Photo by Claudia Wolff
As a therapist, I spend a lot of time working with adults of all ages to develop healthy emotional regulation. The last five years have been harder for those 35 and younger. This previous political season was far from the normal process for people on both sides of the political coin. It is challenging for many people to find stability regarding their emotional regulation with normal life interactions, much less when they are extremely driven about a given topic.
During the last political season, social media triggered primal fears on both sides! There is no point in arguing whether one
side was right or wrong in this writing; rather, it is about how the process
has caused so many people to have emotional dysregulation.
I have seen some extreme emotional reactions from Gen X and some Boomer populations. However, I have seen the most extreme emotional dysregulation in the millennial and Gen Z populations. I have been studying the political and psychological warfare process that played out in this last election, and I have been impressed with both sides in the wrong ways.
Using fear as a primary motivator is a dangerous but
effective process, as we have seen throughout history, such as Hitler and Hanoi
Jane. They used fear to incite irrational thinking and violence that ended in atrocities and demoralized others, all to gain power. All of this was
done long before the power of social media addiction in this current society.
Social media is often the first thing people turn
on and the last thing they see before they sleep because of FOMO (fear of
missing out). The use of close-to-truth but manipulated or selective parts of
truth by political parties, based on the ultimate fear of dictatorship, has
resulted in extreme hate, massive racism, increasing sexism, the fears of loss
of freedoms, a loss of women's rights, and homophobia. They have a perfect
storm to create emotional dysregulation.
There are two main points I would like to address in this recent
propaganda war: the manipulation of two generations of self-centered ideology and the emotional dysregulation that is coming out of two generations
that have never had to learn how to lose.
Over the last 30 years, we have seen the rise of gentle parenting, which is not all bad. However, it has changed the impact on the emotional dysregulation of the last two generations. We have created parents who want to be their kids’ friends, avoid using the word no, and try to explain concepts to kids that are way outside the psychological ability of children to process. I overheard a parent explaining to a 6-year-old the process of genocide! This is so far outside that child's development range that you might as well leave them to run a nuclear reactor at 6 years old; it will have the same functional outcome.
There is a reason that simple answers such as NO, you may not eat candy for dinner or work with children, and that is a child’s mind if based on concrete, straightforward absolutes. (I want candy – I am hungry –
I’ll eat candy and not be hungry), They do not think about food values or
health. They simply use concrete processing, which drives them for the first twelve years. Then, the ambiguous ideas expand slowly as the brain solidifies for the next 10 to 13 years. Suppose we do not teach our young children that there are boundaries that they cannot cross simply because the adults in their lives know how to keep them safe. In that case, they will struggle to understand how to
self-regulate and find healthy boundaries as their mind expands into the grayer
world we all grow into.
I am not talking about total child control. I am talking about positive, age-appropriate parenting of young humans. It is vital that we stop the idea that children are tiny adults. THEY ARE NOT. They are young humans who need time to grow with guidance!
In the last two generations, society has failed to teach children how to fail and lose. Thousands of pages have been written on the topic of “everyone is a winner” and “the no-score-keeping generation.” Simply put, we steal a very important lesson from children when we do not let them fail at things in life.
The video gaming industry, no, I am not anti-gamming. Still, it has created adaptive gaming so that if a child faces a hard level and loses to the “boss,” they do not have to start the whole level over, just the boss fight, and even that, after so many tries, changes to make it easier to win. This has
created a severe weakness and a failure in the last two generations. Losing does
not feel good, but it teaches us many lessons. I can’t even list them all here,
but the main one is:
If one loses
today, I will go back and practice, work harder, and learn from the loss. One can come back next time, and they might win!
What happens to people who do not learn that boundaries are
real and that losing should make you refocus and work harder? I refer you to TikTok, Clapper, BlueSky, Facebook, or any other media out there, and you will see. They have extreme emotional dysregulation, they cry, scream, threaten
others, self-harm, they fall into deep depression, they isolate, they shun
others that have different reactions to the outcome of events, and in worse
case end their lives.
- People need to recognize that life is not a television show and that things do not always work out perfectly.
- We need people who can lose and come out stronger, not decay into blobs of empty, emotionally dysregulated humans.
- We must change the idea that there is no balance and that fear-mongering is NOT okay from our political parties or anyone else in society (CDC, EPA, WHO, etc...)
- We must get back to training children to be resilient, not reactionary.
- We need to make losing okay; it is how you learn to win.
- We need to adopt the idea that ideologies cannot be imposed on others, no matter how right you think you are.
- We need to teach children that tolerance only exists if they can talk to, interact with, learn from, and empathize with others who are different from themselves.
We need to rebuild the importance of EMPATHY and rejection
of self-centered thinking.
This last election must warn everyone that the outcome will be devastating if we continue allowing this self-centered absolute thinking to grow and expand. China, North Korea, and Argentina are just a few examples of what happens in humans when one group has all the power and forgets to share and work with humans who are different from their views.
We need the generations to remember that we all (every human) need the same things to live our lives: love, respect, and a feeling of safety. No matter which political party you belong to, we are all human. We are all trying our best, following our understanding, and not enemies but opponents who can find balance in the middle.
