” Emotions are an extremely important part of our lives, and they profoundly affect our actions, even though we’re not always aware of them. Skillful understanding and balancing of emotions is called Emotion Regulation. Emotion regulation is a general term that encompasses several component parts, which include being aware of and paying direct attention to emotions, understanding and labeling emotions, allowing emotions to occur without necessarily acting on them, and managing or modifying emotional reactions so as to meet important goals. “
Quote taken from https://learning2breathe.org/purpose/
I will imagine that in the very beginning of my life I felt appropriate emotions according to circumstances. I have memories from before my emotions shut down, before I was afraid to be me. In my third year three major things happened.
- Ma and Dad were in a war, a Cold War we called it, because there was stone silence between them except for intermittent bursts of necessary discussion about the farm. One moment I remember was Ma telling Dad she would be in charge of the girls, and Dad was to mind the boys. This tidbit related to the division of farm work. Dad wanted the girls to remain in the house and become proper young women, while Ma insisted they could work alongside the boys in the fields. I do not know the entire consistent story, but somewhere in there Dad was to leave the girls alone. In what context I cannot say.
- Dad gave me my first and only spanking for going back downstairs to give him a second kiss goodnight. Years later my sister Sheila giggled giddily while telling me she was the one responsible for that horror. That was the beginning of the end for Dad and I. He told me I was too old for that nonsense. I climbed the stairs between laughing faces and jeers of older siblings and cried myself to sleep.
- I was ripe for the picking, rejected, confused, and very much alone. My much older brother told me we would play a game, just the two of us if I stopped crying when my NYC doll’s head fell off. I stopped crying and took his hand. I was elated, proud, somebody wanted me and I grinned at Ma and at Dad as I passed their silent forms and let my brother lead me up the stair well to his room.
After that day with my brother, my mind, my body, my heart were no longer recognizable to me. I floated outside me, forever trying to fit the old me and the new me together. It was not possible. the abuse continued and I was shut out of my childhood. Emotional maturing stopped and remained dormant for many years.
My family had no emotional maturity. There would have been no person to learn it from and whatever had been normal to me pre-sexualization was now a remote memory, in fact, the memory of love and joy and sadness were replaced by fear, anger, confusion and the shame of having felt emotions.
The normal range of emotions being foreign to me, I continually cycled through anger, shame of anger, rage and shame of rage. Everything was a crisis, the sky was falling, relationships had to end before I got rejected and the list goes on.
Dbt is the first sign of hope for me not continuing the savage cycle of my emotional upheavals.
The Road Forward 