[Issue #6] Emotion Commotion [Series Issue #3]
A layman's exploration into the physiology and neurobiology of PTSD: Emotion Regulation
“To form meaningful connections with others, we must first connect with ourselves, but to do either, we must first establish a common understanding of the language of emotion and human experience.”
-Dr. Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart
About 4 years ago, my wife and I were on the tail end of a trip to South Africa (related to my wife’s occupation at the time) and it had been a very long day. It was about midnight or so, in whatever time zone Cape Town, South Africa resides. My eyes were heavy and my patience more limited than usual.
Any day of travel feels long. Traveling internationally always feels longer. I had the same feeling when I flew to Iraq and Kuwait for deployment and it tends to make my anxiety bubble at the brim. I remember, as we waited at the Capetown airport, feeling so exhausted and restless, the two emotions competed throughout the entire day and flowed into the evening, then dragged me into the late night hours.
My wife and I had gotten a few things which needed a VAT ticket signature. It being a small airport, combined with the late hour, there was no one around to ask about getting the VAT taken care of and the ticket employees who were present had no clue. We found one employee who told us to go one direction, so we lugged our luggage and tired bodies all the way across and down a hall to find a dead end to nothing.
We found another employee who attempted to direct us, but also to no avail. My level of emotional skill mastery was at solid zero back then and my frustration quickly began morphing into anger, which catapulted my PTSD into attack! mode. My wife, being the beautiful soul she is, tried to calm me down the best she knew how. As we walked down the corridor and again saw nothing, my anger hit max level. My wife managed to find another employee and asked about finding the VAT stand. This person was actually correct as they pointed us in the right direction.
We had to have walked back and forth across numerous gates three times.
We followed the directions and ventured down a long airport corridor leading to a large, open area with flight gates, empty of any employees working them. One lone, small podium stood sadly in a crooked fashion and backed into an open corner. I, seeing no one working there, became more frustrated about the VAT ticket. I felt the palpable thmp, thmp of my heart as I walked closer to the podium. The closer I got, the more angry I became to once again find no one working there. I walked directly up to the small podium and saw a young woman slouched so far down in the chair that she could have been asleep or maybe dead.
I got even closer and saw that she had just been on her iPhone.
I fucking lost it. I lost it so far, I have yet to reassemble the shit I slung out of my mouth. I screamed, yelled curse words at the her, stomped and stormed off to allow my frustrations continue seeping. I felt the ferocity of unharnessed anger in a public place, which at the very least was incredibly embarrassing for everyone involved. Worse yet was the blatant and obvious question of why did I just completely lose my shit?
A couple issues back, we began the themed series exploring the physiology and neurobiology of post traumatic stress disorder. Prior to that topic, we explored how trauma can turn into a trigger moment (much like the one I just described). This week, we begin to take a larger look at human emotion and what to do when we do not, or cannot, handle those feelings at any given moment.
Studying or conversing about human emotion has become much easier thanks to Dr. Brené Brown (if you want a much deeper dive into human emotion, her newest book, Atlas of the Heart is a great tool to use to gain understanding). If, however, you aren’t sure what a feeling or emotion even is, that’s okay, too. It turns out, no one can agree on a singular definition of emotion.
The journey of emotion dysregulation is fraught with treachery and malevolence. Of violence and disgust. Of anger and sadness. Without the awareness of, interest in, curiosity about, and willingness to understand our emotions (and the impact they have on others), we cannot expect to manage our emotions in a way that does not become (or continue to be) a potent poison and drain of joy.
PTSD can oppose emotion regulation and make it difficult to harness the stillness and calm that is present within all of us. Previously, we briefly covered the forward feedback loop, which allows us to better understand our emotional journey when we’re triggered.
Let it be said outright: there are no bad emotions and our feelings are not there to disrupt us. They are there to guide us toward our values and inner calmness. Emotions are our listening post. We only need to arrive willing to hear.
Again, negative affect ≠ bad emotion and positive affect ≠ good emotion. Bad and good get thrown out the fucking window, like that little white rock I sent sailing out the window of my Mustang.
According to Dr. Brown’s research, there are 87 core human emotions. The chart above shows these emotions beneath different groups of instances or experiences when such emotions arise. And these are really good groups and examples, so why re-invent the wheel?
What happened with me with my PTSD, triggers, and trauma, with the young woman at the airport, was not the young woman’s fault. It wasn’t my fault , either. What was my fault and responsibility, was my behavior while having those “when we feel wronged” and “things are too much” emotions. The responsibility of emotion regulation comes from the empathy and compassion we’ve actively cultivated toward ourselves and others. Without feeling as though we’ve wronged someone, it’s difficult to grow and change. Who grows when things are perfect or when everything is done right? We grow best in discomfort, in pain, in shame, and in the aftermath of someone else’s undoing, including our own.
Every species is parented. Humans are a very needy species. After birth, we need kindness, softness, stillness, and respect to learn acceptable ways to deal with our emotions. If we were raised in a home of addiction and abuse (these two things typically go hand in hand), the chances of becoming a well-adjusted and emotionally regulated adult human are few.
I learned two emotions growing up:
1. Anger
2. Shame
I was raised (about 3/4 of the time) in a white/puertorican household with an addict, accidental gunshots through our living room ceiling, invitations to smoke marijuana as a teenager, being driven from place to place by the addict who drank from a paper bagged bottle. Inside those walls was a lot of love when there were highs and a lot of screaming and throwing things when there were lows. No one in my household ever sought mental health help except for me. At age 15, I asked my mother. I paid my first therapist (on a sliding scale) from my wages I earned at the local small town, Indiana Dairy Queen. It was around 1999 or so. I was fighting my sexuality and other obvious demons.
The other 1/4 of the time, I was raised in a Jamaican household (I’m 22.1% West Nigerian, according to 23andMe) located in Los Angeles, California with quieter alcoholism, quieter abuse (that anyone culpable has yet to talk about or admit), and general disengagement. I tried running away a couple times and only ever made it to the corner, before my younger sister asked what I was doing and told me to come back.
According to Dr. Brown:
“Anger is a catalyst. Holding on to it will make us exhausted and sick. Internalizing anger will take away our joy and spirit; externalizing anger will make us less effective in our attempts to create change and forge connection. It’s an emotion that we need to transform into something life-giving: courage, love, change, compassion, justice. Or sometimes anger can mask a far more difficult emotion like grief, regret, or shame, and we need to use it to dig into what we’re really feeling. Either way, anger is a powerful catalyst but a life-sucking companion.”
And
“I define shame as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging—something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection. I don’t believe shame is helpful or productive. In fact, I think shame is much more likely to be the source of destructive, hurtful behavior than the solution or cure. I think the fear of disconnection can make us dangerous.”
We learn what we are taught. We are all a part of someone else’s version of us. For humans, that’s whoever raised us. Uncle Martin or Grandma Sherry. Mom or the foster system. Prison or church. Those are all vastly different experiences which shape vastly different human beings.
To showcase the astonishing connection between humans, our emotions, and our physical bodies, the two graphics below illustrate where we humans typically feel differing emotions.
The first graphic depicts more subjective emotion and the second depicts a few of the core emotions and their locations within the body.
When I feel very angry (or, rage), my neck tenses up, usually my left side. My shoulder gets higher and I begin to shudder and shake mildly from the adrenaline. Then I’m flooded with a sense of radiating lightning down my legs, which I then tighten and clench up.
When I feel extremely anxious, I feel my lower legs tense up, my buttocks get really clenched, and my hips are inflexible. My chest feels heavy, my stomach becomes upset, and I get more bloated.
During an angry outburst, when was the last time you literally stopped yourself to do a body check-in to figure out where you’re feeling that anger? Or admiration? Where do you feel shame? Where do you feel empathy?
I can tell you for certain that in order for me to answer these questions, it takes a certain amount of stillness and breathing. (If you haven’t mozied around on Substack, you may be missing my good friend, Reneé Faber’s, publication: The Creator’s Compass, which explores this very topic.) I can tell you how difficult it is to curate my time in such a way that it allows space for me to explore my own purposeful quietness.
Next week, we’ll cover the nature of rhythm and how we can give ourselves the time and space to take a few deep breaths and reflect on who we truly want to be and how we truly want to feel.
My quietness doesn’t have to be immense silence. It can be listening to music that soothes or uplifts me. It’s present when lifting weights or going for a long walk. It appears while stretching my weary legs to alleviate the strain on my lower spine. My quietness glistens in a glance at the moon or in a warm shower. Calm stillness finds me when writing a poem or journaling. Quietness and breath expand within me when I am creating.
And, quietness occurs when I spend time with our pets. It seems the only boundary I typically have around reaching my inner calm is only one human is present: me.
If any of the above work for you, or you think they could, there’s no harm in giving any of them a shot. I’m learning the older I get, the more I want to learn to enjoy life. Enjoy myself for being myself. I want to feel what I feel and know what that feeling is - where I feel it, its intensity, and then name it. I want quicker and deeper access to my own peace and joy. That begins with learning to identify these emotions when they present themselves. Apparently, there are way more feelings than just anger and shame.
I know that now and I’m hopeful about my ability to self-soothe and regulate. It takes a lot of unlearning and learning new things. I have to possess even more willingness to continue trying in the face of failure or discontent.
It takes a level of exhaustive awareness at first, which titrates down over a long course of seasons. Emotion regulation seems as though it should be…easy. And maybe it is, for some people. I’m not one of those people and you’re not crazy if you can’t keep your shit together, either. The good news is, we can learn these skills because we are here and curious.
And we get to do it together.
If you observe a really happy man, you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under the radiator.
-W. Béran Wolfe
Emotional regulation is the most difficult thing a human can learn in my opinion. There is an interesting line in a tibetan buddhist text that says, "the hundred moods of peace and wrath". It is pointing to the idea that all emotions can transform into enlightened mind. Of course, I always need to joke about this line when I come across it!
Great article, Adrian!!!!!!! I always leave your writings having learned and with new ideas to contemplate.