What Is Restraint Collapse & How To Cope

Andrea Loewen Nair, a counselor, and parenting educator, coined the term “after-school restraint collapse” to describe the everyday experience of children holding their feelings together all day at school, only feeling safe enough to let it all out at home.

While the after-school restraint collapse can affect all kids, it can be especially prominent for neurodivergent children. Lack of sleep, hunger, overstimulation, or sickness may contribute to even more challenges for children in regulating their emotional responses.

Restraint Collapse is not limited to children.

Restraint collapse happens when we can no longer comply, assimilate, and “hold it together.” Unfortunately, there are situations in which we can't exercise our adult rights or agency. Sometimes abusive people (or systems) make us feel cornered, sometimes we encounter situations from which we can't extract ourselves (e.g., encounters with police action), and sometimes we are overwhelmed too quickly to react. Responsibilities themselves can also be very restrictive forces (in addition to sometimes being guiding forces, directing us on how to behave and when). So what happens when the restriction is eliminated or drastically reduced?

Ways To Cope With Restraint Collapse

Whether you’re considering a child, yourself, or another adult, several strategies can help soothe the sudden rush of emotion that comes with changes in restraint (or changes in the need for self-restraint). Practicing mindfulness when possible can help. You cannot always avoid encountering these emotional spaces, but you may find different ways that get you to calmer waters.

1. Ask For Connection/Give Connection

There’s not much debate about this one these days. Social connection can lower anxiety and depression, help us regulate our emotions, lead to higher self-esteem and empathy, and improve our immune systems. By neglecting our need to connect, we put our health at risk.

Ask for (and provide) texts or little notes of support. Make check-ins part of your routine. Sometimes this looks like sharing part of your day to encourage a friend or loved one to share how their day was. Making direct requests can be overwhelming during transitional times, but if you can muster it, it’s a great way to make sure you get the support you need. If it feels difficult to ask for your needs in the moment, you may want to think about what you need during these moments, and proactively ask your support network for those things in advance.

2. Validate Your Own (or Their) Emotions

Try naming what you’re feeling. Naming our emotions tends to diffuse their charge and lessen the burden they create. The psychologist Dan Siegel refers to this practice as “name it to tame it.” Even if you don’t use “accurate” names, this practice helps reduce denial and avoidance which (counter-intuitively) tend to feed negative emotions.

3. Release The Tension

Take naming a step further. To process in healthy ways and to feel healthy emotions, we need to express feelings in healthy ways. We need to recognize which one(s) we're feeling, express it, and move on. When feeling an emotion, we often respond in two ways:

• Focus on the reason for the emotion

• Talk ourselves out of it and stuff it down

Neither of these is productive or leaves much room for expressing emotion. Expressing an emotion doesn't have to be something outward, like slamming a door, yelling into a pillow, or even telling someone about it. These methods can actually sometimes backfire. Emotional expression can happen entirely in our minds. Instead of getting enraged at someone, forget who you are angry at, forget the story behind it, and allow yourself to just feel the emotion, itself.

4. Take Things Slow

Plan consistent downtime as you maneuver through transitions. If you’re not used to this, it can feel uncomfortable or forced. Try sticking it out. I personally find cooking helpful while I transition from my work day to my “non” work day. Sometimes the first 10-15 minutes are emotionally grating, but I’ve found much more relief over time.

5. Keep Snacks & Water Handy

Hanger is real. It doesn’t help anyone deal with transitions. Let’s discuss HALT. This acronym is often used in addiction recovery to encourage someone to check in with themselves and see what is causing their urge to act on an addiction. However, the strategy is making its way into relationship-advice arenas. The idea is that if you are Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired, you are less able to regulate your emotional responses to stimuli. So, this is an area where you might want to prepare in advance; make sure your schedule is filled with social connection, ample sleep, enough time for food, and supports to help with anger, like therapy. And in the moment when you’re experiencing restraint collapse, it can help to do what you can to address those needs, too.

Does the concept of restraint collapse sound familiar to you? Have you developed coping strategies that help?