Emotion Dysregulation
What does it mean to have difficulty regulating emotions… doesn’t everyone struggle with their emotions sometimes?
It is completely normal for a person to struggle with overwhelming emotions in the face of difficult life experiences, for example, the loss of someone they love or in response to an accident or seeing something distressing. When Psychologists, Psychiatrists or other mental health professionals refer to someone who displays emotional dysregulation, we mean someone who does not have effective strategies to cope with any intense emotion and who has difficulty managing their behavioural response to intense emotions most of the time.
From my perspective, the development of emotional regulation difficulties is impacted by a complex combination of possible genetic factors, environmental factors and exposure to trauma or maltreatment. It is estimated that around one-third of people are born more sensitive than others. These people are generally more strongly affected by their experiences, and if these sensitive individuals are lucky enough to be born into a nurturing family environment that has the emotional and other resources to cope with their sensitivity, they may go on to develop optimal coping skills for their sensitive natures. If, on the other hand, they are born into an environment where their physical, emotional and/or psychological needs are not able to be adequately met, they may develop dysfunctional coping strategies to manage their sensory and emotional overwhelm.
What does emotional dysregulation look like?
People who are hypersensitive to emotional stimuli have a slower return to a neutral / tolerable emotional state after becoming emotionally aroused. This might mean, for example, that anger at something (objectively) insignificant can quickly become full-blown rage, with behavioural outbursts such as throwing things, aggression towards themselves or others, or threats to kill themselves. It can also lead to a person becoming fearful of certain emotions, such as anger or sadness, due to how intensely they feel them. In this case, a person might quickly squash down any feelings of anger or sadness and pretend that “everything is okay”… of course, this can only go on for so long before the these emotions need somewhere to go – and very often, they come out at people who we are close to, or they turn inward on the self. Dysregulated emotions can lead to enormous internal distress and also cause havoc in relationships, impacting family, partners, friendships, school, work … every area of a person’s life.
So why do we need emotions anyway?
The best analogy I’ve read about the function of emotions is by Dr Christine Dunkley, one of my Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) Gurus. To paraphrase, she likens emotions to the warning lights on a car’s dashboard. When a car’s system warning light comes on, it tells us that our car needs something to keep functioning optimally. We have some options of what to do about it: We can ignore it and hope it goes away by itself (which rarely happens); we could put a sticker over it so that we don’t have to keep looking at it and being worried by what it could mean, or we could get out the user manual for the car, see what our car needs and make a plan to get it what it needs. In the first two options, our car is likely to start to work less efficiently, perhaps stopping altogether. If, however, we looked in the user manual, it might be that the manual tells us that the car just needs an oil top up and if we do that immediately our car will carry on its merry way. If we ignore the warning light, however, a lack of oil could, over time, cause our engine to seize with catastrophic (and expensive) results!
In the same way, emotions are a clue to what it is that we need. We can ignore emotions and hope they go away or we can explore what it is they are trying to tell us and we can try to get our needs met in more functional ways.
How do I begin to get control of my own emotions?
During our therapy sessions, we will investigate how your current coping strategies may have developed. We explore how this has affected your life and how you would like your life to look in the future. Together, we will discover how to identify emotions and how to recognise when you are feeling one, early enough to intervene purposefully. When a person has difficulty regulating emotions, it can feel like emotions go from zero to overwhelming in an instant, with no space in-between. Our work will be to learn ways to increase the gap between stimulus and response, to give you the opportunity to choose to do something intentional, rather than simply reacting. As part of this work, it may be helpful to learn interpersonal skills to be more effective at communicating to others about your needs, to increase the chances of having your needs met. To go back to the analogy previously used, together, we create an operating manual for your car, so that you can keep it in optimal running order!
Interesting Link:
“Genetic Architecture of Environmental Sensitivity Reflects Multiple Heritable Components: a Twin Study with Adolescents”. by Elham Assary, Helena M.S. Zavos, Eva Krapohl, Robert Keers and Michael Pluess.
Molecular Psychiatry doi:10.1038/s41380-020-0783-8