing neurological process going on when we coregulate where the other person’s calm regulated emotional state becomes ‘contagious’ via our mirror neurons. Mirror neurons in our brain operate unconsciously. We are not aware of the process whereby when we look at the other calm person, our mirror neurons effectively ‘map’ the other person’s facial expression, body language, breathing and so on within our own brain. This connects directly to the brain’s emotional centre (the limbic system) and converts to an actual reduction in distress in our body. Repeatedly experiencing this coregulation process essentially rewires the brain to allow it to self regulate more effectively over time.
Coregulation between parents and their children and teens is a powerful process for learning effective emotional regulation but the reverse is also true… when a distressed child is met with an angry or dysregulated adult, escalation occurs and . repeated exposures can lead to a greater tendency for the child or teen to emotionally spiral when distressed. The good news is that a parent sometimes losing it themselves does not mean they will rewire their child’s brain to experience emotional spiralling every time they are distressed. Ultimately, we are all human and perfection is not an option. We just need to do it a good portion of the time. It may look like affectionately rubbing a shoulder or just sitting in the same room. It might sound like a validating comment (see my other blog article on Validation) or something like my mentor conversations where my concerns were tackled by standing back from it and evaluating all the possibilities rather than getting drawn into the vortex of helplessness I may have felt at the time. The hardest part is
not ‘having the perfect response or solution to hand to them’, it is managing our own emotions and avoiding falling into the trap of reactivity. So before you respond – as my teenager has said to me on more than one occasion – “cool your jets” and you will be fine.