There are a couple of reasons why emotional regulation is so difficult for trauma survivors, especially those with developmental trauma and cPTSD. They are intertwined and sometimes create a fatal cycle of reinforcement.
Parenting
Some of our struggles are created by inadequate parenting. Children are supposed to learn emotional regulation from their parents and receive support in how to do it until they can manage their own emotions.
Sometimes our parents didn’t know a thing about emotional regulation themselves and so we never received any support or learned problematic ways of coping.
Sometimes there were mixed messages about emotions. At times it was ok to show feelings, at other times the response to our emotions was scary or violent. No wonder we were confused and unable to make any sense of the situation. We might also have learned to only show specific emotions that were welcome and hide others, that could get us into trouble.
And in some families emotions were rejected, judged, ridiculed or punished, so that every feeling had to be hidden, disowned or dissociated.
Not only was there no chance to learn emotional regulation like kids who grow up in safety, we also learned to have feelings about our feelings. If expressing or even just having a feeling can get us into trouble, we will experience fear, guilt or shame the moment an emotion comes up. These feelings will cover the others ones and create a protective wall around them, so we won’t perceive them. What is supposed to protect us also keeps us from regulating ourselves. For some people who experience chronic anxiety, guilt or shame, it might be their learned, automatic reaction to shut down other emotions.
Trauma cycles
Emotions happen for a reason. They are supposed to give us fast information about our relationships and the world around us. They make us aware of problems or needs that are unmet. They also trigger urges to act to change the situation
No wonder there were strong feelings happening during Trauma Time, when our world was not safe, our connections to adults highly problematic and our needs were chronically unmet! As children we were powerless to change anything about the situation and the feelings became unbearable. So we had to numb them. The problem with numbing is that the message behind our emotions refuses to be silenced, so the feelings get more intense to catch our attention. Emotions that are ignored get stronger. At the same time our tolerance for them will decrease. If we keep avoiding them into adulthood they will show themselves in sickness and chronic pain.
Numbing happens on a spectrum, from avoidance to dissociation to structural dissociation. If avoidance and zoning out is not sufficient, we will disown and dissociate our emotions. The parts of us who experience these strong feelings (and the events, thoughts, body sensations, impulses connected to them) have to be pushed from our awareness, separated from our every-day experience and sometimes locked behind amnesia walls. But they won’t go away and they are not losing strength. They too are getting louder, so that they will finally be heard.
Another cycle that is rooted in Trauma Time is a sensitization to cues of danger. Our emotions are our main protectors. They create urges to act so we can avoid pain. When we continuously experience violence our detectors will become more sensitive, get off at the smallest sign of a possible threat. The goal is to warn us as early as possible to give us a chance to escape. These cues can come from the outside, but they can also be our own body sensations, thoughts, other feelings or other parts of ourselves. Vehement emotions get triggered more easily. This will still happen later in life and lead to disruptions.
Between being numbed and being easily triggered, we will have difficulties with reading other people accurately. We might miss alarming emotions, that would tell us that something is off and instead feel self-conscious feelings like guilt or shame. It opens us up for more abuse. On the other hand, we might get triggered by harmless things and avoid safe relationships.
Being numb and getting triggered create their own reinforcing cycle.
A trigger pushes us out of our numbness right into vehement emotion. Often it is impossible to tell which emotion we are experiencing. Partly because we never learned how to identify emotions, but mostly because it is so strong it is just perceived as hyperarousal, every distinction lost. The experience is scary because with the identification of the emotion the message is also lost, so we can’t figure out what to do about it. We can’t respond to the cue in a way that would regulate the emotion. We are just left with a sense of losing control and being powerless, a trigger for more trauma-related memories to come up. The experience is so overwhelming and beyond our window of tolerance that we have to fix it as quickly as we can. Our resulting actions are usually mindless and ineffective in solving the real problem. We might have outbursts or self-harm in undirected aggression or spin back into numbing (including alcohol and drugs) and dissociation. Being more numb and dissociated will make the next trigger come as an even greater shock that needs even more numbing.
It works the same way when we have dissociated parts who hold a feeling for us. An emotional part (EP) gets triggered. We experience a loss of control as it surfaces, usually not just with emotions but also with memories. The experience is so scary and overwhelming that we distance ourselves from that part even more, try to control it, keep it down and silence it with all that it carries. The disruptions when that part is triggered again will only increase. Our phobia of the inner experience drives us into a more and more dissociated life with intense outbursts and loss of control.
This is not just you. These problems with emotional regulation are a signature symptom of PTSD. They are worse for those with developmental trauma because we never had the chance to learn even the basics of identifying emotions, let alone how to regulate them.
There is no reason to be ashamed of vehement emotions, they are the natural result of our history. But we have to learn how to break free from the cycles to stop the disruption this is causing in our lives.
This is one of the main reasons why phase 1 for cPTSD takes so much longer than for simple PTSD. We have to learn emotional regulation from scratch. T’s who rush this and start exposure work too soon set us up for failure. We cannot work through our past safely if we lack skills in emotional regulation. The good news is that it can be learned.
The more structural dissociation we experience the less we can treat the situation as an emotional flashback and the more we have to invest into proper SystemWork for a more integrated experience. Only teaching one part of a system emotional regulation is not going far enough. We need to learn cooperation and co-regulation by connecting the different parts. That is why Phase 1 is even longer for DID and subforms, but the good news is that even that can be learned.
We will have to look at
mindfulness to increase our tolerance for emotions,
discrimination to reduce our sensitization,
the nature of emotions and how to identify and regulate them,
our thoughts and their connection to emotion,
co-regulation of dissociated parts
and we won’t be able to avoid looking at needs.
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