Lee - Growing yourself back up : understanding emotional regression

R egression is what happens to us when, emotionally, we leave the present moment. By contrast, staying present with yourself, your partner, your children, friends, colleagues, and boss means that, emotionally, you are completely in the here and now, and that a small part of you is neither wandering over the hills and valleys of your past nor trying to predict the future. While staying present is one of the greatest gifts you can give to yourself and others, it is much easier said than done.

When we regress, we go from being clear-thinking adults to talking, acting, and sometimes even looking like children who are not getting their way. We feel powerless and out of control, as if we dont have choices. We think we know what others need, but at the moment we cant say what we ourselves need. As we regress, we fall back toward an earlier time in life, usually childhood. When this happens, we very often think that others are being childish, and we might even make the fatal mistake of telling them, I think youre regressing.

By picking up this book, you have taken the first step toward learning skills to help you avoid regression. When you understand the phenomenon of regression, you will find yourself really being seen and heard by others, and you will learn to listen to others in new ways. Cultivating this skill will move your life forward in a way that you could never have imagined.

When you regress, you slip into past ways of perceiving, feeling, and thinking that make you unable to see all of the choices available to you in the present. You probably regress because you are feeling unsafe, an experience that many of us felt as children. You might also feel as if forces greater than yourself are in control, and that you have no choice but to follow someone elses moods, whims, feelings, and directions. Another trigger for regression is feeling that someone important is abandoning you, when in fact regression is really your abandoning of your mature adult self.

In a very real sense, I have been gathering material and experiences to write this book for the last fifteen years. My first glimmering of regression came from the hundreds of workshops I led on anger. As I taught others about this very misunderstood feelinghow to recognize it, understand it, and express it in a conscious and healthy wayI realized that anger is no more negative than any other feeling, such as joy or sadness. I also knew, however, that anger has a dark cousin, rage. Rage occurs when anger festers in a person, without release, to the point where he or she regresses to a childish state and explodes or implodes.

I realized that I had to differentiate anger, which everybody feels at times and has a perfect right to express in appropriate ways, from rage, which cannot be expressed safely and harms both those on whom it is inflicted and those who inflict it. Rage is not a feeling but rather a behavior or action that a person demonstrates when they are emotionally regressing. They regress because they are afraid to feel their feelings of sadness, anger, hurt, loneliness, or abandonment. In other words, anger is a grown-up emotion that we feel in the present. Rage is a behavior that we exhibit when we get stuck in feelings left over from unresolved situations and relationships in the past.

When I realized this, I knew I was on to something important, and I had to find out more. Since the personal growth psychology literature contains almost nothing on emotional regression (which is not to be confused with past-life regression), I read mostly academic psychology books to see what I could learn. Most psychologists and psychiatrists, I discovered, use the word infrequently. A field called self psychology often discusses regression, though in ways that are difficult to understand. It took me several years to get clear in my mind what the self psychologists meant to say. When I did, I began using some of their ideas, reformulated in my very personal and, some say, humorous presentation style, in some of my public talks and workshops.