Why am I emotionally dysregulated?

Have you ever had a strong emotional reaction and then felt ashamed afterwards? 

Understanding what’s happening below the surface helps us turn shame into acceptance and realize that this is the key to having more emotional stability.

When we grow up with someone emotionally unstable whether we like it or not, we absorb their way of behaving and viewing the world.

Kids are sponges.

Because kids depend on the people raising them when an environment becomes unsafe to be in physically or emotionally, their bodies have no choice but to learn ways of managing the abnormal circumstances. 

There are 2 things going on here. We are mirroring learned behavior that we directly witnessed. And we are learning ways of responding to situations that in our childhood threatened our sense of safety, security, or worth, but in our adulthood are normal, everyday occurrences. 

Let’s say that your parent was quick to criticism when they felt an activating emotion like stress, anger, or sadness. 

Mirroring

Our young and impressionable minds learn that this is an acceptable way to respond to the same emotions. We also learn that it is not only acceptable, but normal for other people to treat us this way. This creates huge problems for us especially in romantic relationships, but all of our relationships are impacted by this including the one with ourselves. 

Dysregulated Nervous System 

The mind and body becomes used to our sense of safety being disrupted. We have something called the central nervous system. It’s made up of 2 parts, the brain and the spinal cord. That alone tells you it plays a significant role in our daily lives. It’s responsible for receiving, processing, and responding to our environment. 

When we grow up in an environment that is emotionally unstable, our nervous system works harder than it should.

Depending on how chaotic or neglectful the environment was, sometimes a lot harder than it should be. 

It’s never good to be in a situation that puts the nervous system in chronic high alert, but it is especially damaging when it happens during developmental stages of life.

During our youth, we develop our base programming for how to respond to the world around us. Then we take that into our adult lives. 

In the example above, the parent is quick to criticize when they are stressed, sad, or angry.

Let’s elaborate on that.. 

Imagine you’re a kid who comes home excited to tell your parent that you got an A on your test, but when you walk in the door and can sense either by what they are doing or saying that they are feeling stressed. As a kid who’s grown used to emotional instability, you’ve learned to read the signs for these kinds of things. 

So, you decide to hide the good news. You escape to your room because you know it’s your best chance for the parent to not break into that place where they become critical and reactive.

At that moment, you learn to stay quiet when people around you are stressed. You learn to isolate. 

As an adult, when you sense your partner becoming stressed you immediately shut down. You may start behaving in avoidant ways.

Feeding a new cycle of dysfunction bred from the initial one. 

There are several different ways this situation could play out.. Where as a kid you try to cheer the parent up opposed to hiding, you learn people pleasing tendencies. Or you get into a fight with your sibling because you were craving + expecting the attention you were going to get when you got home, but felt too nervous to share the good news in fear it wouldn’t go well. As an adult, when you have something to communicate, but don’t know how or feel like you can’t, you learn to create a situation out of something small to receive attention. 

Sheesh, if this happened enough in childhood it may even be in your programming that in order to receive attention or validation you have to be difficult in some way. 

Receive. Process. Respond. 

In an emotionally unstable home, what we receive is beyond what our mind and body is able to process as a kid. We end up finding unique and creative ways to manage and store these emotions, stacking one on top of the other. 

We get dysregulated in the processing part.

And because this is happening while we are still developing, we develop a faulty way of receiving and processing our environment. This gets us all confused and our responses tend to be quite chaotic and self-destructive. It doesn’t matter that you are in adulthood now and no longer benefit from these ways of responding, your nervous system is caked with unprocessed experiences and emotions. 

Walking around with a dysregulated nervous system is like walking around with a bunch of open wounds.

When someone bumps into one, we can surprise ourselves and the people around us with a big reaction that we can’t necessarily understand or explain. This is a trigger.

While getting triggered is an uncomfortable experience, it is actually a beautiful opportunity to process an experience that has been woken up after dwelling within us since childhood. 

Oftentimes we don’t see how heavy and uncomfortable it’s been to carry around all time, until we start letting it go. 

But how do you actually start doing that? 

It’s honestly quite simple, but it does take time to get the hang of. 

#1: Meet Yourself with Grace. 

Understand that if you meet yourself with critical thoughts you are only continuing the cycle you’re trying to break. It’s hard to try to understand something if we are so ashamed for doing it that we immediately want to look away. 

*Practice ways of increasing your self-worth to make this easier*

#2: Cultivate Awareness for Triggers and Responses

Start to pay attention to the sensations that arise within you when you’re becoming triggered. What are the telltale signs that something is being activated within you? 

The more you do this and heighten your awareness around your triggers the better you will be at catching them before they turn into emotionally dysregulated reactions. 

For me, I tend to start feeling a panic attack. I feel pressure bubbling in my chest, tingly in my fingers. 

There are 4 ways the CNS responds when it’s perceiving a threat.. Become aware of these and practice indentifying them when they’re happening: 

#3: Interrupt the Pattern

Whether you are in the pre-response stage or the response stage, once you notice you are becoming emotionally dysregulated and triggered, remove yourself from the situation immediately. 

This looks like implementing a boundary if you’re with someone and creating space for you to explore your emotions. 

It’s the only way to start the process of de-escalating a worked up nervous system.

*This has already been a lot of information, so this will be the topic of my next post. Follow along for that*

In childhood we learned what to do with our emotions, unfortunately in cases with emotionally immature parents what we learn creates cycles of chaos and pain in our lives now. 

If you take anything from this post, know that

There is nothing wrong with you. You had things happen to you.

And if you are struggling with emotional regulation now, that’s completely normal and there are ways to change the way your nervous system responds. 

What did you think about this post? What else would be helpful to know? 

Take care of yourself beautiful human

-Ash