Stop Overreacting Page 3
Self-Awareness
When it comes to self-awareness, there is a wide spectrum of ability. At one end, there are people who seem to have easy access to a full range of responses. They can identify dozens of different feeling states and can even sort through a combination of different feelings that are operating at the same time. At the other end of the scale, there are people who seem completely cut off from feeling-state awareness and instead only register the facts. They may have intense emotional reactions, but they have little or no ability to describe or even focus on the way that they feel before or during the event. They can tell you what they think but not what they feel.
Once again, the connections between different parts of the brain seem to make all the difference. Researchers have identified the brain processes that help us connect emotional reactions with working memory and language (Viamontes and Beitman 2006). Other researchers have examined the neural circuits that connect the parts of the brain that generate emotion-based impulses with the parts that store the working memory we rely on to make sound decisions (LaBar and Cabeza 2006). Without the ability to think about how our emotional responses will impact our future, our judgment is simply not there to guide us.
Many rash actions that we deeply regret are created when impulses generated in the amygdala can not be processed by particular parts of our brains. However, it is possible to strengthen the necessary connections so that recognizing, naming, and weighing consequences can work together more smoothly.
Dylan’s Story
Dylan liked to think of himself as a happy-go-lucky kind of guy. In fact, most of his friends would describe him that way. He was the first one to tell a joke and had a knack for making other people laugh. When his friends complained about work or minor health problems, Dylan would know exactly what to say to help them find the humorous side and shift their mood. The two exceptions to this were golf and parenting. Dylan was an excellent golfer and usually went through the round with a grin on his face. But if he flubbed a shot or couldn’t get out of a sand trap, he would curse in a loud voice that made everyone uncomfortable. If he had a few bad shots in a row, he would throw his club, and once he even threw his whole golf bag into a creek. This temper problem was even worse at home. If the kids didn’t listen to him, he would shout in a very loud voice and threaten to take away all of their privileges. He started therapy after he took a swing at his ten-year-old son. Fortunately, his son ducked the blow, but he might have been seriously injured if his father’s fist had connected. Dylan’s wife said that if he didn’t start therapy immediately, she would call the police and Child Protective Services.
In therapy, Dylan said that he just didn’t know what had come over him. He claimed that he was perfectly calm one minute and then would feel so enraged that he would start to shake. His face would turn red, and he would do whatever came to his mind. Dylan was surprised to hear that he could learn to measure anger by paying attention to different parts of his body and that, even if his rage mounted quickly, he could notice how his stomach, neck, and throat felt when the anger first started. Dylan was also curious about my observation that he seemed particularly reactive to situations where he was made to feel incompetent. His son’s defiance had made him feel that he had no control over his child’s behavior and that his son was going to walk all over him. Feeling diminished and incapable of getting it right were important triggers that unleashed powerful childhood memories.
Although Dylan started from the position that he had no control over or explanation for his anger or why he just lost it, he had plenty of memories of running away from his dad, who was also prone to episodes of rage. When Dylan was able to understand how sensitive memories could cause his interpretation of events to be magnified, he was able to learn to warn himself when he started to feel powerless or diminished. That, combined with his ability to recognize anger when it started, helped him learn to remove himself from the situation until he could regain his calm, separate his current experience from the emotional memories that were causing him to overreact, and use his better judgment.
Processing Emotions
Perhaps you, like many others, have been trying to learn ways to understand and manage your feelings. Getting information from books and articles is definitely a first step, but reading by itself seldom yields immediate results. Why? Like other things that are stored in our memory bank, that vital information simply may be bypassed once the amygdala takes over. Research suggests that information is processed and retained in a part of the brain that may not be available at the moment when intense emotions are triggered (Cyders and Smith 2008; Ochsner and Gross 2007). Even if you have acquired new information that could be useful to you, you won’t have access to it during an overreaction unless you can calm yourself enough to access it. During peak emotional experiences, self-awareness is possible only when the circuits in the brain allow the emotional and logical parts to inform each other.
Parents’ Roles in Creating Neural Pathways
It probably won’t surprise you to learn that therapists are very interested in researching the processes that help create optimal neural pathways. The way that parents respond to their children’s emotional distress seems particularly important. Level of security is another key ingredient that helps children cultivate pathways between the thinking and feeling parts of the brain (Cicchetti and Tucker 1994; deZulueta 2006). Children who are soothed by responsive parents and given the kind of consistent home life that allows them to trust their caretakers are better prepared to cope with potentially distressing situations than children who are ignored or criticized when they need comforting.
Children whose parents help them to regain their calm have a distinct advantage over children whose parents become overly anxious and worried themselves. Children’s feelings of being protected and joined in the process of resolving a problem help create a sense of trust and safety. The ideal parenting response allows children to talk about problems and share feelings without being rebuffed or overwhelmed by their parents’ response. Parents who become agitated or take on their children’s anxieties are only adding to their children’s belief that feelings are dangerous. Rather than absorb a child’s emotional state, parents need to soothe the child and then help the child sort out feelings, fears, and possible solutions (D. J. Siegel and Hartzell 2003).
Brenda’s Story
When I started to work with Brenda, I was concerned about her health. In the previous year she had suffered from several infections, severe headaches, and a back spasm that had confined her to bed for a week. She was very thin and told me that she frequently suffered from gastrointestinal distress and irritable bowel syndrome. As the mother of two preschool children and a ten-year-old with Tourette syndrome, she was under a lot of stress. I quickly learned that there were financial and marital problems as well. Brenda had quite a few friends she could choose to talk with, but often she kept her feelings to herself.
I asked Brenda to tell me about her parents and whether they had been interested in helping her handle her stress when she was younger. It turned out that Brenda’s mother had been too interested in trying to help her daughter. If Brenda started to talk to her mother about being chastised by a teacher or excluded from a friend’s party, her mother would react to the situation as if she had been unfairly reprimanded or left out. Rather than respond to her daughter’s feelings, her mother would get upset and start to swear and threaten to do all kinds of rash things that frightened Brenda. Her mother’s agitation could last for hours, until the positions were reversed and Brenda ended up trying to calm down her mother. These kinds of experiences taught Brenda that it was more burdensome to unload her feelings than to keep them private. The cost of having to take care of her mother and her fear that her feelings could lead to more serious problems convinced her to keep her feelings to herself.
Shutdown
Genetic predisposition, temperament, and situational factors all contribute to the level of distress a child experiences. But a c
hild who is in a state of agitation or protest and can’t be soothed will only remain in a state of acute distress for so long. Sooner or later, the level of emotional intensity escalates to an unbearable physiological tension that leads her to shut down (Krystal 1988; van der Kolk, McFarlane, and Weisaeth 1996). The process of numbing the self or completely tuning out the stress is basically a strategy for immediate psychological survival, but one that creates neural circuitry that works against the integration of thoughts and feelings.
Nancy’s Story
Nancy was the youngest child born to parents who were miserable in their marriage. By the time Nancy was born, her parents slept in separate bedrooms, and her mother was bitter that her life was confined to a husband she no longer respected and to children who seemed unappreciative of what she had to offer them. For most of her childhood, Nancy was on her own, getting little solace or comfort from her self-absorbed parents. She learned to take care of herself and to focus on the things she could control.
Nancy excelled at school and sports and had a small group of friends who had similar interests. She preferred to keep busy and had little patience for people who wallowed in self-pity. She rarely asked for help and was proud of her self-sufficiency. Things almost fell apart for her the day after she accepted her boyfriend’s marriage proposal. In an effort to clear the air, he had confessed to her that despite an earlier promise to be sexually exclusive, he had remained sexually involved with a former girlfriend. Nancy was momentarily overpowered by dizziness, but she said nothing. When the room stopped spinning, she decided to call her closest girlfriend. As her friend listened to Nancy’s factual description, she expressed amazement that Nancy wasn’t furious or in tears. Nancy’s logical approach to the situation seemed cold and calculating and was completely devoid of feelings.
When her friend asked how she was feeling, Nancy answered in her typically calm and collected way that her read on the situation was that she should go ahead with the wedding plans. She focused on the fact that because he had chosen to confide his infidelity, nothing was seriously wrong. For the next few months, Nancy found that by keeping extra busy, she could prevent those momentary twinges of doubt and stay optimistic that the future would be just fine.
Nancy is an imploder: she represses her emotions rather than lashing out with them. When she first learned about her boyfriend’s infidelity, she was flooded with anxiety. However, rather than understand her reaction of becoming light-headed as a signal of strong emotions, she shut down entirely from her feeling world. When her friend asked her how she was feeling, she simply stated the facts as she saw them. Because there was no place in her learned experience from childhood for self-pity or self-doubt, she repackaged the information in a way that allowed her to feel secure and in control. Later she would come to see how she had glossed over information that should have been more thoughtfully processed. Shutting down leads to an illusion that things are under control, but at a considerable expense. The numbing leads to a deadening of emotional life and prevents us from dealing with problems that need to be addressed. Although an implosion may look less disruptive than a meltdown, there is a similar rupture between thoughts and feelings that leaves us unable to fully process and respond to the situation.
Creating Options
Being able to process feelings is a key ingredient to knowing yourself and to empathizing or understanding someone else’s feelings. Even if you didn’t grow up in a family that was emotionally attuned, it is never too late for you to develop new neural pathways. Regardless of your age and childhood experiences, you have the potential to build new mechanisms for processing emotions. Every time you are able to talk about your emotional experience with someone who cares and consider an emotionally charged situation from multiple perspectives, you are developing new circuits between the left and right parts of your brain (D. J. Siegel 1999).
Important pathways can also be created by strengthening connections from top to bottom. Neuroscience research has shown that impulsive and scattered responses are generated by the lower areas of the brain (Cyders and Smith 2008). By asking ourselves about consequences and searching stored memory for lessons we may have learned, we activate the higher areas of the brain responsible for planning and executing complex strategies (Farmer 2009). The networks between left and right and top and bottom can be strengthened through practice. With this in mind, know that it is never too late to learn how to become more attuned and tolerant of feelings. Learning that this is possible is one of the most promising new developments of recent decades, and it can help you learn to understand and overcome overreactions.
Developing Emotional Awareness
We all have different emotional comfort zones. When a powerful emotion overcomes us, we may be so overwhelmed that our first response is to run away from the experience through numbing, shutting down, seeking distractions, or using anger to expel it. However, the process of identifying and naming the emotion can stimulate the left-brain–right-brain circuits and point us in the right direction.
Many psychologists have suggested that it is easier to work with feelings after you learn how to approach them. I have worked with many intelligent, successful people who have learned to survive through their skill at analyzing problems, but whose overreliance on thinking is accompanied by an underreliance on feeling. A rational stance that doesn’t incorporate feelings won’t make you happy or fulfilled and very often creates problems in relationships.
I explain to my clients that their years spent thinking about problems can be compared to developing expertise in hiking and navigating hilly terrain. Some have become accomplished mountain climbers and have acquired the boots, ropes, and ice axes that help them excel. But in this analogy, their feeling world is the water, and they must now learn to swim. Their mountaineering gear will not help them here—and will likely hold them back.
Learning to swim requires new skills and the confidence that you can learn to do it. Experiencing emotions might be uncomfortable, but the discomfort is short-lived and unlikely to cause any harm. If you were emotionally overwhelmed when you were a child, you might automatically become anxious when your emotions begin to stir. But by spending time learning to identify and explore your feeling world, you will become less uncomfortable and more curious when you find yourself becoming emotional.
To learn how to tolerate feelings, you will need to learn how to identify them. I have organized feeling states in ways that may help you dig a little deeper and stretch your awareness.
When you feel angry, you may also be feeling
afraid
aggravated
agitated
annoyed
appalled
betrayed
bitter
cranky
disappointed
disgusted
exasperated
frustrated
helpless
hostile
irritated
jealous
let down
nervous
offended
pessimistic
provoked
repulsed
riled
tense
vicious
When you feel happy, you may also be feeling
accomplished
amused
charmed
cheerful
delighted
elated
enthusiastic
excited
glad
joyful
peppy
proud
validated
When you are content, you may also be feeling
appreciative
calm
fortunate
reflective
relaxed
soothed
When you feel hurt, you may also be feeling
cheated
defeated
deprived
deserted
diminished
forgotten
insulted
<
br /> isolated
lonely
neglected
persecuted
slighted
snubbed
upset
When you feel inadequate, you may also be feeling
diminished
helpless
incompetent
inferior
pessimistic
powerless
useless
The first step in connecting brain circuits is to become attuned to your emotional world. When you read a word that represents a feeling, you are using your intellectual understanding and activating your left brain. To become comfortable with the feeling world, it is important to register the physical and emotional experience that occurs in your right brain so that you can comprehend what you are feeling in that moment. The process of knowing your feelings is such a fundamental and necessary part of learning to stop overreacting that several exercises are presented here to get you started.
Take a closer look at each word in the preceding lists of feelings. Ask yourself if you can remember a time when you experienced each feeling. Dr. Beth Jacobs (2004) suggests that starting a journal for writing exercises is a wonderful way to help you get acquainted with different feelings during times that you are relaxed. To expand awareness and tolerance, Dr. Jacobs recommends tackling each feeling, one at a time, in your journal or notebook. She suggests one exercise that is designed to help you understand that feelings occur in increments: Concentrate on one feeling and write about a time when you felt that way slightly. Then write about a time when you had a more intense experience with that feeling. Finally, write about a time when you felt that way very strongly. We sometimes need to remind ourselves that not all feelings occur in the extreme and that, even if they feel dangerous in the moment, we can tolerate them once we create a safe distance.