Learn to accept your emotions

 

Quotes from the book " Managing dissociation of traumatic origin " (Boon, Steele & Van der Hart, 2014):

"Emotions are part of the basic functions of the human being. These function as indicators and help us in decision-making . They function as signals to behave in a certain way in given situations. feeling of love helps deepen contact with someone we care about; fear helps us avoid dangerous situations; joy stimulates us to seek out pleasant experiences. Emotions play an important role to incite us to a behavior which satisfies our needs and which helps us to reach a specific goal.

Certain emotions are an automatic reaction to something happening in our environment . Other emotions are a reaction to your own thoughts, actions and feelings (shame about feeling sad, guilt about being angry).

Emotions are strongly linked to our thoughts, our actions, our sensory experiences and the way we perceive the world. These influence and activate each other continuously , which creates a series (or circle) of experiences. "

 

In the sect in which I grew up, I did not learn to manage and identify, recognize my emotions . Certain emotions like fear, or anxiety were perceived as bad and harmful , it meant a lack of faith in God and in "providence" (the fact that God hears us and will provide for our needs by the action of our prayers ). Often, we lacked money or food ... the guru said that it was enough to pray and that God would give us what we needed. And if it was not given to us, it was because we did not really need it or was shown as a sign of god to test our faith in him. On several occasions, we children had to pray in the chapel to ask what everyone needed because "children's prayers go straight to heaven". A kind of responsibility was placed on our shoulders. If we hadn't prayed enough, it was our fault that we didn't have to eat ...

 

Our fear and anguish were denied. Some of the people we greeted were dangerous, our parents' fear and concern for our safety were swept away with the back of my hand, God protected us. I have witnessed (seen or heard) many scenes of violence, knife fights, suicides, deaths, mentally ill people who "blew a lead" ... All that this could generate in me as anxiety was denied seeing ridiculed . I had to welcome and love "the poor" as God did ... Being afraid meant that I was selfish, not tolerant, that I was not good because I did not love my neighbor.

 

My family was sent to live in a third world country to replace another family (whose parents were doctors and nurses!) Even after their daughter had just died from a tropical disease! The death of this child was the will of God, we were not to be afraid. In the same country, there was a fairly serious civil war for several years with hundreds of deaths. We were not repatriated ... Or in any case, when we returned to France it was not for this reason.

 

Certain emotions were prohibited : anger for example.

All the people who got angry were publicly reprimanded, we prayed for them in the chapel so that their evil inclination, the demon in them would go away. If they persisted, they were punished in one way or another. Either they were shelved in another house and lost their "status" in the sect (demoted), or they were sent to a very poor and dangerous country to test their faith in God. If the anger was directed against the gurus, they were banished and had to leave, they no longer existed, we should no longer talk about them. My father was very angry and we had to move a lot because of this. We suffered the material and physical consequences.

 

I have not learned to interpret other people's emotions and intentions correctly . Because these emotions were taboo, no one named them when I felt them or helped me channel them. They simply should not exist. So I learned very young to avoid feeling these emotions, to deny their existence in me, to keep them hidden inside me ...

 

I also have a great fear related to this prohibition to express them to lose control if I do so. The impression that if I allow myself the right to feel this emotion, it will be like a huge tidal wave that will overwhelm me and that I could no longer stop it, that it will suffocate me, will kill me ...

 

My different parts divided the "roles" : some parts carried fear, anger, anxiety, rage and remained hidden internally, repressed ... Others felt nothing and interacted externally to conform to the group and to his expectations.

 

Psychologists speak of a " tolerance window " of emotions: DIDs feel either too much or not enough or not at all. There are no in between.

 

To manage this "tolerance window", two skills must be called upon: self-regulation and relational regulation .

Self-regulation is acquired little by little while growing up. We learn to listen to our emotions and to satisfy our own needs, we realize what makes us good and what makes us bad. In the community, listening to yourself, being attentive to your own needs was forbidden and very frowned upon. So I learned very little about this skill. Relational regulation is acquired in early childhood. A crying baby will be comforted by his parents, if he is hungry he will be fed, if he is afraid he will be reassured. Little by little he will learn to turn to the other to express his feelings and needs. Likewise, this skill is very difficult for me to apply because expressing my fears and needs was highly criticized in the sect and could have serious consequences.

 

Over-activation : it is feeling too much, excessively.

"The characteristic of certain dissociative parts of your personality is their continual excessive feeling, because they are trapped in traumatic experiences and submerged, for example by anxiety, pain and shame. This is what we call the over-activation. "

 

under-activation : it is the fact of feeling nothing or very little.

"Sometimes you don't feel excessively, but rather" too little ". We call it under-activation. We talk about under-activation if you (or parts of your personality) avoid them in response to intense emotions. not to feel very little or practically nothing at all. They are not or very little aware of the presence or existence of these other parts (the parts that feel too much). When they are, they show little or no understanding of them. Some experiences are bad and should be avoided. This avoidance behavior contributes greatly to the maintenance of dissociation. "

 

DID people are either over-activated or under-activated . Generally when I feel that my anger is rising or that I feel shame or anxiety, very quickly I "switch" into a part that no longer feels anything, which is indifferent, as if I were in a cotton veil which protects me from all internal or external noise, from all thoughts deemed "negative" or from all sensations.

 

Anger

I have a group of parties called "anger". It took me a long time to accept them as part of me and my thoughts and feelings. When I was angry, I felt like it was not coming from me, that this anger belonged to someone else and I put it aside, dumb.

 

I have two "types" of angry games: defensive and those imitating my attackers .

 

My "angry-defensive" parts are always on the alert, they are hyper-vigilant and try to decrypt and constantly identify in my environment the danger signs. they are always ready to protect me, to attack or fight. This is their survival strategy, their existential goal.

 

My "anger-imitating aggressor" parts express themselves only internally, their strategy and their anger is turned against me only. When they were created, these parties attempted a survival strategy with my attackers. This defense strategy failed, I either suffered a lot more (was beaten or punished with more violence), or the number of my attackers increased. They therefore have the function of preventing me from repeating this action because they learned that it put me in danger. They learned that showing their vulnerability or weaknesses led to more trauma and violence. They integrated all my failures in my attempts to call for help so for them all hope is vain, you should not trust anyone. They therefore fight on a daily basis as soon as another party tries one of these approaches by threatening internally, by making them suffer internally, reproducing the voice and the ways of acting and being of my aggressors.

 

It took me a long time to accept and tolerate this type of part as part of me and of my feelings. For a long time these parts felt very alone and hated by the other parts of me. I believed at certain times that a part of my attackers was in me, that their defilement had permeated me so much that they entered my mind and lived there in a certain way, continuing to threaten and threaten me. To make suffer. Now I know that these parts are good, that they did it for a good reason: my protection and my safeguard. A dialogue has taken place and little by little they are changing the way they protect me.

 

My anger often masks other emotions such as grief or shame or guilt. Often I felt a lot of anger when I heard parts crying inside. For some parties it is dangerous and ashamed to be angry, while for others it is dangerous and harmful to be vulnerable. This is followed by incessant inner struggles ... Seeing the anger in someone else is a trigger for some of my parts who suffered the anger of my father and the destructive rage of my attackers.

 

The anxiety :

Anxiety is a life-saving emotion, it signals the need to implement survival strategies.

 

This is what some of my parts do: "the dreamers".

 

I have a game, for example, when I'm driving which makes me "see" in the form of waking dreams all possible accidents and what could happen to me. When I double a truck, I see myself banging its blanks and making a barrel on the side, so I am hyper-vigilant. I have never had a car accident.

 

When I left my ex-husband, the "dreamers" showed me in the form of waking dreams all that my ex-husband could do, all that could happen if I lost custody of my children ... I was therefore already prepared for the worst and I was "ready" to absorb the shock and not to collapse if it happened. They did the same with my attackers, they anticipated their possible actions so that my emotional and bodily shock from the trauma was less intense.

 

But these inner strategies have a high price to pay, it's like I have an interminable alarm signal that rings all over my body all the time! My boss calls me in his office? In a fraction of a second, all the possibilities are swept away and all the reactions to have are planned: he will fire me, he will yell, he will hurt me ...

 

But these strategies turn out to be inappropriate in the present!

 

In my past, they were effective, they allowed me to survive, to anticipate, to absorb the shock ... In my present, as they are automatic (since I had to use them all my childhood and my adolescence and part of my adult life) I cannot perceive the signals that show me that I am safe.

 

My boss is a good man, he has no inappropriate gestures, he is satisfied with my work and trusts me, he gives me responsibilities ...

 

I find it very difficult to distance myself from someone's anger, not to take it for myself, directed against me ... I find it very difficult to hear and perceive that a person may be angry because that she is tired or upset by something external to me.

 

And when I am confronted with violence as I could be after my separation from my ex-husband (at work or in a couple), I tend to "switch" into parts that do not feel anxiety and have the phobia to feel it. So I tend to ignore the signs of danger and violence completely and minimize the impact.

 

Shame and guilt

Guilt is a form of shame linked to our actions, while shame concerns the "being" of the person.

 

I feel a lot of shame about myself, what I am, and a lot of shame about what I went through. I feel dirty, stained to the bottom of my soul.

 

To this is added the murderous sentences of my rapists "it's your fault if I do this, you wanted it, you provoked it, you like it, it turns you on ...", and the threats that they could have done to me "I'm going to kill you, I'm going to kill your parents, I'm going to hurt them ...". I have a deep-rooted feeling that I do not deserve affection, that I have no value ... The guru blamed my parents for the death of my sister, he told them that it was the punishment given by God to repair a fault they had committed. I survived and I carried the weight for a long time. My father once told me that I was not his daughter, that he did not recognize me. I shouldn't have existed ...

 

The strategies that can be put in place to deal with shame and guilt can be different depending on the victims:

• attack yourself,

• attack others,

• avoid inner experience,

• isolate oneself

 

Added to this is the fact that many of my parties do not realize that I was a child during rape and violence. They do not understand that I had a child's body, the strength of a child facing the superiority of an adult and feel responsible. They mistakenly think that I could have struggled louder, I could have screamed louder ... forgetting and obscuring everything that made it happen.