Tag Archives: Emotions

Everyday Triggers and Survivors

Many survivors, including myself, finds it difficult to manage their emotions.  That may sound a little strange manging your emotions don’t they just happen after all? Don’t we just experience them?

Well yes and no. You see most people live within a fairly tight emotional boundary, usually not to happy or too sad, too excited or too bored. These everyday emotions can it seems often even go unnoticed until somebody else mentions them, the “you look a bit down today, is everything OK” type conversation

The majority of people have learnt, in very much the same way people learn to walk or to talk, buy living the experience, as children, in an environment that allows them to both experience the emotions in a safe space but also one the by its nature helps to moderate the emotional swings. Parents calm the scared child and excide the bored one.

For survivors of childhood abuse, particularly those where the abuse happened within the family setting, the story is sadly very different. Often, we never felt that safe guiding hand, the calming voice or touch so in alter life emotional responses can be far from regulated.

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Where can you stand if your foundations are broken?

One of the things I have been asked to do recently is to try and identify what emotions accompany the emotional storms.  Some of you may ask what is an emotional storm, if so don’t worry I suspect this blog post isn’t for you.

I found the task surprisingly difficult, In the throws of the storm it is almost impossible to actually identify the dominant emotion and put a name to it, or it is at least for me. The storm feels just like a super enhanced version of how I normally feel so trying to identify an emotion driving the storm is a bit like trying to find a needle that’s 10 times the normal size in a haystack that is also 10 x the normal size. The needle might be ten times as long and ten times as wide but so is the haystack so its actually 100 times a big! I was simply swamped with the size of the emotion that even a needle ten times the size was way too small to ever find.

But eventually, but repeatedly letting my self go to the edge, to the place where I stop being me, A few episodes of self-harm to bring myself back again, I think I found the key emotion. Fear

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