Excerpts from âA Practical Guide to Complex PTSD: Compassionate by Arielle Schwartzâ on âManaging Emotional Dysregulationâ
Many individuals who grew up in abusive or neglectful households have difficulty expressing emotions in a healthy way. Either they find themselves losing their temper, crying uncontrollably, and feeling out of control, or they shut down and feel cut off from their feelings.
e.g âIt all started because my husband told me that he has to go away for a business trip. Logically, I know that he loves me and that itâs only a short trip. But I got this horrible feeling that heâs going to leave me. I felt so out of control. Then, I got angry and couldnât stop myself from yelling. Afterwards, I felt so bad about myself. Now, I canât stop crying and I donât know what to do.â
Like Christine, you might have a fear of abandonment. Alternatively, you might feel triggered by someone elseâs behavior or feel distressed when someone you care about is disappointed with you. Emotional dysregulation often leads to behaviors you later regret.
These behaviors tend to increase to a downward spiral in which you feel consumed by self-hatred or start to think about suicide as the only way out of your pain. Emotional dysregulation is common among survivors of childhood trauma.
The patterns learned in childhood can come out in adulthood as a tendency to cry uncontrollably, get angry easily, feel lethargic and dull, or be overly attuned to the feelings of others. These patterns of emotional dysregulation indicate that you are outside your âwindow of tolerance,â a term created by Dr. Dan Siegel to describe the range of stress that a person can manage without becoming overwhelmed.
When you are outside your window of tolerance, you might feel high-arousal emotions, such as fear, irritability, restlessness, anger, or excessive crying. These feelings mean that your sympathetic nervous system has kicked in. Low-arousal emotions mean that you are feeling a parasympathetic system response. You might feel fatigued, lethargic, helpless, emotionally dull, numb, or depressed. Often, those with C-PTSD alternate between these highs and lows.
Patterns of dysregulation learned in childhood often continue into adulthood. You might notice a tendency toward fight, flight, fawn, freeze, and faint responses.
Fight: If you are prone to a fight response, you might feel critical of yourself and others or be angry or full of rage. You might have a strong need to feel in control. If you relate to this pattern, you may need to work with your anger in therapy.
Flight: If you tend toward the flight response, you might notice a tendency to startle easily, feel hypervigilant to your surroundings, and be on guard. You might feel flighty, âcaught in your head,â have racing thoughts, or feel disconnected from your body.
Fawn: When a child learns to cope by taking care of the parentâs emotional needs, that child is relying on another defense structure, termed the âfawnâ response by Pete Walker. The fawn response involves trying to appease or please a person who is a source of threat. In adulthood, an unresolved fawn response might lead to patterns of codependence, in which you sacrifice your own needs for the sake of maintaining relationships. It will be important to focus on developing your boundaries and improving your sense of self-worth.
Freeze: A freeze response happens when you become absolutely still in anticipation of your life being threatened. Think of a deer in a carâs headlights. Often, there is a tendency to hold your breath, and you might feel frozen, like you cannot move your body.
Faint: The faint response happens when our bodies decide we are under threat and that we need to conserve energy in order to survive. With this response, you might feel disconnected, dissociative, numb, or have the urge to withdraw from others. Or you might experience nausea, dizziness, or difficulty with your vision. These symptoms indicate that you are relying upon a primitive defense system that kicks in when it senses that death may be unavoidable.
You can increase your window of tolerance by paying attention to uncomfortable emotions and bodily sensations while also recognizing that these feelings do not require knee-jerk reactivity. For example, you might notice a sense of irritability, a change in how you are breathing, a loss of focus, or that you suddenly become tired. Instead of pushing these feelings away, you can become curious. You might discover that these feelings are connected to the past.
Now, instead of reacting impulsively, you can use positive coping strategies and choose wiser behaviors, such as setting a boundary, advocating for yourself, or mindfully ending an unhealthy relationship.
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