One of my counselors goals was to convince me that I had control over my own life.  I was raised with the ‘you must’, ‘I have to’, ‘I can’t’ and other statements indicating that I was turning my life over to someone else to regulate my behavior.  One time when I stated that “I had to……” my counselor looked around the room then replied, “I don’t see anyone holding a gun to your head.”  He worked long and hard getting me to see that I could control my life.  I didn’t have to wait for someone else to tell me what to do.  I could regulate my own actions.  One of the keys of self-regulation is emotions giving me information such as anger when boundaries were violated.  Frustration when I choose a task more difficult than I could handle. But I needed to have myself control my life by my values and not how I felt in a moment.  So I needed to know what I valued.  Which brought us back to the most basic of questions….”What do I want my life to be?”  What do I want? What do I value?  Where did I want to go with my life?  How could I self-regulate if I didn’t know where I was going?  I could follow orders but I had no idea how to create a map of my life.

This is an article I found about self-regulation:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/anger-in-the-age-entitlement/201110/self-regulation