Emotions and the Middle Way
If you are wrestling with post childhood trauma symptoms in adulthood, right now you don’t even know how good your relationships have the potential to be. Most likely, you currently cannot accurately evaluate the state of your relationships, describe how others perceive you, nor pinpoint exactly what is preventing you from having better relationships with those that matter most to you. This is upsetting, triggering and generates familiar childhood fears that reach all the way down to our long over-worked, limbic fueled, survival instincts. Because it makes us feel out of control and insecure we, often unwittingly, resort to manipulating others to get to a state in which we feel some semblance of acceptance, lovability and security.
To us it isn’t about manipulating others to get our way; it’s about manipulating others to quell the terrifying misperceptions of our self we’ve been battling our entire lives. Since we have under-developed skills for self soothing and communicating to express our feelings and needs we turn, instead, to either taking on all the blame in a relational conflict or blaming the other person completely. We have constricted ourselves to two very narrow and unpleasant choices; either go on a rant against the person who has triggered us, or go into a spiral of self-blame and self-loathing. Knowing that and seeing clearly when you are reacting in that way is a huge step up the road to recovery. Take heart though, because there is a middle way.
Initially, all you need to do is recognize and identify when this either/or behavior is taking place for you. Tell yourself and the other person involved, “I need some time to think about this. Let’s continue this later when we’ve cooled down.” Then take your triggered self out of there pronto, even if it’s just for a walk around the block, neighborhood, or state – after all, these triggers are very deep and wide at times.
Focus on identifying what emotions you are feeling around this encounter that has triggered you. I know your heart just skipped a beat at, ‘identify your emotions.’ This is groundbreaking territory, but you’re going to be okay. This step is the key to mastering communication from you to other humans. It has a lot to do with why I chose to volunteer at the Oregon Humane Society rather than Habitat For Humanity. Still, we need to learn this if we are going to ever know true emotional intimacy (including with ourself).
For most of my life I identified my emotions within the confines of happy, sad, scared, mad and, sometimes, excited. When the kids came along I expanded my emotional repertoire with worried, frustrated and exhausted. So much for owning a thesaurus. I did not explore my short list of emotions any deeper, even when I was suicidal. At those times I was just really sad. In retrospect I understand I was actually really terrified; some past trauma was seeping out and I was experiencing the effects of a toxic spill. The more I did to evade my feelings the more toxic the effects. Sound familiar?
In my next post I will provide a Feelings list and teach you a method for reigning in those buggery feelings and getting them to a manageable level.
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Copyright ©2018 Josephine Faulk, MPH Excerpt from WORTHY A Personal Guide For Healing Your Childhood Trauma by Josephine Faulk,MPH. Available, along with accompanying Workbook, on Amazon.
