Month: April 2017

Emotional dysregulation in action

So far it looks like no one is reading this so I guess this is more of an online journal than anything else. Slightly disappointing but I guess it does relieve one of my fears, which was about putting my self and my experiences out there and having people troll me about it. 


Anyway, its been a rough couple of days. I’ve been severely emotionally dysregulated, as my psychologist would say. Not only are my emotions all over the place but my brain is spinning, my thoughts are racing, I’ve been talking faster and a whole lot more than normal, and I flipped into bouts of hysterical laughing yesterday. I’m not getting a lot of sleep and that is making things all the more difficult to deal with, and my feet/ankles/legs and the rest of me is swelling with edema.

Yesterday I had my weekly psychologist appointment and something triggered and I started laughing and couldn’t stop. I wasn’t talking about anything funny, I was discussing how I had cried when I was trying to comfort a crying colleague at work. My laughing went on and on and I just couldn’t stop. This is the strangest feeling and I guess it must have been very odd for my therapist too. He pointed out how my laughing didn’t match the emotion of the situation, which I knew and of course is a classic BPD symptom. But there wasn’t anything I could do about it – uncontrollable, hyterical laughter just kept bubbling up in me and bursting out. Then I would gain a little bit of control back and either start crying or laugh again. That went on for a good half an hour.

I’ve got multiple symptoms at the moment, the ones I mentioned above is just the physical side of things. I am obsessing over buying a doll for my daughter – she’s been wanting a doll like her favourite book character Fancy Nancy has, which I guess the equivalent is either like a porcelain doll or an American Girl type doll. Both of which are out of my price range. So I’ve been obsessively researching other options. Not sure why – it’s not her birthday or Christmas, and she has plenty of toys to play with. She doesn’t need another doll and it’s likely to be only a passing whim anyway. But the idea has taken hold in my head and won’t let go. I have trouble managing my money for this reason. Because I get obssessed with whatever my latest idea is and despite my wise mind knowing better, I either buy a whole lot of it (art supplies) or very expensive things that I feel terrible guilt over because we didn’t really need them. 

My compulsive buying also happens if I go shopping in this kind of a mood. At the time I tell myself I deserve a treat or my daughter needs it/wants it, or I have this really good idea that I just need supplies for. But the guilt often kicks in as soon as I walked out of the shop. I’m also a frustrated minimalist at heart so it annoys me that I’ve brought more things to put in my house that I will have to deal with. Then I feel ashamed that I can’t control my spending.

I’ve also been annoyed this afternoon as my case manager (part of my psychiatric outpatient team) moved my appointment from 10.30am to 10am on Monday. Part of the annoyance is that she is always moving my appointments around, this happens regularly, and I feel like some sort of second class citizen she can just shove aside when it suits. Then she also made a comment about having someone else coming in at 11am and I could keep my original appointment of 10.30am if I felt I would be ‘done and dusted’ by 11. I am not sure why this comment filled me with rage but it did. And all day I have felt like ringing and saying “stuff ya bloody appointment then, I don’t want it anyway”, and cancelling. I have not been able to let this go and yet I know I am being irrational.

I had a big argument with Little G’s dad last night when he came to drop her off. It started with a minor issue over payment of swimming fees, and quickly escalated from there. I am annoyed about him taking her to church as I am not religious at all and he didn’t ask me before he did it. This has been going on for weeks but my family said to leave it, that it wasnt worth fighting over and that there were worse places he could be taking her. So I’ve been biting my tounge but when the swimming fees thing came out I brought it up. Big mistake. The minor issue decended into a big argument over custody and my mental health and whether I was fit and well enough to look after our daughter.

He threatened to take me to Court and take Little G from me. Currently we have a court order in place (he went for full custody when we split when she was a baby) saying I have day to day care and specifying which days he has access. But he threatened to go to Court and get that overturned because of my mental illness. Unfortunately I know the Family Court don’t look kindly on mothers who have been on the psychiatric ward, no matter how good the care was that the child got while I was there. And while I’ve done the right thing in putting a support worker in place for her I had to do that because she was not dealing well with my having been hospitalised, which won’t look good to the Courts either. The fear that something might happen and the thoughts about being a terrible parent are swirling around in my head right now.

So all this, plus various other stressors, no sleep and work stuff going on means I am in a very vulnerable place right now. The potential for things to go pear shaped is pretty high. I know this is when I am supposed to switch from distress tolerance into my crisis plan but I have thoughts going around in my head about how it would be easier and feel better to drink and cut. I don’t want to talk to my family tomorrow or tell them how bad things are because I feel like that’s all I do. I lean on them a lot at the moment and I don’t want to. 

I need to concentrate on the basics which are eat, sleep and exercise. Hopefully this wekend I can be more sensible about getting these done and pull things back from the brink.

BPD and me – Emotional dysregulation

It’s been a really long time since I wrote and a lot has happened in that time. I stopped writing when I ended up on the psychiatric ward twice in March, and it’s taken a while to recover.
I am planning to write about what happened and the last two months, but in the mean time here is the first part of a series of posts I have written called BPD and me.

BPD and me
BPD at it’s core is behaviour that alternates between extremes. My emotions often feel like I am stuck in the middle of a storm, being pulled this way and that. My emotions appear out of nowhere and can go from 0 to 100 in 2 seconds flat. I often don’t know what’s triggered the strong emotion in the moment, and it’s taken me a long time to figure out how to pin point the trigger. Because I have no control over my emotions I also feel like I have no control over the behaviour I have in reaction to them. The wild, angry, impulsive behaviour is an attempt to gain control over the emotion. I am aware that I can be full of rage, unpredictable and volatile. And I am ashamed by it and always vow to do better. Then I get triggered again and the same cycle repeats. I am not deliberately trying to hurt or upset anyone.
Borderline Personality Disorder basically means I exhibit a chronic pattern of behaviours based in my personality, which essentially means they affect everything: moods, actions and relationships. There are 9 main diagnostic criteria and a number of subgroups of the disorder. This means no one person with BPD is alike.
Extra sensitive and highly reactive emotions – Emotional dysregulation
I have emotional dysregulation which means I am at the mercy of my highly tuned emotional system all the time. It’s like taking a bath in boiling water that everyone else insists is lukewarm. You might feel a twinge of irritation but an emotionally dysregulated person feels instant rage. Something that might make you feel slightly embarrassed might send me off to drink shots of vodka and/or cut myself to obliterate the feeling of overwhelming shame.
People with BPD have emotions that come up quickly and change quickly. I can flip from laughing and happy to shame and then anger and then sadness in a very short space of time and those emotions are very intense.

My emotions can also last for a lot longer than other people’s do. A vivid memory for me is going to the movies to see ‘The Book Thief’. If you’ve seen it you know it is a sad movie but not probably the saddest you’ve ever seen. For me, I was so overwhelmed with emotion that I cried for two solid hours afterwards. So hard that I burst blood vessels in my eye. At one point I struggled to breathe because I was crying so hard. I ended up having to drive to my parents house and they sat one on each side of me, holding on to me while I had a big meltdown over it. I remember Dad being so baffled, he kept asking me what was wrong and I just kept repeating the movie was so sad. He said “But you’ve seen sad movies before….’. Yes, I have, and they don’t all do that to me. But on that day, that one triggered extreme emotions in me and I didn’t have the capacity to deal with it.
Shame is something I feel very strongly and is a big trigger for me. It reinforces those experiences from my childhood that taught me that there was something wrong with me. In the scenario above, I felt a huge amount of shame for over reacting so much to a movie. It wasn’t that my parents did anything wrong. But my Dad’s confusion triggered shame in me, because I felt that my reaction was wrong or bad as it was so out of proportion. I didn’t understand why I was so emotional, and neither did they. Through this misunderstanding I felt invalidated and very deeply shamed by the strength of my emotional outpouring. It took me a long time to understand that invalidating experiences can be ones like these where people I love are trying to help me and inadvertently reinforcing my negative self beliefs. And this comes back to my being extra sensitive – my emotions are dysregulated, therefore my reactions are quick, intense and out of proportion to what others would do. People’s confused reactions can invalidate my experiences (Like the bath – it’s not that hot, its only lukewarm, what is your problem?!) and cause shame, which perpetuates the cycle.

Sometimes I can appear emotionless as I have learnt to squash my emotional sensitivity in certain situations because of the disastrous consequences that it has had in the past. Subconsciously I’ve learnt “emotions are bad, I shouldn’t have them” and so when I have big emotions I try and suppress them which usually results in an eruption at a later date. Often this will happen in the context of work, where something will trigger me but I will try and not react till I am ‘safe’ at home. When my daughter was younger (and even now) I tried to avoid letting her see me cry. So I suppressed anything upsetting. For a long time (years) this meant I couldn’t cry. I’d done such a good job at suppressing upsetting emotions that they came out as anger and rage and impulsive actions rather than sadness and tears. This ultimately is what lead to my biggest major depressive episode aka ‘my breakdown’ in 2013.

In my next post I will explore another of the subgroups of the disorder.

Until next time….

Ka kite anō