Managing Emotional Dysregulation
This is the fifth part in a series of posts about my thoughts while reading A Practical Guide to Complex PTSD, by Arielle Schwartz, Ph.D. For more posts like this, take a look at my page on bibliotherapy.
Understanding Emotional Dysregulation
Reading the first paragraph of this section, it hit me all at once that I don’t think I’ve ever been emotionally regulated. Ever. Not once.
I have never felt grounded and calm. Any time I feel emotions, I get overwhelmed. I have to do repetitive things to calm myself. I start to feel like I’m going to cry, and often have to do things (or feel like I have to do things, to keep myself from crying. This is borne out of a lifetime of having to prevent myself from crying in public, because it was not an “appropriate” thing to do.
I cry when I’m happy. I cry when I’m sad. I cry when I’m excited. I cry when I’m angry. About the only time I don’t cry is when I’m numb or when I’m being the “strong” one, like when my father was dying, or when my partner was in the hospital. I can maintain the “strength” for quite a while, but after that need passes, I don’t necessarily have the ability to grieve or process my emotions. It’s like when the crisis is on, I just deal with it, and when it’s over, there’s nothing to feel anything about, any longer.
Other people set me off, too. If my partner has a particular look on their face, I interpret that as anger at me. This probably comes from that same look on my mother’s face when I was a kid, which definitely meant she was angry with me. However, if I ask my partner whether they’re mad at me, they tell me they’re just tired. The last time I experienced this was when I was sick. My partner looked angry, and since I was ill, I thought they were angry with me for being sick, or that they were angry with me because they didn’t believe I was sick, or because they thought it was my fault I was sick.
I asked, and they told me they were just tired, and that they would never be angry with me for being sick, and that they love me and want me to be well.
Schwartz says parents are supposed to help their kids learn how to regulate their emotions. This never happened in my childhood. If we cried, we were told to stop crying or we’d be given something to cry about. We were not allowed to be angry or sad. Our mother was jealous when we were happy, too. We couldn’t win for losing.
The Window of Tolerance
The “window of tolerance” is the range of stress you can manage without becoming overwhelmed. I wonder whether this is above or below what my therapist calls “baseline stress.” My baseline stress is pretty high. I usually sit at around a 5-7 on a scale of 0 = “dead” to 10 = “can’t manage.” When I have additional stressors to the everyday background stresses in my life, I can shoot up to a 10 pretty easily.
Over the past year, in fact, my baseline has been averaging about a 7.
Apparently, inside the window of tolerance, you’re supposed to be able to handle a certain amount of stress, but when you’re outside of your window of tolerance, things can go haywire. You can get highly aroused (fearful, restless, irritable, angry, prone to crying) or extremely unaroused (lethargic, fatigued, helpless, numb, depressed, anhedonic).
Oh, wow. Now I feel seen. Schwartz says we with CPTSD can alternate between high arousal and low arousal. So I’m not crazy. I’m normal within the population of people with CPTSD.
There are five stress responses: Fight, Flight, Fawn, Freeze, and Faint. Most people are only familiar with the “fight or flight” stress response because that’s what we’re taught in school.
People who have a fight response can be self-critical, critical of others, and angry. They can also feel a strong need to be in control. I think I have at least some fight response. I am highly critical of myself and others and although I don’t think I feel anger frequently, I do find the need to be in control. Mostly so I don’t get nasty surprises, I think.
People who have a flight response can get startled easily, and are hypervigilant. They can have racing thoughts and can feel disconnected from their bodies. I think I have some flight response, too. I do get startled easily, and I notice things. The other day, I heard a strange noise, which was not very loud. I found where the noise was coming from fairly quickly. Not many people would have noticed things like that.
People who have a fawn response people-please and appease the people who are perceived as a threat, to prevent that person attacking them. I definitely have some of this. I do a lot of appeasing of my partner to prevent them from attacking me about the clutter or whatever else I’m worried about. I think I did this a lot to my parents, as well. I have definitely sacrificed my own needs for the sake of maintaining the relationship I have with my partner. In fact, I sacrificed my way into not being able to escape if I need to. (At the moment, I don’t think I’ll need to, but it’s always good to have contingency plans.)
People who have a freeze response literally freeze. They don’t move. If I have a freeze response, it’s not very often. It might be right after my partner starts attacking me for the clutter. I tend to move out of this response to a fight response or a flight response fairly quickly.
People who have a faint response tend to dissociate or feel numb or have the urge to withdraw from others. They might get dizzy or feel nauseated or have trouble seeing. I think I have had a faint response quite a lot. Especially after my partner attacks me about the clutter.
Widening Your Window
First, you need to figure out how to stay within your window of tolerance (or how to get there, in my case, I guess). Once you’re better able to manage stress within that window, you can start to pay attention to how you feel emotionally and physically, and to try to figure out where those feelings originated. This can give you an idea of what to look at for the cause of the current feelings.
I think maybe I can still try to learn more positive coping strategies even while I’m still mired in moderate to high stress. It will just take more energy, at first, I think. I think that swimming every week day will help with this, and also taking a walk on a daily basis and eating more good foods, like fruits and veggies.
Also, now that I’m going to the pool every week day, it will make it easier for me to maintain a regular sleep schedule. I just need to not be afraid to enforce my sleep boundaries with my partner.
Start Healing Yourself
This is going to take a while, so I need to be patient with the process. I also need to not be in a hurry. (Damn. I hate waiting.)
Bonnie
Bonnie was afraid that if she felt her emotions, she would fall apart. I feel that same way a lot of the time. I don’t have substance abuse problems like she does, but I do eat comfort foods. Since my comfort foods are generally sweet and high in fat, this has had an adverse effect on my weight. Probably also on my cardiac health.
I also have trouble not being busy with something or other. I rarely let myself have the opportunity to not think. The only time that I really have to not distract myself is when I’m swimming. Then when I do that, my brain flits from one thing to the next. It never settles down.
I need to start paying closer attention to how I feel and I need to write about it, so that I’m forced to have my attention on the feelings.
Healing Strategy: Increase Your Distress Tolerance
I can completely identify with the desire to have difficult feelings disappear. I often think, when I’m having difficult feelings, that I just want it to go away.
I don’t do well with meditation. Any time I try, the tears come. I hate it. So I avoid meditating. I’ve tried apps. They all seem like good ideas, but I can’t get myself to use them regularly. Maybe I should just start setting a timer for 10-15 minutes and try just being with my thoughts for a minute or two or however long I can manage before starting to cry. Then I need to let myself cry. That, at least, would be a start.
Carl
Like Carl, my mother would get angry with me when I was upset about anything, to the point that I don’t remember actually getting upset about anything past grade school. Possibly even since before my father moved out. If I can’t remember being upset, then it was probably suppressed a good long time ago.
I think that also made me internalize that my emotions are too much for anyone.
Luckily, my partner is so very good about me having emotions. Most of the time. They’re not good about it when we’re having an argument about the clutter or when they don’t trust me for some unknown reason (because I’ve never given them reason not to trust me). But if we’re doing ok, then they’re 100% willing to do whatever needs doing to validate my feelings and to comfort me.
I need to thank them for that again.
Healing Strategy: Engage and Empower
I think I already do some sort of movements that help me to calm myself. I will jiggle my leg or tap my foot or clap loud or fast or hard (when I’m by myself) or things very similar to this. I will dig my fingernails into my palm rhythmically to regain control when I’m about to cry in public (and also sometimes in private, which I should not do). I also use breathing exercises rather deliberately.
I should probably try doing some more deliberate movements in addition to these, though.
How Am I Doing?
I have suppressed my crying throughout this chapter so that I could get through it. This probably means that I need to sit with myself for a bit after I’m done writing and allow the tears to flow.
Healing Strategy: Access Your Inner Wisdom
I don’t think I’ve ever, except once, relied on my emotions to make a decision, and that was the decision to move in with my partner. Was it a wise decision? Meh. They love me and I love them, but our political and social views are pretty far apart, even if they don’t know that. This makes it difficult for me to deal with them from time to time. If I hadn’t been with them when I got laid off, I’m not sure where I’d be, right now. Probably not in a good place.
Most of my other decisions have been pretty well-thought-out, taking emotions into account, but not letting them rule the decision. Not all of these decisions turned out for the best, but none really ruined my life, either.
I do have decisions to make in the next little while, though, so I will try to listen to my body.