Regulating Emotion,Regulating Selves: A Critique of the Emotion Regulation Discourse in Psychotherapy

Abstract

The discourse of emotional regulation is a dominant narrative in contemporary psychotherapy and clinical social work practice, framed as essential to psychological well-being and adaptive functioning. However, through a critical theory and narrative therapy lens, emotional regulation reveals itself as a technology of neoliberal governance that individualizes distress and obscures sociopolitical contexts. Drawing from Foucauldian ideas, feminist theory, critical social work, and narrative therapy practices, this article critiques emotional regulation as a disciplinary discourse that upholds normative ideals of an emotionally self-governing subject. It highlights how such discourse disproportionately burdens marginalized communities and pathologizes resistance, dissent, or grief. Narrative therapy offers a politicized and relational alternative that centers meaning-making, deconstructs emotional norms, and foregrounds social justice. Implications for anti-oppressive therapeutic practice are discussed.

Introduction

In the mental health field, the concept of emotional regulation has achieved near-hegemonic status. Widely regarded as a hallmark of psychological well-being, the capacity to regulate one's emotions is frequently framed not only as a therapeutic goal but also as a moral imperative. This framing is pervasive across therapeutic modalities, from cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) to trauma-informed care, where emotional regulation is cast as an internal, self-directed mechanism that individuals must cultivate to be seen as psychologically “well.” Techniques such as grounding, reframing, and distress tolerance become tools through which clients are encouraged to manage, contain, and ultimately master their affective worlds. While these practices may offer short-term relief or stability, they also reflect and reinforce dominant cultural assumptions about which emotions are acceptable, how they should be expressed, and who gets to express them.

From a critical perspective, this discourse invites urgent scrutiny. Emotional regulation is not a neutral or apolitical construct; it is a social technology embedded in cultural scripts that reflect and reproduce broader ideologies. Drawing on Foucault's (1988) notion of technologies of the self, the discourse of emotional regulation can be understood as a mechanism through which neoliberal subjects are invited to govern themselves. It positions individuals as responsible for their affective states, thereby obscuring the structural and relational conditions that give rise to emotional distress. In this way, emotional regulation is tethered to a neoliberal ethos of self-management, responsibilities, and emotional labor (Illouz, 2007).

Importantly, rejecting the discourse of emotion regulation does NOT imply abandoning clients to “wallow” in their suffering. Instead, narrative and relational approaches create spaces where painful emotions are witnessed, held, and explored as meaningful responses to the social, cultural, and political contexts of people's lives. Rather than pathologizing distress or imposing norms of emotional self-control, these approaches invite collaborative meaning-making and honor emotions as potential sources of knowledge, connection, and resistance.

Moreover, the norms that undergird emotional regulation are deeply racialized, gendered, and classed. Composure, positivity, calm, and emotional restraint are valorized, while expressions of rage, grief, or despair—particularly when voiced by racialized, queer, disabled, or otherwise marginalized individuals—are frequently pathologized or dismissed as dysregulated. As Ahmed (2004) argues, emotions are not merely personal experiences but are shaped by histories, power, and social relations. Within clinical settings, clients whose emotions exceed normative thresholds are often subjected to disciplinary practices—diagnosis, medication, behavior plans—that function to restore order rather than foster understanding.

As Sara Ahmed (2004) argues in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, emotions are not simply internal psychological states but circulate within “affective economies” that produce social hierarchies of feeling. Within this framework, some emotions—such as calmness, gratitude, or optimism—are valued and rewarded, while others—such as grief, rage, or despair—are stigmatized or pathologized, particularly when expressed by marginalized groups. This perspective clarifies how discourses of emotion regulation are deeply entangled with cultural power: they do not simply “help clients cope” but teach us which emotions are desirable, permissible, or deviant within neoliberal society.

This article offers a critique of the emotional regulation discourse through the lens of critical theory and narrative therapy. It challenges the presumption that emotional health can or should be achieved through individualized mastery of affect. Instead, I propose a narrative approach that views emotion as storied, relational, and political—a site where personal experience meets collective history. By attending to the socio-cultural and narrative contexts in which emotions emerge, narrative therapy opens possibilities for re-authoring emotional life in ways that resist normalizing and pathologizing discourses. Rather than teaching clients to regulate their emotions to fit dominant norms, narrative practice asks: What do these emotions speak to? What histories do they carry? And how might they be honored as acts of meaning-making and resistance?

The analysis in this paper is grounded in critical, feminist, and post-structural theoretical traditions. Foucault's (1988) concept of “technologies of the self” is central, as it illuminates how individuals come to govern their emotional lives in accordance with normative ideals of composure, productivity, and self-sufficiency. Emotion regulation practices, framed as neutral therapeutic tools, can thus be understood as disciplinary techniques that produce neoliberal subjects—individuals who internalize responsibility for their affective states while obscuring the systemic conditions shaping them.

Narrative therapy, drawing on post-structural foundations, offers an alternative framework for engaging emotions. White and Epston (1990) were deeply influenced by Foucault's critique of power and knowledge, Derrida's deconstruction of dominant narratives, and social constructionist approaches to identity. From this perspective, emotions are not pre-social intrapsychic “truths” but relational and discursive events shaped by cultural stories and power relations.

To more clearly articulate the theoretical foundations of narrative therapy, it is vital to describe how post-structural thought informs its assumptions about identity, discourse, and power. Post-structuralism emerged as a critique of structuralist claims that meaning is fixed and that language transparently represents reality. Thinkers such as Foucault (1988) and Derrida (1976), emphasized that language is a productive force that organizes experience rather than simply reflecting it. Truth, in this sense, is not discovered but constructed within historical and cultural relations of power/knowledge.

Within this framework, social construction describes how people come to understand themselves through socially produced narratives. Foucault's (1988) idea of technologies of the self and his broader conception of power/knowledge highlight those professional and institutional knowledges—psychology, psychiatry, and social work among them—are not neutral. They define and delimit what counts as health, illness, or normality. Discourse, then, is not merely a set of ideas but a field of practice that disciplines experience. Power, rather than being merely repressive, is productive: it generates categories of personhood (such as “the resilient client” or “the emotionally regulated subject”) that people internalize.

Narrative therapy operationalizes these post-structural ideas by understanding identity as storied rather than essential. White and Epston (1990) explicitly drew from Foucault's theories of subjectification to reveal how people become “subjects” of particular truth claims about who they are. Likewise, Derrida's (1976) deconstruction of binary oppositions informs narrative therapy's attention to hierarchical pairs such as normal/abnormal, rational/irrational, or regulated/dysregulated. Deconstruction allows therapists and clients to notice how certain emotions or experiences have been devalued, revealing the possibility of new, preferred meanings.

When a narrative therapist invites a person to externalize a problem—for example, saying “Depression is trying to convince you that…”—this act enacts a post-structural move. It separates the person from the discourse that has defined them, creating space for alternative stories to emerge. The therapeutic conversation becomes a site for deconstructing dominant discourses and co-authoring counter-narratives grounded in clients’ lived knowledge. In this way, narrative therapy resists universal truths and embraces multiplicity, positioning the client as the primary expert on their own experience.

Sara Ahmed's (2004) concept of affective economies extends this theoretical foundation by demonstrating how emotions circulate within social relations, producing attachments and hierarchies. Emotions, from this lens, are not internal signals to be controlled but relational practices that align individuals with dominant cultural norms. The “regulated” subject—the calm, grateful, and self-governing individual—becomes a moral ideal that sustains neoliberal order. Recognizing this dynamic invite narrative therapists to ask, whose comfort is preserved by emotional restraint? And what forms of dissent are dismissed as dysregulation? This interrogation connects Ahmed's feminist affect theory to the everyday work of therapy.

By grounding narrative therapy explicitly within post-structural thought, the critique of emotional regulation gains coherence. The very idea of a self that must control affect assumes an Enlightenment model of the autonomous individual. Post-structuralism contests this by viewing the “regulated self” as an effect of discourse—produced through relations of power and knowledge that privilege certain affective repertoires. Narrative therapy's practices—externalizing, re-membering, and re-authoring—are therefore not mere techniques but ethical and political acts of de-subjectification. They enable clients to resist and rewrite the discourses that have historically confined them, opening new possibilities for identity, emotion, and relational life.

Ahmed's (2004) work shows how emotions circulate between bodies and institutions to align individuals with collective norms. For example, “happiness” is constructed as a moral imperative, while grief, anger, or rage may be pathologized when expressed by marginalized communities. These insights underscore how therapeutic discourses about “healthy” emotional regulation are inseparable from broader affective economies that privilege some emotions while suppressing others.

The Ascendancy of Emotional Regulation in Psychotherapy

The concept of emotional regulation, now widely adopted in psychotherapy, has its theoretical roots in affective neuroscience and cognitive-behavioral psychology. Defined broadly, it refers to the capacity to monitor, evaluate, and modify one's emotional responses in ways that align with internal goals and external expectations (Gross, 2014). Emotional regulation is presented as both an intrapsychic skill and a marker of psychological maturity. This construct has gained prominence through the proliferation of therapeutic modalities such as Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), both of which institutionalize emotional control as a primary goal of treatment. In DBT (Linehan, 2015), clients are taught strategies to reduce “emotional vulnerability” through mindfulness, distress tolerance, and emotion modulation skills. ACT (Hayes et al., 2012), similarly, encourages psychological flexibility by teaching clients to “accept” difficult emotions while committing to value-based actions, thus positioning emotional discomfort as something to be endured and transcended.

These interventions have proven effective in offering relief to many individuals navigating acute emotional pain, suicidality, or trauma responses. They provide structured pathways for people to regain a sense of agency over their internal world, particularly in contexts where affect feels overwhelming or disorganizing. However, the ascendancy of emotional regulation as a therapeutic end goal carries significant risks when left unexamined. Chief among these is the tendency to individualize psychological suffering, framing emotional distress as a sign of dysfunction within the individual psyche rather than as a response to a hostile or oppressive environment. In this framing, dysregulated emotion becomes pathology, and the therapeutic task becomes one of normalization: to return the individual to a state of emotional equilibrium that aligns with dominant socio-cultural expectations.

This orientation aligns with neoliberal and behavioral paradigms that prize compliance, resilience, and self-control, traits that are highly valued in capitalist societies predicated on productivity and emotional restraint (Rose, 1999). Within this discourse, clients are subtly encouraged to internalize responsibility for their emotional states, regardless of the social conditions in which those emotions emerge. Emotional volatility, despair, rage, or anxiety are not read as intelligible responses to racism, poverty, heteropatriarchy, or intergenerational trauma, but as signs of poor coping or “maladaptive” emotion management. As a result, the therapeutic space risks becoming a site of disciplinary correction rather than liberation.

Further, the ideal of regulated emotion is not culturally neutral. What counts as “appropriate” emotional expression is shaped by racialized, gendered, and classed norms. Black, Indigenous, and other racialized clients, for instance, are often pathologized when expressing anger or grief that diverges from white affective expectations of composure and politeness (Watkins, 2018). Queer and trans clients may feel pressure to present as emotionally stable or “well-adjusted” to access mental and medical care or social legitimacy, reinforcing normative scripts of assimilation and emotional conformity. These dynamics underscore how emotional regulation, though presented as therapeutic, can function as a mechanism of affective governance that punishes non-normative feelings and reinscribes existing hierarchies.

In sum, while emotional regulation strategies may offer tools for short-term coping, their widespread adoption as unquestioned therapeutic ideals reveals a broader ideological project. Rather than asking what emotional regulation serves, for whom, and at what cost, mainstream psychotherapy often assumes its universal desirability. This article challenges that assumption and offers narrative therapy as a practice capable of naming, honoring, and politicizing emotional experience, making space for emotions not as problems to be fixed, but as stories to be told and acts of resistance to be understood.

Neoliberalism, Normativity, and Affect

From a critical theory standpoint (Bronner, 2017), the discourse of emotional regulation must be understood not merely as a therapeutic technique but as a cultural and political artifact—one deeply embedded within, and constitutive of, neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism is not solely an economic project; it is also a rationality of governance that reshapes the contours of identity and subjectivity. It reconfigures citizenship, social life, and care around principles of efficiency, competitiveness, individual responsibility, and self-improvement (Brown, 2015). Within this rationality, individuals are interpellated as autonomous, entrepreneurial actors who must manage every aspect of their lives—including their emotional states—as personal projects of optimization.

By neoliberalism, I refer to a broader political and cultural project that prioritizes individual responsibility, self-sufficiency, and market-driven ideals over collective care and structural transformation. Within psychotherapy, neoliberalism often manifests in the imperative to “self-manage” one's emotions efficiently, subtly aligning psychological well-being with productivity and compliance rather than fostering relational and systemic change.

Emotional regulation, in this context, functions as a disciplinary tool that aligns psychological life with market logic. Emotions are not treated as socially situated, relational responses to lived conditions, but as potential liabilities—flaws in the individual's operating system that must be reprogrammed for smoother functioning. The therapeutic discourse of self-regulation promotes an ethos of constant self-surveillance, where “wellness” is measured by one's capacity to contain, channel, or eliminate disruptive emotions in favor of composure, productivity, and social legibility. Clients are trained to internalize norms of emotional propriety that prioritize affective equilibrium over emotional truth, and personal adaptation over collective transformation.

The ideal neoliberal subject is autonomous, self-governing, and emotionally disciplined—an affective entrepreneur who “bounces back” from adversity without demanding systemic change. This figure is tasked with metabolizing trauma, grief, rage, and despair into manageable, palatable expressions that neither disrupt institutional settings nor challenge dominant power structures. In such a paradigm, emotional regulation becomes less about fostering genuine psychological well-being and more about enforcing the kind of emotional comportment that ensures social compliance and institutional order.

Therapy, in this framework, risks becoming a training ground for affective conformity. Emotions that exceed normative thresholds—such as anger that refuses to quiet, grief that lingers, or anxiety that speaks to structural precarity—are pathologized, depoliticized, and redirected. Clients are invited to “let go” of anger, “work through” grief, and “manage” anxiety, not because these emotions are illegitimate, but because they are inconvenient to systems invested in their disappearance. Therapeutic language, under the guise of neutrality, often mirrors managerial logics, wherein the psyche becomes another site of optimization, and the therapist another functionary in the machinery of self-discipline.

Emotional regulation thus becomes a form of emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983), rebranded through clinical jargon but still bound to the imperative of productivity. Resilience, in this schema, is valorized not as a collective or relational capacity, but as an individualized, privatized resource—akin to psychological capital (Bottrell, 2009). Mental health is framed as the capacity to withstand, absorb, and adapt to systemic harms without protest. Therapy sessions become spaces in which clients are encouraged to reconcile themselves to the status quo, rendering emotional suffering legible only if it can be recontextualized as a site of personal growth or entrepreneurial self-fashioning.

Importantly, the demand for emotional regulation is neither evenly distributed nor universally accessible. As critical race, feminist, queer, and disability scholars have shown, affective norms are produced through intersecting matrices of power that define whose emotions are seen as legitimate, whose are pathologized, and whose are criminalized (Ahmed, 2004; Collins, 2000; Spade, 2015). Emotional expression is always already coded through systems of race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability. The same emotion—say, anger—may be read as righteous in a white man and dangerous in a Black woman.

For example, when Black women express justified anger in clinical, educational, or institutional contexts, they are often perceived as threatening, irrational, or unstable. This is the enduring legacy of the “angry Black woman” trope, which, as Collins (2000) notes, serves to delegitimize emotional expression as a site of Black feminist resistance. Here, emotional regulation becomes a form of affective silencing—a demand that Black women contort their emotional truth to fit within white, heteropatriarchal norms of civility.

Similarly, trans and gender nonconforming clients frequently find that their expressions of grief, despair, or rage are read through cisnormative frameworks that frame such emotions as symptomatic of pathology rather than responses to transphobic violence or erasure (Spade, 2015). Emotional dysphoria is misrecognized as internal dysfunction rather than a mirror of structural alienation. Rather than being supported in naming and exploring the sources of their pain, these clients are often nudged toward narratives of personal adjustment that re-center normative gender expectations.

Poor and working-class clients, too, are subject to a politics of affective control. They are often encouraged to “remain calm,” “stay positive,” and “focus on what they can control” in the face of housing insecurity, precarious labor, or state abandonment. In these instances, emotional regulation functions as a buffer for neoliberal indifference—a way to redirect rage away from systems and back into the self. Therapists, whether intentionally or not, may collude in this process by encouraging clients to pathologize their affect rather than situate it within the broader terrain of political and economic injustice.

In this context, emotional regulation becomes a mechanism of affective discipline, a tool for sorting, managing, and correcting non-normative emotional expression so it aligns with dominant cultural scripts. It reifies what Lauren Berlant (2011) calls “cruel optimism”—the aspirational attachment to the very systems that produce suffering. Clients are coached to remain hopeful, grateful, and composed, even when the promise of well-being remains structurally foreclosed. Therapists who claim neutrality in such conditions risk becoming enforcers of emotional normativity, upholding affective hierarchies while disavowing the political content of emotional life (Larner, 2021).

Lauren Berlant's (2011) notion of cruel optimism illuminates how discourses of emotional mastery can bind people to ideals that are both seductive and unattainable. In psychotherapy, clients are often invited to aspire toward a future self who is perpetually calm, resilient, and regulated. Yet this aspiration can become a form of cruel optimism: the harder one strives to achieve emotional control, the more elusive it becomes, often leading to cycles of frustration, shame, and self-blame. From a narrative therapy standpoint, this invites us to question not clients’ capacities, but the cultural promises embedded within dominant therapeutic discourses.

This disciplinary function is deeply Foucauldian. Drawing on Foucault's (1988) notion of self-surveillance, we can understand emotional regulation as one of the many practices through which individuals are incited to monitor, assess, and correct themselves in accordance with normative ideals. What appears as therapeutic care may, in fact, be a covert form of social control—encouraging clients to internalize the gaze of the state, the employer, or the institution under the sign of “wellness.” The regulated subject becomes a docile subject, trained to respond to injustice not with resistance but with mindfulness techniques, breathing exercises, or cognitive reframing.

A critical theory lens, therefore, compels us to ask: What does it mean to be emotionally regulated in a society structured by systemic violence? Whose affect is deemed acceptable, and whose is marked for correction? When therapists frame emotional upheaval as an individual problem, whose truth are they protecting? And what possibilities are foreclosed when emotional expression is circumscribed by the mandates of civility, productivity, and positivity?

To resist these dynamics, a critical reorientation of therapeutic practice is necessary. Clinicians must interrogate the ideological underpinnings of emotional regulation and ask: For whom is this regulation demanded? Who benefits from its enforcement? Rather than teaching clients to suppress or reframe their feelings, therapists should treat emotional expression as a site of political intelligence and moral vision. Rage may be a demand for justice. Grief may name an irreparable loss produced by systemic failure. Anxiety may be a rational response to precarity, not a sign of malfunction.

Emotions, in this light, are not deficits to be corrected, but capacities to be honored forms of knowledge that carry histories, expose contradictions, and gesture toward more just futures. The work of therapy, then, is not to discipline the emotional subject but to accompany them in deciphering the meanings, politics, and collective resonances of their affective life.

Narrative Therapy as Counter-Discourse: Politicizing Emotion and Resisting Pathology

In contrast to dominant therapeutic approaches that privilege individual regulation and emotional self-control, narrative therapy offers a radically different orientation, one that resists pathologizing emotional expression and instead situates emotion within broader socio-political and discursive contexts. Developed by White and Epston (1990), narrative therapy emerged as a practice that views identity as constructed through language, stories, and relational histories rather than as a fixed set of internal traits. Narrative therapy, informed by a post-structuralist (Belsey, 2002), and a critical social work lens (Webb, 2019), views emotions are not merely intrapsychic states to be managed; they are expressions of meaning, values, and resistance shaped by culture, power, and history.

A central principle of narrative therapy is that people are not problems—the problem is the problem (Denborough, 2014; Madigan, 2025; Tilsen, 2021; White & Epston, 1990). This discursive shift allows practitioners to relationally externalize emotional struggles such as “overwhelming sadness,” “rage,” or “shame,” viewing them as effects of life experiences and social conditions rather than as flaws in the self. These externalizing conversations create space to ask critical questions: What is the history of this emotion? When did it first appear, and what made it stronger? What cultural messages has it absorbed? What is it standing up for? Such inquiries reposition emotions as storied responses—acts of sense-making within a specific context, not symptoms to be corrected.

For example, a client who is frequently overwhelmed by anxiety might be asked: What does anxiety know about the risks you've had to navigate in the past? How does it try to protect you? These questions do not seek to eliminate the emotion, but rather to understand it as part of a larger narrative. The focus shifts from regulation to recognition—from normalizing to narrativizing.

This approach foregrounds the political dimension of emotional life. Emotions such as anger, grief, or fear are treated not as individual deficits but as intelligible responses to injustice, marginalization, and betrayal. Rather than teaching clients to contain or “cope with” these emotions, narrative therapy invites them to explore what their feelings are protesting and what commitments they are pointing toward. In this way, emotion becomes a resource for reclaiming agency and constructing counter-narratives that resist dominant definitions of what it means to be mentally well.

Within narrative practice, emotions are viewed as relational and contextual, not as raw affect to be disciplined, but as forms of knowledge that often carry ethical or moral significance. For instance, what is commonly labelled “dysregulation” may be better understood as a protest against injustice. A client who experiences rage in response to racial microaggressions, or despair in the face of climate collapse, is not emotionally ill but emotionally attuned to the violence and absurdities of the world.

This re-contextualization of emotion allows therapists and clients to co-create space for what Sara Ahmed (2004) describes as affective economies, how emotions circulate between bodies and institutions, shaping what is felt, by whom, and with what consequence. Emotions are not just experienced; they are governed, racialized, gendered, and commodified. Narrative therapy's focus on re-authoring stories allows practitioners to name these dynamics rather than obscure them.

Moreover, narrative therapy offers practices such as re-membering conversations (Grau-Kristensen & Hedtke, 2018; Hedtke, 2012; Hedtke & Winslade, 2016; White, 2007), where clients can reconnect with significant figures, communities, or values that support their preferred identities. When emotions are re-situated within these conversations, they are no longer problems to fix but signposts that point toward what matters most. A grieving client, for instance, might explore how their sorrow is connected to their ethics of care and commitment to lost relationships. Grief, then, is not a pathology but a testament to love and loyalty.

For example, consider a person whose anger about racial injustice has been pathologized as “emotional dysregulation.” Through re-membering, this anger can be situated within a lineage of collective resistance: connecting with ancestral stories, civil rights movements, or contemporary activist communities who share similar struggles. In this way, re-membering transforms an emotion from a private pathology into a shared act of protest and solidarity, reframing it as part of broader sociopolitical narratives.

Importantly, narrative therapy resists the individualization of emotional life. Instead of framing emotional difficulty as a personal failure of regulation, it fosters collective meaning-making (Zimmerman, 2018). Clients are invited to locate their experiences within cultural, familial, and political landscapes (Beaudoin & Monk, 2024). This helps counter the isolating effects of dominant therapeutic discourse and opens room for solidarity, mutual recognition, and resistance.

For example, clients navigating depression due to long-term unemployment or housing instability might be asked how these struggles reflect broader systems of inequality. What does depression say about what they have lost access to—dignity, purpose, community? In answering such questions, emotional pain is not reduced to a set of cognitive distortions or affective symptoms; it becomes a valid response to dehumanizing systems. This reframing empowers clients to author narratives that center their ethics, dignity, and resistance.

Narrative therapy also makes space for the absent but implicit, the idea that even the most painful emotions imply cherished values and hopes (Carey et al., 2009). A client who feels overwhelmed by rage may be asked: What does this rage tell us about what matters most to you? What does it say about your sense of justice, about what you believe people deserve? Such inquiries not only honor emotional experience but also mobilize it for meaning-making and political consciousness.

Under narrative therapy, the therapist's role is not to regulate, instruct, or normalize but to serve as a curious, co-author of meaning. This represents a profound shift in the ethics of therapeutic engagement. Rather than acting as an emotional technician dispensing regulation strategies, the therapist becomes a witness to the client's struggle, protest, skills, values, and hopes.

This redefinition of the therapist's role also challenges professional norms that conflate neutrality with ethical practice. Neutrality (Larner, 2021) often functions as tacit consent to the status quo. In contrast, narrative therapy embraces a politicized stance that acknowledges the therapist's location within systems of power and the therapeutic encounter as a site of potential resistance and solidarity. Practicing from this stance requires a commitment to ongoing reflexivity and accountability, especially when working across lines of difference.

Clinical Vignettes: Emotions as Storied Resistance

While this paper critiques the dominance of emotion regulation discourse, it does not position narrative therapy as a flawless or singular alternative. Emotion regulation strategies, particularly in contexts of acute trauma or crisis, can provide essential grounding and safety for clients. Similarly, narrative therapy—despite its commitment to politicizing emotional life—cannot fully escape broader cultural discourses or its own limitations.

For example, narrative therapy's externalizing practices risk inadvertently reproducing “reframing” techniques that individualize distress if not explicitly situated within social, political, and historical contexts. Likewise, not all clients may resonate with narrative methods, particularly if dominant expectations of “storying” emotions feel alienating or overly abstract.

Acknowledging these possibilities and limitations creates space for a more integrative therapeutic ethic—one that invites clinicians to critically reflect on their own practices, draw from multiple frameworks, and remain accountable to the power dynamics inherent in all therapeutic work.

Narrative therapy resists the pathologizing of emotions by framing them as meaning-making responses to lived contexts. Drawing from feminist and poststructuralist sensibilities, emotions are not internal errors to be corrected but forms of knowledge, often rooted in social injustice and systemic harm (Ahmed, 2004; Brown & Strega, 2015). In the therapeutic space, practitioners can make visible how emotions—particularly those marginalized by dominant psychological discourses—serve as agents of protest, self-definition, and collective memory. The following vignettes illustrate how emotions can be recast as storied acts of resistance, using a feminist narrative therapy approach.

Maya: Rage as Resistance and Connection to Lineage

Maya, a 32-year-old Black queer woman, entered therapy naming her struggle with “rage at work.” She described multiple incidents in which coworkers made racialized comments, dismissed her contributions in meetings, or expected her to take on invisible labor. Standard therapeutic approaches might frame her anger as dysregulation or a target for affect regulation. But using a feminist, narrative, and anti-oppressive lens, the therapist instead asked, “What is this rage standing up for?” and “What does your rage know that the world has refused to hear?”

In re-authoring her experience, Maya traced this rage not to a personal defect, but to the repeated dismissal of her labor, intellect, and humanity. She linked her emotions to a broader legacy of Black feminist resistance—from Audre Lorde's assertion that “anger is loaded with information and energy” (Lorde, 1984) to contemporary movements challenging anti-Blackness in professional spaces. Maya came to see her rage as both protective and prophetic—an embodiment of her refusal to be diminished.

In teaching this case to social work students, we would explore:

How do we recognize emotions like rage as a form of social knowledge?

What dominant discourses tend to frame certain emotions (especially in Black women) as pathological or threatening?

How can a feminist ethics of witnessing (Brown, 2021) be practiced in response?

This vignette also opens space for student reflection on their own positionality: How might their social identities shape what emotions they view as “appropriate"? What feelings do they have permission to express—or are punished for expressing?

Jordan: Panic as Embodied Knowledge and Survival

Jordan, a 17-year-old nonbinary youth, came to therapy describing what they called “panic attacks” when walking through certain public places. Clinicians might immediately reach for a cognitive-behavioral strategy to reduce the frequency or intensity of panic. Instead, the therapist took a different route: “What does your panic know?” “Where did it learn to be vigilant?” “What has it witnessed?”

Jordan described experiences of transphobic harassment, stares, and occasional verbal assault when their gender presentation disrupted binary expectations. These experiences had accumulated, even if they weren’t always visible to others. The therapist proposed that the panic was not simply an intrusive biological malfunction, but a form of embodied memory and wisdom. Jordan came to describe their panic as a “body-alarm"—a system alerting them to real dangers and signaling their worthiness of safety and dignity.

In this case, when shared in a clinical training or supervision setting, it invites several pedagogical questions:

What happens when we de-medicalize emotional responses and listen to their historical context?

How might this approach shift our intervention strategies from symptom management to solidarity-building?

What is the cost of ignoring the social conditions that give rise to panic in marginalized communities?

Using feminist scholarship—particularly queer and trans feminist perspectives (Spade, 2011; Serano, 2007), we would examine how emotions that seem “irrational” within dominant frameworks may be adaptive responses to structural precarity.

Teaching Through Vignettes: Expanding Feminist Clinical Imagination

These vignettes are more than illustrative; they are pedagogical tools that invite a feminist epistemological shift in clinical training. They foreground emotions as political, historically situated, and relational. In classrooms or clinical consultation groups, we ask students: What stories are told about which emotions in which bodies? Who is allowed to feel what, and why? How do race, gender, sexuality, and class shape these narratives? Drawing from feminist social work scholarship, particularly the work of contributors such as Baines (2017), Dominelli (2002), and hooks (1994), we frame emotions not only as individual experiences but as affective traces of structural violence and systemic injustice. Rage, panic, grief, or numbness—especially when emerging in marginalized populations—can be honored as acts of refusal, memory, and care.

Moreover, this work demands a deep attention to positionality. As therapists, social workers, and educators, we must interrogate how our own raced, gendered, classed, and able-bodied locations influence what we notice, pathologize, or validate in the therapeutic space. For instance, a white clinician working with Maya must be attuned to their potential investment in narratives that position Black women's anger as disruptive or inappropriate. A cisgender therapist working with Jordan must reckon with their own privilege and assumptions around gender legibility and safety. Positionality is not a box to check, but a stance of ongoing reflexivity and accountability. In feminist pedagogy, emotions are not distractions from the “real” work but are themselves forms of knowledge and resistance. Teaching through vignettes like Maya's and Jordan's offers a pathway to move beyond individualized pathology toward a clinical social work practice that is relational, feminist, queer, justice-oriented, and emotionally literate.

Conclusion and Implications for Practice

The ascendancy of emotional regulation as a central therapeutic objective reflects broader socio-political forces that valorize self-discipline, emotional containment, and individual responsibility within neoliberal frameworks. While emotional regulation strategies may offer clients temporary relief or functional coping skills, a critical examination reveals how these approaches risk reinforcing depoliticized models of mental health that obscure the structural violences shaping emotional suffering. By framing emotions as individual problems to be managed rather than as relational, political, and storied experiences, dominant therapeutic discourses may inadvertently collude with systems of racialization, patriarchy, capitalism, and heteronormativity.

Narrative therapy offers a compelling counter-discourse that resists pathologizing emotions and instead situates them within rich socio-cultural and political contexts. By externalizing emotional difficulties and inviting clients to explore the meanings and histories of their feelings, narrative therapy restores emotion to its role as a vital resource for agency, resistance, and connection. This approach disrupts the neoliberal imperative of emotional self-regulation and opens space for clients to author stories that honor their values, ethics, and relational commitments.

For practitioners, this critical reorientation entails a shift away from seeing emotional regulation as the endpoint of therapy and towards seeing it as one of many possible tools, used judiciously and contextually. Therapists are called to adopt a reflective stance that questions how emotional norms function within clinical work and to remain vigilant about whom these norms serve or marginalize. This involves:

Interrogating the socio-political dimensions of emotional experience: Actively exploring with clients how their feelings relate to broader systemic oppressions, cultural narratives, and histories of trauma or resilience.

Valuing emotions as knowledge, values, and resistance: Viewing emotions not as symptoms to be eliminated but as embodied critiques that carry political and ethical significance.

Fostering relational and collective meaning-making: Encouraging clients to connect their emotional experiences to communities, histories, and shared struggles, thereby resisting individualization.

Practicing therapist reflexivity: Recognizing how therapists’ positionalities and adherence to normative frameworks may shape the therapeutic encounter and being open to co-creating more liberatory relational dynamics.

Resisting normative emotional silencing: Challenging cultural expectations that certain emotions—anger, grief, fear—are inherently undesirable or maladaptive, especially when expressed by marginalized groups.

Therapeutically, these practices translate into using narrative and post-structural methods such as relational externalization, re-authoring, and re-membering conversations to expand the understanding of emotion as a complex social and political phenomenon. By embracing these approaches, social workers and mental health practitioners can support clients not just in managing emotions but in harnessing them as sources of insight, solidarity, and transformation.

For example, consider a person whose anger about racial injustice has been pathologized as “emotional dysregulation.” Through re-membering, this anger can be situated within a lineage of collective resistance: connecting with ancestral stories, civil rights movements, or contemporary activist communities who share similar struggles. In this way, re-membering transforms an emotion from a private pathology into a shared act of protest and solidarity, reframing it as part of broader sociopolitical narratives.

Finally, future research must continue to critically evaluate the cultural assumptions embedded within psychotherapeutic models of emotional regulation and develop interventions that center social justice, relationality, and client-led meaning-making. As mental health practitioners and social workers committed to ethical and emancipatory care, embracing a critical and narrative lens on emotion offers a pathway toward more equitable and transformative mental health practice.