What if “emotion regulation” isn’t just a clinical skill, but a cultural demand?

In this episode of The Radical Therapist, Chris sits down with therapist and professor David Nylund for a rigorous and timely conversation about the near-hegemonic status of emotion regulation in contemporary therapy. Together, they explore how practices often framed as neutral, helpful, or evidence-based can quietly function as technologies of governance, shaping not just how people feel, but who they are allowed to be.

Drawing on narrative therapy, post-structural theory, Black feminist thought, and critiques of neoliberal subjectivity, David invites us to look beyond whether regulation techniques “work” and ask deeper questions: What kinds of selves do these practices produce? What futures do they orient us toward? And whose emotions are deemed acceptable, intelligible, or safe?

A conversation for therapists, educators, and practitioners who want to think more critically about what we’re teaching, what we’re regulating, and what might change if we treated emotions not as problems to solve, but as embodied critiques of the worlds we inhabit.

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