Latest / It’s All Your Fault: High Conflict People / Big Emotions Explained: Understanding Emotion Dysregulation and BPD
Transcript
- Speaker 1 (00:05): Welcome to, it's All Your Fault On True Story fm, the one and only podcast dedicated to helping you identify and deal with the most challenging human interactions, those involving high conflict situations and the people involved in them. I'm Megan Hunter and I'm here with my co-host, bill Eddie. Speaker 2 (00:23): Hi everybody. Speaker 1 (00:24): And he's back from New Zealand, so welcome back Bill. Speaker 2 (00:27): Thanks a lot. Speaker 1 (00:28): We are the co-founders of the High Conflict Institute where we focus on training, consulting, coaching classes, and educational programs and methods, all to do with high conflict. In today's episode, we've been asked to talk about emotion dysregulation, which we could describe basically as big emotions and the inability to regulate emotions in particular associated with those with traits or even more with borderline personality disorder. Before we start, please send your questions to podcast@highconflictinstitute.com or on our website@highconflictinstitute.com slash podcast, and you'll also find all of the show notes and links there as well. All right, bill, so you had a little trip, you got to go trot over to New Zealand. How'd it go? Speaker 2 (01:25): Oh, it was great. It was totally a vacation and included a lot of hiking, which I like to do. Speaker 1 (01:33): Of course. And Speaker 2 (01:34): People ask me how do I cope with dealing with high conflict all the time? And I say one of the solutions is getting away from it all and getting into the great outdoors trees and rocks and flowers and birds and bees and all of that are really very inspiring and let us know the world kind of goes on regardless of what we do. And that was just great and getting up really high. They have some really high places. We were above the clouds with some of our hiking, but since it's summertime, it wasn't really cold, so it's great. Yeah, down there it was like August there, what's February here? So it just was a wonderful time. Speaker 1 (02:20): Nice. So were you north island or South Island? Speaker 2 (02:23): We spent a week on the north island and two weeks on the south island. And when I say I was actually with eight people, so there were four couples Speaker 1 (02:31): All survived Speaker 2 (02:33): Each Speaker 1 (02:34): What? Everyone survived, Speaker 2 (02:36): We all did all eight of us. It was great. No percent losses. Speaker 1 (02:41): Nice, nice. Well that's good. Yeah, I think it was an Emerson quote, I go to nature to soothe my soul and I guess you could add to that and cleanse my brain. Speaker 2 (02:54): Exactly. Speaker 1 (02:55): And there's just so much to be said for that. So welcome back. We missed you and we're glad you're back. So let's talk about big emotions, which it sounds like there was no one in your group of eight people with big, big emotions because if there were, I would say you would've been doing some fair amount of work and would've had maybe even a little bit of stress. Speaker 2 (03:17): No, what was really great is because of Zoom and Covid and all of that, I haven't spent three weeks almost every daytime, 8, 10, 12 hours a day with eight people. And it was really, really nice that no one was blaming each other. There was a couple minor hiccups and decisions where we should do this, no, we should do that. But nobody was screaming. I don't think anybody was crying. It was just nice. Speaker 1 (03:52): That's good. Speaker 2 (03:53): Our listeners need to know you can have nice times that there are a lot of reasonable people out there and that it's really wonderful to spend time with them. Speaker 1 (04:04): It is, and you definitely wouldn't want to plan a three week trip without some knowledge of the people that you're going to be with the whole time because those things really can blow up. And I've seen it, seen it many times, and so brief little day outings are a pretty good idea. Speaker 2 (04:21): Get to know people. I might add that everyone in this group I knew at least 30 years, so it really, we were well vetted. Yeah, Speaker 1 (04:33): If you don't know 'em by then, you're not going to know them. Speaker 2 (04:35): That's right. Speaker 1 (04:36): That's great. Speaker 2 (04:38): That's why we say wait a year if you're dating because you'll get to see everything. And I think we got to see everything, but it was in a reasonable range and it was just wonderful that way. Speaker 1 (04:51): Good, good, good. So let's talk about big emotions, particularly in association with borderline personality disorder. And I guess we should sort of start by explaining what that is. Essentially it's someone who has a difficult time in relationships and part of the disorder itself is this inability to regulate emotion. Would you say that's across the board Bill for everyone who's diagnosed with BPD? I Speaker 2 (05:22): Would say everyone I've met with BPD has an emotion regulation problem. Some of them more self-aware than others, but it seems to be the predominant symptom. And there was actually talk about 20 years ago of trying to rename it from borderline to emotion regulation disorder because that's really maybe the predominant symptom that you see with that. So I would say it's very consistent with that diagnosis. But to add something, some people say that borderline personality disorder really should be a post-traumatic stress disorder, that people with PTSD often have dysregulated emotions and that they don't necessarily have a personality disorder. I see those as two separate things and I think most clinicians and researchers do, but often in early childhood there was abuse, there may have been trauma and that may be a factor and I'm sure you're going to get into that. Speaker 1 (06:30): Yeah, but so emotion dysregulation disorder is probably a pretty good description of the disorder, but I don't think it, like you said, it doesn't cover it all. And I think does some of it come from genetics? I think it's probably likely that some does because there's often, or maybe all the time, a correlation with he emotional sensitivity, which is different from emotion dysregulation. Yes. Speaker 2 (06:58): Yeah. So sensitivity means what bothers you. Emotion regulation means what you put out. And so there's people that don't show emotion dysregulation or very sensitive emotionally feel like a pin cushion. Oh, that hurt, oh, that and experiencing things. But emotion regulation I think has a lot to do with the emotions you put out. And so there's some difference there. Speaker 1 (07:27): So that's interesting. So what you're putting out there is this is the big emotion that we're talking about that is outside regular emotion that most people have. We all have emotions across the spectrum, but people with borderlines seem to go very quickly into big emotions. They can be very regulated and then dysregulated. So what is causing that? I think it's extremely confusing to those from the outside who are just trying to figure this out and they're experiencing someone who has just rapid fire emotions and goes from a calm state to a very angry state and just hurling maybe some really awful things to someone else at that time. And just today I was explaining this to someone and holding up the right hemisphere of our plastic brains. I don't have mine with me here today. And it's like shaking a piggy bank and you're trying, there you go shake a piggy bank and you're trying to get the coins to drop out of the bottom of that little piggy bank and just all the stuff that's coming out is maybe curse words, I hate you. You are the devil, you are the worst. Just these kind of really awful things and it's just kind of all shaken around in there and it comes out in these moments of emotion dysregulation. So what makes it go so quickly into that state? Speaker 2 (08:52): My belief, a lot of reading but not there's always more to know. First of all is I think there are some genetic tendencies and some people may be born with really the framework for borderline personality disorder. And we see this in families with several children and one has this and the others don't. It's the same parenting, the same environment. Everything's the same except one person has these tendencies. So I think there are some genetic tendencies at birth. Marshall Lanahan, who's kind of the big name in borderline personality disorder treatment, talks about a lack of a fit between the child's kind of emotions and the parent's management of emotions. So a child may be difficult, a parent let's say has had a lot of experiences, maybe their third or fourth child is calm around. A difficult emotional child may really help the child learn to manage their emotions pretty well, even though they have a poll to be more extreme. Speaker 2 (10:04): Whereas another parent, maybe it's their first child, they don't know what to do, they scream at the child, shut up, stop yelling, stop crying, whatever, which escalates the emotions of the child. So that early genetic tendencies of per is a factor for some, I won't say for all. Then early childhood. Early childhood is when you learn self-regulation. And so starting really around two and three, the child's born kicking and screaming. People say kids are born high conflict and I agree. And our job is to try to help them manage their emotions and their behavior and who they kick and scream at. And so early childhoods when you should be learning that 2, 3, 4 years old, you're really learning emotion regulation. And what happens is if there's an insecure attachment with the parent or parents in those early years starting maybe one and a half to two when they start being able to have a little bit of self-awareness, control, et cetera, is that the parents need to start teaching that by their behavior. And a lot of early childhood learning is by mirroring your parents. And so if you're kicking and screaming and your parent stays calm and says, Johnny, calm down, we're going to eat soon, you're doing okay and stay with a calm tone of voice. The child often starts mirroring that tone of voice and learns emotion regulation from an adult who's emotionally regulated. Speaker 1 (11:51): And the opposite is true Speaker 2 (11:53): Too, Speaker 1 (11:55): Which is where I think you're going. Speaker 2 (11:57): So yeah, so if the parent starts kicking and screaming back at the child, the child learns kicking and screaming is what you do in relationships. And so they don't learn that. And so one theory really is that kids just don't learn emotion. Self-regulation with insecure attachments, with dysfunctional parents, and especially parents who may have borderline personality disorders so their dysregulation gets passed to the child, child sees it as a role model, also experiences it when they have upsetting emotions. They don't experience anyone calmly helping them calm down. So early childhood lack of learning. But a third piece in their early childhood would be child abuse, child's getting abused, they're upset, crying, ticking, hitting, whatever it is because they're being abused and they don't learn that the abuse shouldn't happen, that they can regulate themselves. And so they're reacting very reactive and may have learned have a very short fuse. Speaker 2 (13:10): Lemme add one more piece here. This is all early childhood. Most of when this stuff goes off the tracks is the brain development and the research that shows that some people with borderline personality disorder have a smaller corpus callosum. That's the bridge between hemispheres. If that's smaller, they have a harder time going back and forth. So let's say right brain where you have a lot of your emotional responses, left brains more reading, writing, talking, listening, problem solving, et cetera. So adults with borderline personality disorder may be dominant with their left hemisphere problem solving. Then suddenly something triggers them and now they're outraged and they can't get themselves back to calm or they can't stay calm. And that smaller corpus callosum seems to be a factor. And I've read at least three studies that suggest that that's a problem. One more problem and then I'm going to stop Speaker 1 (14:18): Lots of problems, bill. Lots of problem Speaker 2 (14:21): Underneath here. So you have the amygdala and there's one in each hemisphere, the right hemisphere. Amygdala is particularly sensitive to nonverbal, to facial expressions, tone of voice, hand gestures, and for many people with borderline personality that's actually larger, it's been exaggerated, overused, so they perceive situations as more threatening than they be from other people's point of view. So with the smaller corpus callosum, harder to manage emotions, larger amygdala, overreactive, they're kind of physiologically built for emotion dysregulation. What's exciting is I mentioned Marshall Lanahan and her dialectical behavior therapy method teaches people how they can learn to regulate their emotions, and I think it may actually be boosting the corpus callosum so that they're really changing some of their brain physiology to be able to more calmly manage situations after they go through that therapy. So there is hope. Speaker 1 (15:38): Interesting. So the corpus KoSA may be able to change, but the amygdala doesn't. I find this fascinating because it's almost like a muscle, you can make that muscle bigger and the amygdala grew to be too big because of negative inputs, but it can't reduce back down. Speaker 2 (15:59): I don't know. And that's something I'd be curious about because it may be possible if it's less, I don't know, irritated or something like that. They say parts of the brain are larger that get used a lot. Like taxi drivers in New York City have a larger geography section in their brain Speaker 1 (16:21): Really Speaker 2 (16:22): Because they're using that all the time. Yeah, they say that the Buddhist monks, that meditation makes their left brain a little bit larger, so use makes a difference. It's usually not observable, but makes a difference in how your brain works in the future is what it's used to using. And that's why good treatment, good therapy for emotional regulation does give people hope that they may be calmer in the future. Speaker 1 (16:52): Interesting. So anger management classes taught the right way really should be effective. Speaker 2 (16:59): It's a question of how much time you need. A lot of anger management classes are like six weeks and in many ways they speak to the left brain, you should do this, shouldn't do that. Watch out for situations that might trigger you. Whereas really in a sense, changing your brain, just like with alcohol and drug treatment, you're talking months and years rather than six weeks. Not to say that that isn't what some people need is six weeks may be really sufficient, but with someone with borderline personality disorder or significant traits, they're going to need more time. The treat, the DVT treatment often is referred to two to five years as needed. Although we've interviewed Amanda Smith, Amanda Smith, who tells us she really can see change within a year. So that's very encouraging, especially with a really skilled clinician like she is. Speaker 1 (18:02): Right. Okay. So now we've gone through childhood, now we're getting into the teen years and a lot of teenage behavior can seem very erratic and big emotions. So how does a parent know the difference between a child who's misbehaving and being a teenager with normal teen emotions and someone who could be headed down a road that's going to be pretty challenging for relationships in adult life and could even potentially lead to problems with the justice system? Speaker 2 (18:38): Yeah, here's what I've learned. This kind of comes back to the brain is between about nine and 12, the brain's reorganizing itself somewhat and opening itself up to more emotional experiences. Starting 12, 13, you suddenly have this nuclear reactor living in your house and you go, where did this come from? And I know had experience with that. Speaker 1 (19:05): Yeah, a little bit. Speaker 2 (19:06): And so that's normal. In other words that people need to know this is normal and it's learning. The prefrontal cortex of the brain is the last to develop and that does a lot of its development in adolescent years, and that's the control center and it tells your amygdala, calm down, that's not a crisis. Your boyfriend will call you back and if he doesn't, you'll find a better boyfriend. So it's not a crisis and learning what's a crisis, what's not a crisis, a huge part of what adolescence is. And we now know the brain isn't fully developed till about 25. So every teenager has to learn emotion regulation in a sense over again because now you have these new systems in your brain, more openness to emotion and more involvement of emotion because relationships are going to be the future. Huge part of adult life is our relationships. Speaker 1 (20:09): And you throw hormones in there at that age too. Yeah, I mean, okay, so back to how then do you decide what's normal behavior and what's maybe not Speaker 2 (20:23): My experience so much with high conflict behavior is it hits you over the head. It's like, wow, that is really extreme. Speaker 1 (20:32): I call that jaw dropping, right? Speaker 2 (20:33): Yeah, exactly. It's jaw dropping and so it doesn't take an analysis. You see it and you see, okay, this is over the top, this is a problem. Part of it's because of how extreme it may be, how hard it is for the person to calm down, and it may be the repetition of this. So what you see at 13 generally isn't what you're going to see at 15 generally isn't what you're going to see at 17. If you're still seeing it or it's getting worse at 15, worse at 17, then there really needs to be some intervention so that this team can really learn how to manage their emotions because they're going to start impacting their relationships. And it's a spiral. It is like people are rejecting me, so I'm really freaked out and I'm really angry. Well, if you're really freaked out and really angry, people are going to reject you. And so teaching them emotion regulation is a huge part of successful relationships and people are attracted to people who handle emotions well and can stay calm even in the storm. And we teach managed emotions and people with managed emotions are often popular. So it's a teaching but more intensive teaching for the people having difficulty. Speaker 1 (22:06): I think we dilute ourselves into thinking that this is just someone who deals with stress differently. I even heard someone say that yesterday, this guy was really yelling at his wife and being very cruel to her, putting her down, telling her to shut up. And this was on a TV show. Speaker 2 (22:26): Good. Speaker 1 (22:27): Yeah, and it was during the amazing race and it's high stress situations, and you can learn a lot about emotion regulation watching that show because it's all pairs, it's all couples of one sort or another. And to see them under stressful conditions for a whole 40,000 miles over a month or two, you really start to see who can regulate and who can't. But this man's wife made an excuse for him after being berated and put down so harshly. She said he just handles stress differently than others. And so he continues to get away with this because no one ever sets limits on him. Not that we're diagnosing him with anything, but yeah, so it's interesting if you want to have those good relationships, and we don't want anyone diagnosing, and that's definitely not what we're doing here is teaching anyone to diagnose or label or anything. But just be aware. If you see something that is like Bill said, you Bill talking to our listeners, if it's that jaw dropping hits you over the head type of behavior or emotion, then you probably have, I would suspect you've seen it maybe somewhere along the line, probably a pattern of it even since the child was younger. But I think there's a time they're in those teen years that you can have a lot of impact. Speaker 2 (23:52): Absolutely. I think the 13 to 15-year-old age is so important, especially with this because it's an age when they can learn these things. Like you said, hormones are kicking in and they don't know what to do with them and learning that hormones are kicking in and it's natural and you need to step by step, teach your hormones and your amygdala what's okay, and what's a life and death struggle? Because for most people in the industrial world, there's no life and death struggle that you're dealing with at 13, 14, 15, but if you're in a war zone, you may really need that short attention span, that quick reactivity, those hormones may save your life, life. So it's really kind of learning very much an emotional learning time. But parents need to help their kids with their emotions by letting them know emotions are normal and it's okay to feel anything, but you have to learn what you do with these and what you express and what you don't express. Speaker 2 (25:03): And a big part of becoming an adult is learning when to hold your tongue. That's something people with adult borderline personality disorder have a hard time doing, even when they think they should, they can't sometimes until they've learned slowly. This is all step-by-step stuff and that's why 13, 14, 15 is a really good time to learn it. Mostly from counseling but mostly also from parents learning how to accept your child and still set limits on the extreme emotions. The other thing, when I was a child and adolescent and adult therapist with teenagers, I would often have them journal. I would say they'd come in and they got in trouble. They blew up something, they called their parent terrible words and things like this. And so I'd say write two pages about why that's not a good idea and then we'll meet next week and see if you've learned enough. I don't like kids being in therapy every week for 10 years. And so that would often be they would learn to manage their emotions because they were thinking about them and learning, this is a thing we have with High Conflict Institute, the new ways for life for teenagers, which really helps them understand some about the brain and self-regulation, so engage with them. This is a problem to solve and it can be solved, but you need to work on your emotions more. Speaker 1 (26:38): Absolutely. So if you're a parent of someone like this and you're kind of stuck for what to do, number one, practice managing your own emotions. First of all, try not to shame and blame and make your child, your young person, feel judged because that will just dig the hole deeper in it. I dunno how it couldn't, most people are already feeling badly for not being able to manage their emotions, so we don't want to make people feel worse. Speaker 2 (27:18): That's real Speaker 1 (27:19): Important. And the way I've been thinking about this recently, bill, is there are people who in this high conflict area, they really have a need. So when they're around you, they have a need that's higher than other people's needs and their need in the case of borderline is to feel connected, to feel attached. And so we have to find that balance. And I think that's a new concept I think for a lot of people to take on is that this need is being presented to you and it's not to make your life miserable, it's just this emotion dysregulation makes the relationship difficult so you can step back away from it and realize this isn't about me, this is something though that I can perhaps do something about. And you need to learn what those things are. We have a lot of things, a lot of resources at HCI that I'll throw some links for those in the show notes, but there's also a ton of information online these days, various groups that can help. So we'll also put those links in the show notes. Any last thoughts, bill? Speaker 2 (28:34): Yes. I want to talk about the media influence here, and we have media role models of loss of emotion regulation. It's a big part. One day I saw someone blow up, I think it was in a mediation and storm out of the room, and I thought, I've seen this somewhere before, and I realized most sitcoms have somebody at some point give a blast of anger and storm out of a room. Then at the end they often reconcile and stuff. This is not normal family life. People do not normally do this. This is not necessary in families. You never have to yell and storm out of a room. Now it does happen a lot. Let's say 80% of families have, it happens sometimes, especially if you have a 13, 14, 15-year-old and child younger than that for sure. But the idea is media is teaching high conflict behavior and teaching emotion dysregulation. Speaker 2 (29:37): I think we need to help parents teach their kids, this is not healthy, this is not good for you. This is drama, this is fantasy. It's fun to watch, but it's not fun to live with and so be self-aware that you don't absorb that stuff. The last thing I want to say is about social media. One of the problems with social media is that people are connecting who share bad behavior like emotion dysregulation, other borderline traits, cutting things like that, that are really unhealthy, are sharing that with each other and reinforcing each other in their problem behavior rather in getting healthy. I've worked for a lot of years alcohol and drug treatment where the group helped pull people up into healthier behavior. Now we're finding people finding each other and reinforcing their negative behavior. And so social media reinforces emotion dysregulation. You follow a lot of those conversations. They just people yelling at each other in print and such. And so I think parents need to teach their kids about don't let this influence who you become. Speaker 1 (30:56): Yeah, and like you said, you get pulled up into something or you can get pulled down into something. And a lot of times with borderline, there's this seeking identity and I think when we get on social media and we're seeking identity, we go to places where we feel we fit in and are accepted and welcome and included. Those groups sometimes may have a lot of negative advocates in them and that's going to pull you down. And I think a lot of parents have had to deal with that the last several years. So bottom line, I think the closer connection you have with your child at any age is probably going to get you better results and help maybe mitigate some of the damage that could be occurring if they do get pulled into a harmful group like that. And maybe you can help them come out of that if they are and maybe prevent them from going in even beforehand. Strong connections. Speaker 1 (32:02): Well, thank you Bill and thank you listeners for tuning in today. I really appreciate it. Next week we're going to be talking again about emotion, but this time specifically about anger and why some people go zero to 60 in a flash. Why does that happen? We're going to talk about the brain science behind it. In the meantime, send your questions to podcast@highconflictinstitute.com or submit them to high conflict institute.com/podcast. And until next time, keep learning and practicing. Be kind to yourself, be kind to others while we all try to keep the conflict small and find the missing piece. It's All Your Fault is a production of True Story FM Engineering by Andy Nelson. Music by Wolf Samuels, John Coggins and Ziv Moran. Find the show notes and transcripts at True Story fm for high conflict institute.com/podcast. If your podcast app allows ratings and reviews, please consider doing that for our show.