I made a couple of steps this week.  I have primary diagnoses, and also secondary features/symptoms of other disorders.  The primary diagnoses have been easier for me to see and accept.  Some of the others are harder to see and admit in myself.  My recent relative stability has allowed me to look back and identify and accept some of my other issues.  Ugh.  Not fun, but it opens a new door to further learning, which I always appreciate.  (Really!)

Two minor things happened.  Someone delayed a walk we had planned, and an arrangement I’d made with someone didn’t sit with me well.  I realized I was feeling angry, resentful, and defensive.  It’s a new experience to identify these emotions while they are happening.  I know when I’m having a hard/bad day, but often either my emotional/mental state snowballs quickly and I can’t think clearly, or it’s not that severe, but I can’t really sort out my emotions until much later.  It was actually a small shock, realizing that I was able to identify I was in that state (this has been true on and off for some time now), and to be able to actually name emotions while I was experiencing them.

Naming emotions while I am experiencing them gives me more power over my situation.  I experience a fair amount of emotional dysregulation, both due to PTSD and to some of my secondary diagnoses.  Healthy emotional regulation has been a goal in therapy and in my self-education.  The severity of the dysregulation has decreased markedly over the last six months, for which I am very grateful.  Reading about this challenge in the context of diagnoses other than PTSD has really shed new light on how I can approach and understand these states.  (I think that increased stability also has readied me to understand things further.)

For those not familiar with the term emotional dysregulation, it is basically the inability to experience and move through emotions in a socially acceptable way.  People with average emotional regulation = getting into a car, driving through a storm on the way to your destination, doing all that you need to deal with that storm and the dangers, and then arriving safely, eventually, at your destination.  Emotional dysregulation = getting into a car, beginning to drive, suddenly having someone intense and desperate put a knife to your throat and threaten you — while also screaming to tell you where and how to drive, crashing the car to try to end the situation, and arriving at your destination late, traumatized, and bleeding.

Emotional dysregulation is like having emotions (especially negative ones) hijack my brain.  I’m gradually learning tools I can use to identify what is happening, name the players, use negotiation skills of sorts, and arrive back in calm/stable land without disrupting so much of my life.  It is definitely a hard journey worth taking.