Trauma Causes Emotional Dysregulation: Here's How to Heal It

there's this idea out there that to heal from trauma you need to feel your feelings and some people will encourage you to feel your feelings and explore your feelings and trust your feelings but when you have ptsd from childhood the problem isn't always that you don't feel what you're supposed to feel more of the time i think the problem is that you do feel your feelings too much they get overloaded and i can show you how to reel that back into a healthy balance it's called emotional dysregulation and in my opinion it can do even

more damage than being out of touch with your feelings your life can get dominated by your emotions are you familiar with that feeling your relationships get dominated by your emotions your career gets dominated by your emotions and being so emotional like having feelings that are inappropriately intense by most people's standards or when you get emotional at inappropriate times that's not something where feeling your feelings is the solution in my view emotional dysregulation really is kind of like a wrecking ball or like a tornado that spins around and wrecks everything in its path where's it gonna

go you don't know it just sort of comes up out of nowhere and boom starts destroying things sometimes emotional dysregulation goes in the opposite direction and it just sort of like like it's like a light bulb you know where all the sudden it glows really brightly and then goes out it's dark there's nothing you're not feeling anything blazing light nothing with complex ptsd what is often a symptom of emotional dysregulation is that flatness after a big outburst so you might be familiar with some of those patterns feelings go out of control they're coming out in

bursts they're out of proportion to what's going on or at an inappropriate time like crying at work or having an angry outburst at your internet provider when you're on a customer service call and it also refers to going flat emotionally so it's disregulated it's just like not kind of in the middle area that would be appropriate or normal or comfortable for human communication so big spikes nothing but either way when your feelings are dysregulated you might say and do things that are that only overwhelm you further and then that actually create new traumas that make

your situation even harder than it was so it can be a vicious circle so one example could be having an argument with your partner so let's say something makes you angry they forgot you had friends coming to dinner and you cooked but your partner arrived an hour late you didn't know where they were they never called and the guests arrived and you didn't have an answer for them and you called your partner three or four times and you texted and you called and you were getting more and more frantic you're in the other room to

try to hide how angry you are and the friends are there you're trying to act normal and like everything's fine and it's no big deal that your partner's not there and then an hour into the dinner your partner walks in they totally forgot and they see everyone and they remember oh my gosh they're so sorry and they're embarrassed and the guests are like it's fine it's fine and you're like where were you and you're trying to act normal you're trying to keep your emotions kind of in the bandwidth of not totally awful for the guests

but you can't and so they're ready to sit down now and enjoy the company but for you it's too late that's emotional dysregulation at work because old feelings of being ignored and abandoned or just exploding up out of the past it you know it is an offense that your partner forgot that's not cool but the intensity that's coming out of you has more to do with the past it's you know it because it's like filling up your chest it's in your gut it's in your head you might start getting a headache and the guests are

there so don't you hate that getting emotionally disregulated in front of company it's your reaction to the situation that's now ruining the evening has this happened to you in the moment it feels like these huge emotions are the only feelings a person could have and now later you're going to have the insight that your reaction was actually too much that you became the problem person of the evening but when it's happening it just feels real it feels necessary to be that angry right it's moments like this when maybe you've said things you didn't mean because

now you're not just dealing with disappointment and hurt but you're believing that nothing's any good because you know what's driving you at that point shame you see old shame of like that old well of anger and emotion came up and kind of blasted out there's like this point where you know it's feeling really real and you get so mad and then it blasts out of you and that often sort of triggers you to start recovering and coming back to reality from like wait it's not really that bad so then the shame comes in and you

feel worse then you might feel a need to check out you go flat you can't apologize you know everything well this is how friendships fall apart this kind of thing is how it falls apart and it's not your fault you got this way this is a really common and normal response to having grown up with trauma but of course we all want to work on it and learn to handle it even better even if your partner is used to this kind of behavior and they stick around this kind of conflict that doesn't feel realistic that

feels overblown it'll gradually drain away love and trust and close off connection that otherwise would be getting deeper and getting sweeter over time so that's another way relationships get destroyed so this is what i mean when i sort of give the side eye to the idea that what we all need is just to feel our feelings or you just need to grieve or you just need to get in touch with your anger like that's not always the best advice for everybody it's not always what's needed for some people with cbtsd what's needed is to self-regulate

and get more control over emotions and to have some tools in your tool belt to know how to do that on the spot even before you really know what's going on with you even before you've been able to process or talk through what happened just when you realize like uh oh i'm going over the top how do you pull yourself back because that's how you can make a positive change for the better once you can manage that you start having a huge amount of space where you can you can talk things out you can ask

questions you can express yourself and say you were late for dinner we had company i was so embarrassed you can say that but you can say that in proportion to you know what the problem really is all right so i'll show you how to do that you'll find that if you can control emotions before they get intense so starting early you may have this little window of opportunity to do that you can avoid a lot of problems that come from overreactions and overwhelm and it's easier to get back to a calm and regulated state then

so i have a friend who visualizes emotional dysregulation as an airplane taking off you may have heard me talk about that and regulating her emotions is what she calls keeping the airplane on the ground and i love that that is what it feels like because yeah and so you can think of that too how are you going to keep your airplane on the ground once it takes off you know it's just a great big deal so how are you going to do that you can do it you can stay regulated even when you're upset if

you understand what's happening and you practice practice practice so when you go into a strong emotional reaction one is notice it's happening are you flooding with emotion are you feeling adrenaline are you panicking are you starting to cry so say to yourself i'm having an emotional reaction because it's just true you can just say that to yourself just ground yourself in reality with that ah i'm having an emotional reaction so another thing you can do is slow down the interaction just get it way slowed down a lot of us are very sensitive to hurrying and

yet once we start panicking we start rushing so it sort of compounds itself so you can just back up take big pauses between what is said take your time to answer take your time to say things consider your words prepare to see things in a new way now a lot of the time simply slowing things down can reduce the overwhelm that's all that's needed less overwhelm means you can recover your perspective right there and then and experience a little calming effect inside if you're about to cry and you don't want to cry because you're at

work or you're giving a speech or you don't want to be vulnerable in a particular situation here's a great trick imagine that on your stomach like right below your belly button that you have a knob all right the knob goes all the way up to 10 or 11 if you like spinal tap if you have emotional dysregulation it definitely goes to at least 11. all right so now imagine that the tears are coming because you accidentally left the knob at about eight so now just in your mind dial your belly knob just down to two

just bring it down to two and that's sometimes that's all that's needed to just like just stop the tears control the tears and the sadness it is like somebody left a gate open or something the cows are running out so you just shut the gate or bring it down to two you're not cutting off your emotions 100 but just controlling the opening there all right if it's anger that's happening use what used to be called restraint of pen and tongue that's a really nice phrase i use it all the time it's so helpful to me

and it means don't say anything or write anything including emails text letters don't do it when you're angry what happens is this venting will escalate your emotional overwhelm and your thinking gets distorted and you might say things you don't actually believe and that you'll regret and of course when if you've ever had a conflict over text it never goes well there's no way to communicate the tenderness or the caring or the listening it just sounds like somebody's snapping no matter how you handle it so don't do that when you're angry don't write instead because it's

important to express yourself promise yourself that you'll express yourself just a little later when you're calm you can find a gentle polite way to postpone any more conversation you can just say i really want to have this conversation it's important to me i i definitely don't want to you know get all intense on you could i just have 15 minutes so i can you know just bring my emotions together you don't even have to say that if you're at work you can just say you know what i have this other call i need to go

do that can i come back and have this conversation with you in 15 minutes so whether you choose to tell anybody that you're taking time out to emotionally re-regulate or not people will generally accept that you can continue the conversation later and whether they realize what was about to happen or not it's good for everybody for you to show up kind of regulate it for all your conversations it's just it's good for you it's good for them if it feels urgent for you to express yourself that is often a cue that you need to take

double time pausing and getting re-regulated the sense of urgency is not always reliable with cptsd it's it's basically your old like emergency response kicking in over stuff that's just about communication or saying how you feel so when it really is an emergency if you need to pull somebody out of a rushing river or you're in an abusive situation and you need to get out the door of course urgency is appropriate but if it's just about communicating something or trying to talk something through if you feel urgency it's very likely going to only benefit if you

pause for 30 minutes or an hour or tomorrow there's very little that has to be solved like in in any given day that's important so if you can come back regulated in more time that's really good don't underestimate the damage you can do when you when you try to solve problems when you're disregulated it's kind of like driving drunk okay all right another thing you can do do some emergency writing and i'm talking about the daily practice way of writing that i teach i have a free course i always link it on the free tools

page in my website the free tools page of my website is always linked down in the description section below but it's called the daily practice and i teach a specific technique where you can get your fearful and resentful thoughts on paper kind of ask for them to be removed rest your mind give it a try um so many of us have had it experience life-changing um healing from being able to put our emotions on paper before just kind of throwing them at another person it often feels especially if you were neglected as a kid that

what you really really need is to tell somebody how much they hurt you because there's this fantasy that if you tell them then they'll be like oh i'm so sorry i'll come in and i'll care for you and i'll help you feel better but a in adult life that's usually not how people respond when we come come at them like in in anger they don't respond like trying to help us and if they do it's probably not coming from a healthy place but also it's not realistic that other people can even if they want to

that they can re-regulate your nervous system it is an inside job so so we take those feelings to the paper and have a process for relieving them before having the communication we do need communication but it when it's packed up with like all your unmet childhood needs it becomes it becomes something quite frightening and overwhelming to other people they're either going to run or they're going to pretend but it's going to be a disappointment and it's going to hurt your relationship so paper that's that's a suggestion there what i love about paper you can do

this just about anywhere in the bathroom you can do it in the dark of a movie theater you can do it in the car when you're a passenger not driving obviously you can do it in bed in the middle of the night you can do it at your desk while you're pretending to work and employers i'm an employer too but here's the thing i i'm not saying that you should just fake work and steal time from your employer like that but sometimes the most efficient way to get productive in your day is to take the

overwhelming emotions and just get them out on paper so that you can return your focus back to the task at hand that's a good thing to do it's definitely better than having an emotional meltdown too all right another thing you can do is get some hard exercise to kind of like rinse all those stress chemicals out of your body you can run up and down a flight of stairs a couple times if you are physically able to do that if you can walk you can take a brisk walk whatever you physically can do to get

your heart rate up maybe just break a little bit of a sweat it just is so powerful to turn around the stress chemicals that are active when you're in emotional dysregulation and sometimes sometimes you can come at emotional dysregulation through reason sometimes you have to come at it through physical action there are a number of ways that you can that you can approach your healing so i'm giving you a list of them so you can find your favorites all right here's one this is another physical one you can wash your hands or in a big

pinch you can take a shower wash your hands in cold water splash it on your face everybody does that right sometimes or wash your hands in nice warm soapy water that feels nice and take just take a minute to feel the water on your hands and the soap and the clean hands and feel how nice that is you're using these tactile experiences to just sort of come back from this sort of flight away from what's actually happening for your senses right here in the room for you right now this is called being in your body

and i don't actually believe that people leave their bodies but that's a metaphor for what happens when our nervous system is starting to shut down like quadrants of your brain or just going dim and you're not able to process sensory input from where you are and that's when you're often vulnerable to you know outbursts or saying things you don't mean you want to be in touch with all of your feelings you want to be in touch with cues you want to be able to detect danger like if you're going up and shouting at somebody on

the street what if they're dangerous what if they could physically harm you you need to be tuned in right and so that's that's why physical at physical regulation neurological regulation goes hand in hand with emotional regulation so we're learning to master re-regulation of both it all comes down together and you begin to be centered in a calm awareness and you're just you have nice ears to hear what's going on you have eyes you have a heart to feel what's going on and imagine like if you could do that that would change a lot right so

emotional dysregulation feels to me and i think a lot of people a little bit like a trance like you're hypnotized you're a little bit out of touch with some things you're deeply in touch with with something else a feeling and what what you need to develop is to have part of you that can sort of stand outside that situation and go i see that i'm going into a trance-like dysregulation state and that part of you that can see it's going on can kind of take you gently by the shoulders and say hey come on anna

come on out let's get out of this dysregulated state let's use some tools once you have that part of you that can sort of pull you back a little bit when you notice it's happening you've just gotten on the path to serious change that's how you do it self-awareness just enough to pull back before you know what to do before you've solved all your problems you're just like okay this thing is happening i know it doesn't go well when i you know say things and try to solve problems like this let me take a beat

all right if you like you can talk with somebody who is trustworthy they understand you and who's not in that moment in a conflict with you very important someone else sometimes it helps to get an outside perspective but i don't recommend trying to tell a long story i don't recommend trying to vent going into yet another hypnotic trance and then he did this and then he did that and then you know have you done that i've done it that's bad that's just takes me worse into emotional dysregulation so the the discussion it doesn't usually work

that well when you're already upset but obviously sometimes this can't be avoided and somebody will try to help you and assist you to kind of emotionally calm it the irony is that one of the hardest things for a person in this regular emotional dysregulation to hear is can you calm down ma'am please calm down it's like you know it goes off again so sometimes it's going to be you by yourself so one way to check in with yourself when you're having one of those conversations is to ask yourself is having this conversation making you more

dysregulated are you feeling more upset are you maybe talking faster and faster louder and louder are you talking on top of people these are signs that you're actually going into dysregulation so if you can have that part of you stand outside and go oops i'm getting more dysregulated you just find a polite way to say okay well thanks for your help now get yourself to a private space with your pen and pencil or your tools your physical tools to start bringing yourself back before you begin talking again talking is sometimes the gateway drug to more

dysregulation just saying sometimes it's useful sometimes it's not we need to learn the difference because when we're dysregulated the person we're getting all dysregulated on will often also disregulate and two dysregulating dysregulated people will often escalate quite badly you've probably been there everything that needs to be said can and should be said but not necessarily in that moment if you possibly can wait until you're regulated calm more lucid able to feel the range of feelings you have about someone and not just the angry part not frantically trying to get them to understand something these steps

by the way don't just help you regulate emotionally but they help you re-regulate your brain and in your body your heart rate your breathing your thinking your coordination of your you know feet and hands your ability to focus so i have a quiz you can take if you want to check some of the symptoms of dysregulation if you're hearing this and you're like wait that happens to me i got a list of them and you can check them off on this list that is in my free tools page 2 that i mentioned on my website

free tools the link to the free tools page is down below in the description section when you're re-regulating your emotions and the intense thoughts keep just fluttering in just keep reminding yourself to hold the thought and instead focus on next steps positive actions positive words this isn't positive thinking it's not toxic positivity this is just redirecting your thoughts when they're sort of going whack to a clearer mental space because that's part of you too you have clarity in there you have a place in there that is that has less emotional charge where you can anchor

yourself you can remind yourself that's your home that's that's that's where you go when things get crazy is into this this home inside you're not suppressing your feelings you're just postponing expressing your feelings until you're a little more regulated and contrary to popular belief by the way you don't have to talk things out to get regulated talking about your feelings it's important but there's a time and a place and sometimes that best time and place is later when it will be helpful and constructive and when it will help you have and keep and strengthen relationships

with people you love people you treasure even though it doesn't feel like that when you're emotionally disregulated so when this happens just keep reminding yourself by silently telling yourself i'm feeling dis-regulated and then use your tools stop venting remind yourself that you don't need to express yourself and clear the air right then your words will be there your feelings will be there waiting for you when you're calmer you will have access to yourself you'll be no longer disregulated and then when you express yourself you can do it elegantly and with fairness and love it'll feel

great to keep your relationship gentle like this and to get past the shame of overreactions and then you can enjoy the way that your connections with other people rather than getting ruined begin to get nicer deeper stronger over time if you want to learn more about dysregulation and in particular the whole nervous system kind and what that feels like i've got this video lined up for you right here and i will see you very soon [Music] you