Emotional Regulation – Proverbs 29

“A fool vents all his anger, but a wise man holds it back.” – Proverbs 29:11 (BSB)

We humans are all emotional creatures, some more than others. We can’t help but respond emotionally to certain stimuli. That’s not a bad thing.

Some things are supposed to make us happy. Falling in love. A beautiful sunset.

Some things are supposed to make us sad. We grieve when our loved ones die because we value their presence and we know we will miss them.

Some things make us angry, and rightly so. Even God gets angry in the face of injustice.

The key is to respond to events around us with the appropriate emotions in the appropriate degree and to take the appropriate actions for each situation.

This can be difficult. We have a tendency to either overreact or underreact depending on our personalities and past traumas. So how do we fix this?

In his book, The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis writes about the importance of having “ordinate emotions,” that is, emotions that are appropriate to each situation as it unfolds. It is our duty, as rational beings, to train our emotions to respond reasonably.

This takes determination and practice. More than that, it takes training to be able to rightly identify the kind of response that best fits any given situation.

This is where Proverbs can be helpful. This is where the benefit of centuries of Biblical Christian influence can really show its value in a society.

We shouldn’t need to remind one another that it’s wrong to get angry and murder someone. It should be engrained into us by our parents and environment.

That doesn’t mean we don’t need to cultivate the self-control we must have in order to live according to our convictions. We all need to work on cultivating and encouraging emotional regulation.

“A fool vents all his anger, but a wise man holds it back.” – Proverbs 29:11