” 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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

https://lakeviewcenterdbt.wordpress.com/emotion-regulation/

https://lakeviewcenterdbt.wordpress.com/emotion-regulation/

Amazing woman.

Last week I distracted myself from my journey. I looked away because the panic in my chest went thumpety-thump whenever I thought about doing “family time.”

I have longed for family always. As a child I longed for a family that loved me. Later I longed to be lovable enough to be part of a family. Now I panic at the idea of building family connections.

I have an opportunity and a challenge. Am I up to it? Can I bear the thumpety-thump in my chest? Can I stand still, step up, open me to a vulnerability that has so many times laid me flat on my face?

Can I not put on my running shoes and disappear in the morning mist? No. I cannot. But I can numb-out temporarily when the panic knocks at my chest.

I can progress a minute at a time into a future that is far from certain to bring me closer to myself and to family connections. I can still my panic with logic, reason, facts, and deep breathing. I can count backwards from one hundred to fall asleep or count sweet little sheep as they disappear ove an imaginary fence. I can sit on that same imaginary fence when I am weary or timid. I can climb down from that fence and journey on when I am able to rise to the challenge of walking into the future.

Looking forward is hard for people like me. It is not impossible.

All my life I have found ways to avoid; avoid responsibility, avoid people, avoid unpleasantness, avoid confronting, avoid reality, the list seems endless.

Suddenly I am thrust into this healing process that is seeming to work and I take up avoiding once more. I avoid my homework, practice, meditation, writing, and life in general. Recovery is never a straight path but often as complex as the original tapestry in need of repairs.

This week in DBT I am confronted with the words AVOID AVOIDING. It stops me right there. Apparently avoiding is common. It is no great feat I have accomplished. I am just another wanna be recoverer avoiding recovery.

In truth, if someone were to hand me a certificate of recovery I would gratefully accept it and be on my merry way. I would frame it and hang it and perhaps add a bit of accent lighting to bring everyone’s eye to rest upon it. But it does not work that way. There is no easy fix.

I get angry at the work I have to do at 65 still recovering from a tattered mess that began at birth in a family that never got help for its ills. All people like me must feel the unfairness of having to do tons of repair work endlessly over and over. That said, there is nothing “fair” in life, and it is left to me to fix me.

Now I have been called out on my superior avoiding tactics. Will the words AVOID AVOIDING be forever the polka-dot elephant in the room, following me about like a second shadow? Will the words flash neon at me whenever I unwittingly avoid working on me? One can only hope.

Never give up. There are many distractions and alternative roads to travel. There is one more and one more and one more game to play, gotta watch the news, wash the dishes, take out the trash. One of my big avoiding excuses was “as soon as I get organized” but of course I didn’t so here I am.

“Huh?” was my initial reaction. From the first day until about two months later I could not get the gist of it. I joined the DBT group at Distress Tolerance, the fourth module.

Radical Acceptance caught my eye. I used to radically accept everything eventually, by leaving claw marks before letting go. Sometimes I left claw marks followed up by another turn on the pain merry-go-round. That was radical.

The concept of surviving crises situations without making them worse evoked no memories of past behavior. Crisis could only be kept at bay by keeping people at a distance. Do not love too much. Do not trust. And when crises arrived my mind ran rampant with my emotions. Things always got worse. I often presented myself at crisis centers, psych wards, emergency rooms to say that I was out of my depth and afraid.

12 hospital stays and dozens of therapists later I sat down among strangers and held my mind open against all instinct to protect myself from a crisis of hope. I presented a blank page in my mind and allowed to be written on it vague concepts, platitudes, and the thoughts of the group.

I was desperate. DBT had to work, and I had to be the one to work it. Emotional breakdowns had to be my past, not my future.

The second module of DBT swept me off my feet like Fred Astaire with Ginger Rogers. After decades, yes decades of “dealing” with my emotions with screams, rants, emotional tirades, running to the relative safety of a hospital ward, or just shutting down all systems and waiting to die, I faced the challenge; emotion regulation.

Suddenly before me stood an answer. Could it work? Could I learn the way out of an emotional hell plaguing my every step? I took up the challenge.

The first DBT module is Mindfulness Skills which taught me tools to become aware, breathe, meditate, and find a middle path between Emotion Mind and Logic Mind. Even as I did the exercises (homework) my mind was saying bandaid. It felt like so many disjointed, perhaps inane, actions designed to just calm me and nothing more. How could this be any solution when emotions run savagely through me?

Emotion Regulation answered that question. The seemingly silly exercises like observing a leaf or a rock, watching a cloud formation as it drifted and reformed, being aware of my body sitting in a chair and breathing deeply saying “wise” on the intake and “mind on the out were a foundation to spring into action to regulate emotions.

I love it, and no I am not finished. I have come through a few panics using my new skills leaving me with some measure of faith that I can get through the next and the next. I ought to mention that the fourth module is Distress Tolerance which helped me to reach a state of acceptance before leaving claw marks or beating myself over the head.

Emotion Regulation, who’d have thought it? I am not a finished product and my emotional make up is not set in stone. I can win this.

The second module in Dialectic Behavior Therapy is Interpersonal Effectiveness Skills. The first time through I blocked it like a champ. My life taught me from an early age that letting people too close is to invite destruction. Just the word “interpersonal” sent me reeling backwards.

I want good relationships. I want friendships. I want my knee-jerk reaction to the word “family” to be “yes” instead of “hell no, are you nuts.” I have always harbored a small hope but never actually believed it could be a reality. Every attempt to be family or friend left me more devastated and alone than before. For one thing, I had so many defenses against people. I could keep them at arms length with a cold gaze. I had thick armor, perhaps it looked like a lack of empathy, cold, unfeeling, hateful, but it was sheer coping skills. My main goal was survival and if that meant blockading all the entry points to my heart, so be it.

Where did it begin? I would guess very early. Repeated abandonment by brothers who “loved” me and left me. All my sister-mamas leaving me by the age of five. A mother cold and distant, a dad who rejected me forcefully after a fight with Mother and much later a husband who abandoned me and our children repeatedly over ten years because he could not bear the responsibility. The list could go on, but I won’t because what is important here is relating to the emotions and moving on.

I can tell long stories about my disastrous experiences with all kinds of relationships from work to family to friendship. I will relate one to you. Keep in mind there is no “blame” as such, not even of me, because after all, survival is not always pretty.

Soon after my husband acquired a girlfriend, I acquired a friend. It was about 1980-81. I was needy of course, four small children, struggling to figure out how to relate to the world and work to feed my children, like a babe lost in the woods. I had no work skills, no people skills and a deficit in every other skills. My only asset was my children. They kept me going, trying, working, and loving as best I could.

So I had this neighbor who helped me so much in so many ways. She was older, wiser, loving, kind, hopeful. How hard is it to be friends with that?

One day, please, this is absolutely true, I realized I loved this person. Now I had no actual knowledge of love except that of my children. At an early age I had interchanged “love” and “sex.” And then I spent ten years with a man who probably did the same thing. So when I felt this overwhelming emotion for this woman, I did not understand.

I wondered if my inexplicable, to me, “love” meant I was gay. yes folks, I was that confused. The only other woman I had to that point felt love for was my friend Margie Hunt when I was sixteen, and she too left me, she died.

Suffice it to say I was a mass of confusion, depression, anxiety, and fear. The friendship had to end. I could not take a chance. Under no circumstance could I continue feeling such incredible vulnerability.

I cut off contact. I severed the cord. I treated her very badly. I will always regret it but even now I can forgive myself. I know, you see, what happened that made me shut down to survive. No person can take that from me.

A friendship brought me to the door of DBT in the fall of 2017. A last straw, the end of the line, my dysfunctional self was on the edge of losing a very important friend. Maria is my friend and the other grandma to 3 of my grandchildren. I was about to lose her because of my own screwed up thinking.

So interpersonal effectiveness. Part of me dreads it. Part of me will automatically put up barriers to it. The larger part will embrace it with all my ability.

Sometimes I feel sorry for myself because I must keep on repairing the damage done to me so long ago. Then I remember how lucky I am to be given the opportunity.

Which day I am in is up for debate on any day as I wake. I try to stay in today neither reaching for what is not or dwelling in what has gone by. On this morning I am aware of confusion as to what my purpose is, if any, in writing a blog. More to the point have I anything to say?

Everyone has something to say. Everyone has a story, a past, and a file over-stuffed with all the lessons they have learned along their path. What do we do with that file when there is no one to receive it? That is a truly lonely place.

Thank the powers that be for the internet where strangers find us blabbering away at a break-neck speed about everything and nothing.

I blog because I can. There are people who appreciate people like me who can string words together into a rational thought and speak for them. I used to be one of those people. I grew up without a voice. I spent time in a marriage with no voice of my own. Having a thought was one thing, speaking it without censure was wholly unknown to me. The idea that I had something valid to contribute rarely came to me. On those rare occasions I would feel the heat of frustration rise in my cheeks until words were bound to come flying out of my mouth and I would swallow them instead for fear of being wrong, mistaken, ill-informed, prove myself stupid.

Like other people with no voice I let out the odd and occasional whimper or screamed my frustration like the trapped little mute I was. But I knew I was basically inferior of mind, silly, crazy, stupid, and invalid from long years of training.

I have gone from mousy dust mite on the shelf to full blown word addict in the relatively short period of about 38 years. It began about the time my young husband walked out saying it was time for me to stand on my own two feet, leaving me with 4 small children to stand on my feet with me. He didn’t look back as he took the car and drove away leaving us to fend for ourselves. He later told me he was deliberately making life hard to force me to run back to New York State with the kids, but he did not know there was no place for me to go.

Gotta love a guy like that, right? No, not right. But he did me a favor unwittingly. I began to think for myself, not that I could tell myself my thoughts mattered much, but it was a bare beginning. The little man pulling my strings to make me dance had let go and I slowly learned my own steps.

I do not plan to stop talking any time soon. I have a voice and I intend to use it for the good, hopefully with a few tweaks and refinement along the way, less cursing and more kindness for people without the benefit of my opinion to set them straight. (huge smirk).

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Again I begin. Like the greening of spring, I advance. First buddings have long since become the background for my tapestry. Threads weaving through and out and in and back build a life not always well lived but always survived.

I am not alone. I walk amid fellow travelers into the future whatever it holds for me. I do not walk unarmed. Too scared for that, I carry every tool acquired through many survivals since the bare bones of childhood where I sought reprieve from the mythical god of human creation.

I won’t pick on god, after all, he did not create himself whereas I have created me, at least the me I am today, a far cry from the teary-eyed little girl asking god why he didn’t love me. I rarely whine anymore about how unfair life is. Unfair or not it is what we have to work with.

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton