One way to think about my goal as a therapist is to help my clients build up emotional insulation. Emotional insulation is the protective layer between the self and the world. It enables us to go through the ups and downs of social and work interactions with a positive sense of ourselves. It is like emotional skin.

If I can help my clients internalize a positive sense of self, it will help them get through the barriers they have faced in forming intimate and satisfying connections with others. We all have different levels of emotional insulation, and what we do have can be worn down over time or strengthened.

Emotional insulation is an umbrella term for all of the emotion regulation strategies we develop while growing up. These start at the level of the skin, as babies learn to relax through skin to skin contact. In the best case scenario, a child internalizes a positive sense of herself through love in the home. She gets help navigating the difficult situations she faces over the years, and has learned to tolerate frustration and disappointment.

When there isn’t enough good feedback to draw from and we don’t have that sense of being safe and good enough in the world, we have to search for other, external ways to relieve our emotional pain. Just like a baby will scratch itself if its cries go unheard for too long, we can find harder comforts when we are faced with a challenge. Picking and pulling can stand in when emotional insulation is insufficient.

For an example, let’s look at the very different experiences of two boys, Jim and John who each try out for the baseball team in 9th grade.

Jim is a pretty confident guy. He has learned some basic baseball skills with his dad growing up. When they practice in the yard through the years, his dad is proud when Jim hits the ball well. When he has trouble with his swing, his dad gives him some more tips on how to hold the bat. When he tries out for the baseball team his first year of high school, he has a so-so perfomance, and finds out that he has only made the JV team.

Because Jim has a sense of himself as generally OK, he isn’t pierced through with the pain of failure. He is emotionally insulated, and can handle disappointment without falling into self-attack or despair. He gets help coping with the experience. His dad is disappointed on his behalf but is not disappointed with him. Jim cries a little as his dad hugs him close. They are quiet for a while and then they talk about how to move forward. Jim will practice hard, and will shine on the JV team and next year will make varsity.

John is similarly interested in baseball, and has also practiced in the yard with his dad for many years. His dad was a baseball star and really wants him to be great at it too. Sometimes it seems like he just has two left feet, and whenever he misses a ball his dad yells at him. If he misses too many his dad throws his baseball cap on the ground, and stalks inside. John doesn’t know how to cope with these moments and he starts pulling out hairs that have recently begun sprouting on his chin.

When John enters the 9th grade, he too tries out for the baseball team. He tries his best but still ends up on the JV team. He doesn’t have inside of himself the sense that he can cope with this failure, and he dreads going home and telling his dad he didn’t succeed.

We can see how the impact of not making varsity this year will have a much deeper impact on him than on Jim. He may decide that he will be the best player, and spend his entire summer practicing to be the best, or he may quit altogether. The hard comfort John has found, hair pulling, will be with him until he finds a therapist to help him build a layer of self-compassion.

This first task of building emotional regulation is begun in individual treatment, where clients begin to internalize my positive regard for them. For many, the second building block comes through participation in one of my therapy groups. With a better sense of self, it becomes easier to work through barriers to connecting with others. In both forums, feelings are put into words in place of harmful behaviors.