Emotional Dysregulation Ruins Even The Best Relationships

if you grew up neglected hurt by your parents not heard not seen chances are good that when you're under stress you get emotionally dysregulated now this means your nervous system reacts to stressors with extra strong emotions when most people would be hurt you're devastated when you fall in love it feels enormous and getting angry unfortunately for the people who love you can turn into rage emotional dysregulation is not exclusive to Childhood PTSD but it's a very common and very destructive symptom and perhaps more than any other trauma symptom it ruins relationships and kills dreams but the good news is that healing is possible my letter today is from a woman I'll call Penny and she writes hi Anna I grew up in an extremely invalidating abusive and neglectful household I've got a pencil I'm going to circle things I want to come back to but let's read through Penny's letter and see what's going on she says my parents were alcoholics divorced 13 years ago and I suspect my father is a narcissist and my mother is the definition of a histrionic personality every day was full of fighting and threats and my sister and I often took care of my mother there were times when we had to force her to eat help her get dressed Etc and there were even times we had to hide from my father staying in hotels and friends houses and not going to school due to threats I wanted to write you because I'm in a fairly new relationship I'm 23 he's 25. we met a year and a half ago online met in person a little over a year ago and decided to start dating the same month we decided to date I moved in with him I know that things moved very quickly I have a history of intensely abusive relationships and this is the first relationship I've been in that I can say is safe and mostly healthy I feel like I'm incredibly toxic and hurtful to him when anything happens that I am not ready for something unexpected or plans changing I feel neglected or abandoned or invalidated even if my logical mind knows that it's nothing to start a fight over he's very social and goes on trips With Friends we try our best to have open and healthy conversations but this can only happen after I've had time and space to calm down the problem is really when I initially start to feel hurt because I lash out and threaten to leave or tell him that he's not treating me well when that isn't what I want to do and he has only treated me well he respects my boundaries he cares about me deeply he shows his love and I feel valued and wanted for the first time in my life I feel like I'm a terrible person and I'm desperately trying to be good usually I blow up before I can think to get space and that makes it turn into me letting out every negative thing in my head in those moments I'm blaming him I feel like I'm pushing him away there's also there's only so much someone can handle and I really want to be part of his life and keep him in my life I realize things moved very quickly but I think we could have such a beautiful future together if I can get a hold of myself I haven't been in therapy for a year and a half now and I'm finding it difficult to find a therapist where I am now I moved across the country any advice at all would be so helpful because I feel like I'm ruining our relationship thank you all right Penny I got your back I think I can help all right so let's see what we have here you grew up in an in an invalidating abusive and neglectful household parents alcoholic your dad narcissist mom definition of histrionics that's super emotional so it sounds like a really hard horrible situation for a kid fighting threats had to hide take care of your mom over parentified yeah that'll do it that'll do it and so I can just totally understand why you have emotional dysregulation that is what's going on here what you're describing like you you've been able to form a relationship that feels good he feels like a really good suitable guy for you and your emotional dysregulation is it just irrationally gets triggered and you for the period of time that you're emotionally disregulated the feelings are flying out of your head I've been there it's horrible I know and I promise you there is a way to heal this all right so it's a new relationship 23 you're 23 he's 25 met a year and a half ago online then met in person a little over a year ago and decided to start dating in that same month you moved in and I think you said you moved across the country so I if I'm putting this together right when you decided to start dating him you not only moved in with him but you moved across the country and you know like I totally get how maybe this is going to work out anyway it can but that is such a cptsd move it's like somebody feels like a great fit and you want to spend more time with them and if it's cross country that you're long distance dating it's pretty hard to you know go on a second third fourth fifth date so I see the logic in it but also I just want to point out this puts you under a terrible amount of pressure for a person who has emotional dysregulation living together is hard living together with somebody you haven't had time to like really really get to know and um and you don't have you know living together is like a simulation of a committed relationship there might be monogamy for being that's committed until one of you changes your mind but I'm just saying like living together is a really it's a strain and um I I think it's not for the faint of heart when you don't know somebody because the I the pressure is on you can't get away from that person a lot of what a person who gets emotionally dysregulated needs emotionally or neurologically is they need you know they need their own space they need to pull away so I like that he goes on trips with friends that he has his own life that sounds really healthy that sounds appropriate and he's 25 all of that is great so everything that you're describing here is you get emotionally disregulated and you've put yourself into the pressure cooker for it so let's see if we can help you get back out of that um you specifically said that you've been behaving in a toxic and hurtful way you're worried it's going to drive him away um you don't like it when you're not ready for something unexpected or plans change that's a really typical trigger and you feel neglected or abandoned or invalidated also very normal trigger for a person who went through what you went through so a trigger you know people say trigger like it just means something that you don't like but in this with complex PTSD it's something that triggers dysregulation it changes your nervous system a stimulus and so that's it's really normal that when something has a characteristic that that you had to cope with as a kid way over what you were capable of dealing with that it's still as active like a like a third rail you know it's just so that feeling abandoned feeling like things are changing you do have great conversations and it works when you've had time and space to calm down time and space that is a great Insight Penny time and space now he respects your boundaries he cares about you he shows his love I'm so happy you have that I'm all for you not messing this up all right this is what I'm going to suggest to you first of all there's going to be a lot of tools I'm going to suggest to you I'm going to suggest support I suggest I tell those things to everybody you know who's working on healing trauma but in particular for you Penny I think it would be important for you to develop a life outside the couple outside the home and if that's not right now living somewhere else I just really encourage you to find a way to spend time somewhere else now one thing you can do I know you probably don't have a lot of friends there right maybe you told me that actually you haven't been able to find a therapist so that would be another good thing you could find a therapist everybody needs friends and when you move it all becomes about this one person and so when you're in distress in within the relationship the Temptation is enormous to try to while you're dysregulated talk it out but see when we're talking dysregulated we're kind of we're seeing things in a loopy way we're seeing like you made me feel like this you need to fix it I still feel terrible I need you to fix it and that's a terrible and unreasonable demand to put on somebody when we are emotionally dysregulated they can't actually fix that there's pretty much nothing they could say and I know it's better like if you're not arguing it's better if they're being loving it's better but if you have that trauma wound in you it's gonna find its way out no matter how good the relationship is no matter how much he's careful not to set you off in fact you don't want him to have to be careful you want to learn to calm your triggers and never fear like you can make tremendous progress very quickly if you prioritize this so the first thing is the tools um I have some very practical tools on how to spot dysregulation emotional dysregulation and how to very quickly re-regulate you use emergency measures and some of those have to do with like stomping your feet separating taking a time out using physical exercises that cross over the midline of the body and I'll put it I'll put a free download at the end of this video that you can access anybody watching this can access if you want to see what these are it's just a series of emergency measures that you can do to re-regulate but another thing you can do is I teach my daily practice and this is for all the fearful and resentful thoughts so if you think about like emotional distress anything that's negative we lump it into two just very general buckets fear and resentment and I know there's a lot of nuance and shades of color of the emotions in between there but for this exercise there's no need to do it so I teach this exercise for how to release these feelings and then give your brain a rest and recover and come back to Center again and I do this twice a day I depend on it it's the whole thing that changed my life and I'll be sure to put that a link to that at the end too it's always down in the description section the third thing that you need is support so that's what I'm saying is not only do you need to get your life out of the house but you need the support of people who are walking a path with you who have a similar approach or mindset about what the problem is and what they're trying to do to heal and the reason I say that is if you're struggling with emotional dysregulation and you talk to somebody who's not in any kind of healing for that and you go I'm so freaked out I'm so freaked out like he didn't understand he made these plans and I felt so abandoned a person like a civilian they're going to go oh my God he abandoned you that sounds like a terrible guy you should leave and they don't understand and their advice doesn't connect with what we're going through because they're you know they don't have that common knowledge about what you're talking about and over and over again have I paid the price for you know trying to talk about what's distressing me to people who don't walk the path with me it upsets them it scares them they're like oh my gosh I'm worried about you because I get very intense right when I'm dysregulated and I think to an Outsider they would they would just think oh my gosh This Woman's falling apart I'm totally not I'm just in dysregulation I'm working my way back out of it and give me 20 minutes and I'll be good but if you talk to me when I'm in the middle of it I do I sound I sound very very angry distressed probably unreasonable and so that's one of my boundaries is I try not to talk when I'm dysregulated unless there's a very good reason to I try to re-regulate myself and then talk and talk to those who are essential so when you're in a conflict or you feel like you're you everything depends depending on you being able to notice when you're getting dysregulated there are probably certain thoughts and feelings that come into your mind before you start lashing out so one for me that I finally learned like if I'm thinking this thought stop leave the you know excuse yourself say I'll be back in half an hour hold on I'm just I'm like getting disregulated and I don't want to hurt your feelings let me go work this out and I'll come back to the conversation so for me some of the cues that that's beginning to happen is my nose will feel numb or um I start having the thought I don't need you I don't need anybody or I have this thought I have to do everything don't you realize you don't do anything I do everything that's that that's that's like the pattern of my trauma-driven thinking it's probably an emotional flashback and uh but whatever it is wherever it comes from it's a really unreasonable and harsh thing to like direct at my husband and it never leads to anything good for me to express this stuff when I'm in the middle of feeling it and he can't he couldn't do anything about it even if he wanted to so I take it to my tools I use my emergency measures I sit down and I use my daily practice to for the writing and meditation techniques and I come back to self-regulation and from there I show up that half an hour later and I go okay I think I hear what you're saying I can actually like I actually have the capacity to hear what somebody's saying now if you're like me like a big upset within the relationship if it if if it's allowed to continue and get really bad you're going to stay dysregulated a lot longer than half an hour and that's just a great loss for you and everybody you know the world is counting on you and so uh you know people will say well I don't have half an hour and it's like well you're either going to spend a half an hour re-regulating or you're going to spend half an hour you know just continuing down the road of like damaging everything so sometimes we have to just kind of accept that having cptsd to the degree that we get emotionally dysregulated it takes a little time to come back from and for many years I had office jobs and I was going through this and I was learning how to self-regulate and I just sort of found a way to separate myself people all the time like um you know are detached from their work to deal with a personal call or look at the internet or go have lunch and I just decided you know for me I just I'm going to prioritize taking care of myself regulation because until I'm regulated I can't do productive work I literally can't focus enough to write a paragraph or anything like that my work I do the kind of work that usually involves writing most of my life writing organizing a project that's basically what I still do but um but I can't do that dysregulated I will spin all day in like a little circle of starting something and then jumping over to another thing like it looks like ADHD but the it's not ADHD because it just happens sometimes you know and then it goes away I love being regulated I love having the capacity to control my own thoughts I can't 100 control my thoughts but what I experience after I use my techniques is that I have a choice about what I want to think about like I never had that before I I learned these techniques I was just I was basically like chased around by my thoughts all day long I was exhausted by my own thoughts my own emotions and so I can sort of come to a place of neutrality and be able to decide oh I'm going to focus on the list for my friend's party or ooh I'm gonna lay down or oh I get to do whatever I want with my time now and that is a tremendous power that can redirect your whole life and it can make you the most amazing sweetheart partner because your mind is there like that's what everybody wants when we say we want to be loved we mean we want presence in another person we don't want them to be all about a storm that's going on inside them that we can't influence you know we want them present we want to be interacting we want to tell them how our day went we want to hear how their day went and of course every relationship is going to have hard days you know arguments that's all that's all normal but not to the point that that a person gets emotionally abusive and that's basically what happens with cptsd when it's untreated so I'm so proud of you I've been thinking a lot about you know empowerment and deep like disempowerment and demoralization and how that happens to cptsd people but that little desire that desire to be better is such a beautiful part of ourselves it's you know it's the sacred thing it's why you can heal because it shows that that desire that knowledge of what is good is intact inside you and you need some techniques and some habits to start sort of redirecting yourself when your nervous system starts basically just like putting off fireworks because that's what nervous systems who have been through trauma do you can retrain it it takes practice it takes courage it takes being honest with yourself as you have been I'm so proud of you I don't know about you but people who are very early or haven't really started healing yet they would experience this whole thing like he does this to me why does he do this to me but you're just going wow I'm getting really disregulated and that's how you now have the capacity to change the problem right in your hands by seeing that I'm really proud of you I have very high hopes for you I think this relationship is very hopeful and um and don't let anybody tell you it has to take a really long time if you keep your focus on this the daily practice is not only daily it's twice a day and it's a very specific technique if anybody wants to find out how to do that it's right here and I will see you very soon [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Crappy Childhood Fairy

Views: 42,887

Keywords:

Id: 0DfzZI2Hu5M

Length: 18min 4sec (1084 seconds)

Published: Wed May 31 2023