Heidi Stevens: What a psychology professor's grandmother — and Dennis Rodman — can teach us about regulating our emotions

Chicago Tribune

21-03-2025

Ethan Kross grew up under the loving, watchful gaze of his Polish grandparents, who lived a few blocks from his childhood home in Brooklyn. His grandmother greeted him after school with elaborate meals and generous helpings, which, Kross jokes now, kept his grandfather — a tailor — busy catching up with his grandson's expanding waistline.
Dora and Izzy, Kross' grandparents, moved to Brooklyn after immigrating to Lithuania and then Israel. They were Holocaust survivors whose families and friends were slaughtered by Nazis, a fate they barely escaped.
And they never talked about it.
'Except,' Kross writes in his new book, 'for one day a year.'
'Every year, on a crisp Sunday in the fall, my mom would drag me from my soccer game, still dressed in my cleats and typically muddy uniform, to attend the Holocaust remembrance day gatherings my grandparents held with other survivors,' Kross writes. 'That was where I first heard my grandmother speak of the time she spent living in the woods, going days without food, surviving the winter in a thin dress and coat.
'It's where,' Kross continues, 'I heard her talk about learning that her mother, grandmother and younger sister had been massacred in a ditch off the town square, and the moment she realized her father's rushed farewell from the home where they were hiding would be the last words she ever heard from him.'
And it's where he saw her cry. Once a year.
'These were people I normally knew to be pillars of stability,' he writes, 'which made this display of raw emotion even more jarring.'
Kross asked his grandmother all sorts of questions over their after-school meals — about the war, about her childhood, about her memories. But she brushed his queries away. Those weren't memories — or emotions — she wanted to access in those moments.
Her reticence to open her wounds on demand sparked in Kross a curiosity and fascination with human emotions, particularly our ability to regulate them.
'As I grew up,' he writes, 'I became an observer of emotion.'
He's now a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, where he directs the Emotion and Self Control Laboratory. His new book, 'Shift: Managing Your Emotions — So They Don't Manage You' became an instant bestseller.
In it, Kross turns on their heads many of our assumptions about emotions, including the notion that we should tap into and process them the moment they surface.
He writes about the long history of humans trying to control (defeat may be a more accurate term) our emotions, including the ancient practice of carving holes in our skulls. He profiles people, including a Navy SEAL, who've trained themselves to experience their emotions as signals — not to avoid, but to tune into and deploy with precision.
He shares emotional regulation research and strategies, including this one I love: Talk to yourself in the third person. Because we're so much better at giving advice to other people than taking advice of our own, a simple shift to 'You can handle this' instead of 'I can handle this' can be a game-changer. It's called distanced self-talk, and it helps you see and, importantly, feel a situation from a different perspective.
The book is fascinating, and Kross' grandmother is gently and generously woven throughout. In a particularly powerful passage, he writes about what his grandmother had in common with, of all people, Dennis Rodman.
Rodman, the five-time NBA champion and former Chicago Bull, was known for what he did off-court as much as what he did on — especially his occasional disappearing acts before big games. Hiding out in Las Vegas, hitting a World Championship Wrestling match in Detroit with Hulk Hogan, marrying Carmen Electra for nine days.
'When I look at Rodman's antics,' Kross writes, 'I see more than just a party boy shirking his responsibilities. I see someone strategically using distraction and avoidance to regulate their emotions. Rodman's determination to step away from the stress and anxiety of such a high-pressure position was an effective counterbalance to his focus and determination on game day.'
What does all that have to do with Kross' grandmother?
'The septuagenarian that I watched describe her father's last words was not a stoic,' Kross writes. 'She was suffused with emotion, shot right back into the past, fully feeling the reverberations of her trauma. I wasn't wrong that my grandmother suppressed emotion in her day-to-day life. She certainly did. But what I didn't understand was that her superpower wasn't denial; it was her ability to flexibly deploy her attention to what she'd endured.'
I think this is such a powerful reframing of what so many of us may view as a weakness. Instead of seeing a kid who takes breaks from schoolwork as not applying himself; instead of seeing a partner who doesn't want to process that fight in that moment as avoidant; instead of beating ourselves up for taking a couple days to reply to that tricky email, we can acknowledge that a little time and distance might be assets, not liabilities.
'Our emotions are our guides through life,' Kross writes. 'They are the music and the magic, the indelible markers of our time on Earth. The goal is not to run from negative emotions, or pursue only the feel-good ones, but to be able to shift: experience all of them, learn from all of them, and when needed, move easily from one emotional state into another.'
And if not easily, I would add, at least with some grace — for ourselves and for the people we love.