Self-Regulation is not liberation (Part One)
Part One:
What we call “self-regulation” is often rooted in colonial ideas of control and obedience, turning emotional expression into compliance. True regulation might be said to be relational, embodied, and culturally diverse but these forms are still all too often pathologised under dominant Western norms.
Colonialism and ‘regulation’ as ‘control’
“Self-regulation” floats around therapy, education and wellness circles. It is marketed as the holy grail; the one thing we need to learn to have stability, calm and emotional maturity. But scratch a little deeper, and you will find a word infused by notions of power, discipline and colonial control.
Regulation as Obedience
In colonial systems, so-called “civilising” missions were anything but. Indigenous and colonised peoples were taught - forced, actually - to suppress emotion, control movement and obey standards that were imposed from their colonising masters. Amid far greater horrors now well-documented in history books yet still alive today in the form of endemic intergenerational trauma and ongoing inequity… children were made to sit still, suppress their instincts and perform compliance, not for their wellbeing, but to fit a foreign mould. What passed for “self-regulation” was in fact self-suppression demanded for survival.
Whose Regulation Counts?
Western psychology defines regulation in narrow ways. Stay calm. Stay still. Show insight. There’s no bear. You are safe (are you though?). But, as many cultures recognise, ‘regulation’ happens through co-regulation. We were never meant to do it alone. It happens through movement, through ritual, through community expression, through song. It is relational, embodied, spiritual. And these ways are still pathologised way too often in white Western educational or therapeutic settings. When the dominant model assumes “quiet and still” = “good”, many ways of being are miscast as ‘disregulated’ when actually they are just ‘different’.
Internalised Control
Foucault talked about the power of discipline. When people learn to control themselves from within, systems no longer need to control them from the outside. (A topical theme right now what with self-censorship as a prelude to authoritarianism). In a colonial frame, ‘self-regulation’ can serve this very function: people internalise expectations shaped by systems they had no say in. If you do not behave ‘appropriately’ - well, you are the problem. It is you - not the structure that never welcomed your full self.
The Individualisation of Pain
The emphasis on individual regulation often deflects from structural harm. A child melting down in a racist, ableist, or underfunded classroom is not disregulated. They are in distress. But when a system asks a child to adapt, not the other way around, “self-regulation” translated to “being told to endure what should not have to be endured”.
OK. But how does all of this help us? How does it help those of us - whether we are autistic, ADHD, PDA, or simply chronically under threat - who have been harmed by the use of the term “regulation” - but would also quite like to feel better thank you all the same. Let’s look at this in Part Two: what is ‘regulation’ is not the goal?
