What is emotional regulation in grief, and how can you find it?
When you’re grieving, your emotions can feel unpredictable—waves of sadness, flashes of anger, moments of relief or guilt that seem to come out of nowhere. Many people expect grief to follow a logical path, but in truth, it moves through the body as much as through the mind. Learning to regulate emotions after loss doesn’t mean controlling or suppressing them—it means finding ways to stay grounded and connected while they move through you.
What Emotional Regulation Really Means
Emotional regulation is the ability to notice, understand, and respond to emotions in a way that supports well-being. It’s not about “staying calm” or “keeping it together.” Instead, it’s about creating enough internal safety to let emotions be felt without being swept away by them.
In grief, this might look like recognizing when your body feels tight or overwhelmed, pausing to breathe, or giving yourself permission to cry. Emotional regulation is what helps you return to yourself after a surge of pain or a flood of memories.
It’s also important to name that “emotional regulation” itself can be a colonial concept, rooted in norms that prioritize emotional restraint, productivity, and palatability over authenticity and communal expression. Many Western frameworks implicitly define regulation as being calm, contained, and functional—standards shaped by white, capitalist, and colonial values that have historically punished grief, anger, and emotional expression, especially in marginalized communities. In this lens, emotions that are loud, cyclical, embodied, or relational are often pathologized rather than understood as meaningful responses to loss. For many cultures, grief is not meant to be regulated away but witnessed, shared, ritualized, and expressed through the body and community. Reframing emotional regulation as capacity and choice—rather than control—allows space for decolonized approaches that honor grief as a natural, embodied process rather than something that must be managed to be acceptable.
Why Top-Down Strategies Aren’t Always Enough
Many traditional approaches to coping focus on thinking your way through emotions—reframing thoughts, analyzing triggers, or finding meaning in loss. These “top-down” methods can be helpful, but during acute grief, the body often needs to feel safe before the mind can make sense of anything.
This is where bottom-up approaches come in. Rather than starting with the intellect, bottom-up therapy begins with the body—helping regulate the nervous system so that emotional healing can unfold naturally.
Bottom-Up Techniques for Emotional Regulation in Grief
Here are a few ways to begin fostering emotional resilience through body-based practices:
1. Grounding through sensation.
When grief pulls you into overwhelm, gently bring awareness to your body. Feel your feet on the floor, notice your breath, or place a hand over your heart or abdomen. These small acts remind your nervous system that you are here and safe enough to feel what you feel.
2. Tracking emotional waves.
Rather than labeling emotions as “good” or “bad,” notice how they move through your body. Does sadness feel heavy or fluid? Does anger feel hot, tight, or electric? Tracking sensations helps build tolerance for emotion without shutting down or acting out.
3. Using movement to release energy.
Grief often carries energy that needs to move—through crying, walking, stretching, dancing, or shaking. Movement helps complete stress responses that may otherwise stay trapped, reducing the sense of stagnation or tension that can accompany prolonged mourning.
4. Orienting to safety.
When you feel lost in grief, take a moment to look around the room. Name a few things you see, hear, or feel. This helps your body register that, even while grief exists, you are not in danger now. Safety and sadness can coexist.
5. Cultivating gentleness and rest.
Emotional regulation is not about productivity—it’s about permission. The body heals through softness and rest, not through pressure. Allowing yourself downtime or quiet moments of self-soothing is a form of resilience, not avoidance.
Finding Regulation in the Waves
Grief changes you, but it also teaches you. Over time, these body-based practices can help you build trust in your own capacity to weather difficult emotions. You begin to recognize that grief comes in waves—and that regulation is not about stopping the waves, but about learning to float through them.
In that steadying, the nervous system slowly relearns safety, and the heart remembers how to stay open—grieving and living, at the same time.
