When *You're* the One Who's Dysregulated

11:24Margaret Ables:Right. And somebody who's a little more straight and narrow, as you have told us that your partner is, right, is going to be able to return to that baseline because the swing wasn't as big. Yeah. Excessive reactivity to psychosocial cues is another sign of this emotional dysregulation. Walk me through that. What does it mean? Your kid rolling their eyes at you. Is it a psychosocial cue? That is psychosocial.

11:47Heidi Grant:It makes me psycho. If you go psycho. I go psycho when they roll their eyes.

11:51Margaret Ables:If you're excessively reactive to that, or you think they ruled the rise, or you think that they slam the refrigerator door with an underlying message, this one gets a little specific. Random, chaotic, or rapidly cycling fluctuation in effect. I don't know what that means. I think it just means you're fine, you're mad, you're fine, you're mad really quickly. And this last one, it's like, ooh, touche. Histrionic reporting of effective experience. I experienced this just recently with my spouse. My spouse is like, what are you so upset about? I was almost in tears from something that I could see.

12:22Margaret Ables:He was like, why are you mad? And I'm trying to explain how I feel. And I'm just dysregulated. And so I'm like, and it never, and you always, it's when you get to that. I have never been so insulted. And they're like, I don't even understand. Like, I just texted you back, okay. But to you, and when you're trying to report how you feel, other people might perceive it as overblown. Even if you don't feel that way, others perceive it as perhaps slightly histrionic when you're like, can you believe she said that to me? It's like, she wasn't that mean.

12:50Heidi Grant:Yeah, that's right. This is where I worry about my parenting the most. And you touch on it is that I'm like, could everyone just get their shoes on and get in the car? And I'm experiencing is like you guys could just see that I'm just expressing that I'm frustrated that we're late. But my kids are experiencing it as a very scary experience where I am scaring them. And that mismatch plagues me. I think I'm just being like, oh, I'm so frustrated. But my loved ones are perceiving it as like fire spouting dragon crazy person.

13:26Margaret Ables:Yeah. All right. Let's take a break. When we come back, I want to talk about that, how emotional dysregulation can be contagious in a household.

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17:06Margaret Ables:That's 50 % off your first year at Monarch.com with the code FRESH. so before the break you were talking about how your kids perceive your emotional dysregulation and is that a problem one of the questions i wanted to answer as i was researching this is does an emotionally dysregulated parent create a greater likelihood of a kid who's going to be emotionally dysregulated so i looked into it and yes having a parent who is emotionally dysregulated makes a child more likely to have their own issues with emotional dysregulation There was a study that showed that young children were more irritable when their mother had emotional dysregulation.

17:48Margaret Ables:And irritability is an early sign of emotional dysregulation issues. And of course, when the kid's irritable and the parent is irritable and it goes back and forth and back and forth, it creates a feedback loop of irritability and then eventually emotional dysregulation.

18:03Heidi Grant:Right. And you're both feeding the other person's emotional dysregulation.

18:07Margaret Ables:And I think, you know, the kid is learning that this is like a way to behave and you can grow up if you have an emotionally dysregulated parent. I'm talking like all the time, like likely to have blow ups and whatever. That creates a lot of vulnerability and negative attachment experiences that can affect a kid growing up. So you don't want this to be the water that your kids are swimming in. For sure. That being said, I want to go back and make it clear that being emotionally dysregulated for kids is entirely developmentally appropriate.

18:41Heidi Grant:For sure. I mean, think of any toddler. Emotional dysregulation is what they do. I want a cake pop. OK, here's your cake pop. I don't want that cake pop and throwing it on the floor and smashing it. And you're like, well, I'm living with a maniac.

18:56Margaret Ables:Right. They have temper tantrums because they cannot manage their emotions. Wild swings, right? The lability we were talking about before. Huge reactions that are kind of cute and funny when they're two, when they're, you know, they're pounding their little fists in rage. Yeah. It's a typical, so we're not saying that that is something that shouldn't happen or that your little kid shouldn't be doing. They need to do that. They need to express their emotions unhealthily before you express them healthily. And these things tend to like go away as kids get older, as kids reach school age, they get a little more peer pressure, like you can't behave like that because then the kids won't want to play with you.

19:30Margaret Ables:It tends to dissipate. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes kids have neurodevelopmental differences that can make them have a little more emotional ability, like kids with ADHD or kids in the autism spectrum. They can have issues with this that persist. and then sometimes these coping skills exist into the teen years and adulthood and nobody's a bad person but these things do get in the way it's not great right being emotionally dysregulated

20:00Heidi Grant:is morally neutral but the effects of emotional dysregulation can be harmful to the people around it and both of those things can be true and like that's okay okay so we understand that you have autism and therefore you are emotionally dysregulated. And when things change, as they will, no matter how much we try to do social stories or pictures and tell you what's going to happen, there's going to be things that come up that are frustrating. And the stress of knowing that those bombs are kind of out there and whenever we step on one, it's going to be an explosion and it's going to be frustrating and possibly scary for everybody in the family.

20:41Heidi Grant:that is dysregulating no matter what the source of that is.

20:48Margaret Ables:That's right. And again, to underline growing up in a household where somebody is prone to tantrums and outbursts, particularly when it's a parent, but even when it's a peer, a sibling or an older sibling, it's unsettling. The irritability and the negative contagion is present. It's hard to be around.

21:06Heidi Grant:I know that they talk about this a lot with PTSD, and I'm not making a one-to-one comparison, But the problem with high trauma situations, like, for example, being in a war zone, is that it's a lot of downtime and then bombs. The problem is, like, you're never really at peace, but there are long stretches of quiet. But then you never know when they're going to be interrupted by gunfire or bombs going off or whatever. And I think that that emotional dysregulation, there is a parallel there, that it's not that it's always happening, but that it's always about to happen. where you know it's going to happen at some point, it makes the downtime very particularly stressful.

21:46Heidi Grant:There's an expression in a book about dealing with people with borderline personality disorder who tend to be explosive and dysregulated, walking on eggshells. That's the feeling of constantly creeping and trying to keep things peaceful, but knowing that it's going to break at some point.

22:03Margaret Ables:Yeah. There's a whole other part to emotional dysregulation that I had not understood until I did the research for this episode, that one of the symptoms of it is feeling detached or numb or withdrawn, which I thought was interesting. I didn't really get that that would be part of it, that somebody who has blowups can also be completely unpresent and withdraw, but they call it a maladaptive regulation strategy. You can't really calm down. You can't really say what you were saying before, like, hey, sorry about before. I'm going through a difficult time and I really, you know, I'm sorry. And I know I'm on edge.

22:39Margaret Ables:If you're doing all that, you are regulated. Whereas somebody who's truly dysregulated, they can throw a switch and just shut down because they know that they maybe shouldn't be yelling at everybody, but they can't like return to earth. It is just the throw a kill switch, so to speak.

22:53Heidi Grant:Yeah. And I think that generationally in the past, emotionality was not encouraged. So there was probably a lot of like holding on to feelings and then either explosions or like women who were dealing with chronic depression or other things like mom was in bed a lot. That makes sense to me. Like that is emotional dysregulation, but it's not anger.

23:21Margaret Ables:It's not anger. Right. The other swing is I was about to say Shazbot. That's an old Deluxe alert. Back in my day. Mork used to say that on Mork and Mindy when he wanted to go back to his home planet, he'd say Shazbat and he just would disappear.

23:34Heidi Grant:Wow. That is a really deep cut. Even you missed me with that one. I know Mork from Ork, but wow, do not. That's a deep cut. Congratulations. Peace out, Shazbat, and they would disappear. Right. But I think that feeling of like, well, I'm not yelling at my kids, but I am in bed at 4 p.m. looking at my phone while they're in the house. Like that doesn't feel great. It feeds itself. that now I've failed my kids and now we're just going to stay in this loop cycle of like, I basically took a personal day and took to my bed because I couldn't handle life. But now I'm beating myself up that I'm a terrible mom, you know, that I'm letting the cycle just start going.

24:18Margaret Ables:Then the shame kicks in. Yes. Right. And so I can't like say, gosh, I'm really sorry. I acted like that. So I'm just going to shut down and then kind of emerge from the bedroom and everybody's going to be walking on eggshells and that's how we return to normal is this tacit in general. I'm not saying this is happening at Margaret's house, but right when you have a parent who's emotionally dysregulated, they disappear and then they come back and okay, I guess we're not talking about that. I guess we're back to normal now and it doesn't feel great to be around it, but that's the uneasy piece that exists.

24:46Heidi Grant:Yeah. I mean, I definitely think we're starting to point towards being open about what's going on as probably like one of the solutions to this thing. I mean, I've talked about this with dealing with OCD, that I've had OCD since I was a kid. But one of the things when I had children was I was like, they can never know that I do this. They can never see this thing that I do because it's crazy, right? Like having to walk to the kitchen to touch the oven before I can start working is crazy behavior. And working with a therapist, I really got to a point of my OCD is something that tells me how anxious I'm feeling.

25:26Heidi Grant:And it's morally neutral, like touching the oven is morally neutral. Some people might bite their fingernails, but that I was adding your second arrow of like, if my kids know that I do this, I am a failure as a parent, rather than being able to say like, so my anxiety manifests in behaviors that are known as obsessive compulsive disorder. And this is why you might see me like touching this frame when I walk by it. It's almost an involuntary thing. It's almost an involuntary behavior, you know?

25:59Margaret Ables:And when it is something like touching a frame, it seems to me that must be a way that your body is seeking to maintain regulation. Correct. I'll be calmer if I do this. If I don't do this, I'm going to be feeling a little jingle jangle if I don't. So on maintaining regulation by doing these things?

26:15Heidi Grant:I'm attempting probably to maintain regulation. And there probably are a lot better ways to maintain regulation. And a lot of the therapy around is what they call harm reduction rather than like you're not going to eliminate this behavior. But like, OK, maybe going back and forth to the kitchen eight times a night before you can go to sleep is a we need to replace that behavior with something else, because that's really getting in the way of living your life.

26:43Margaret Ables:So there's two sort of downstream things that people with emotional dysregulation deal with. Besides it not being great for other people, this is why having emotional dysregulation is not great for you if you have it. People with emotional dysregulation are much more likely to ruminate. And ruminate means to think repetitively about your own negative emotional experiences. Right. You like to call it my precious. My precious.

27:10Heidi Grant:you stroke that wonderful feeling of beating yourself up of righteousness or yeah maybe it's shame but maybe it's like can you believe she said that to me nobody appreciates me nobody sees how

27:23Margaret Ables:hard i worked to get us to pickleball and it's negative bias and it maintains the emotional dysregulation like you said before like i'm still mad i kind of want to still be mad i'm not done

27:34Heidi Grant:being mad yet. Well, that's a whole other thing is like I've definitely set some traps in my life. My husband, not a great birthday guy. When we first got married, I could literally watch him screwing it up. I could tell he hadn't made a dinner reservation. Two days out. Two days out. There's no wrapping paper in the house. I'm like, oh, here it comes. I can admit that there were times where I leaned into looking in the closet. There's no wrapping paper. Wow. He's really going to blow it. And I'm going to just taste the marrow of it somehow. I mean, it's a confusing thing. But yes, I want this feeling of how badly you screwed up.

28:12Margaret Ables:The other thing that people with emotional dysregulation have downstream is they are more likely to view having strong emotion as threatening in and of itself. Do you know the kind of person who's like, don't tell me, like, I won't be able to handle that. I'm so upset even thinking about that it might happen that I can't handle it. That kind of a person. Wait, that's me, though. Is that bad? It's not bad. It can be downstream of emotional dysregulation that you feel like you will be unable to cope with bad things that have not actually happened yet.

28:39Heidi Grant:Yeah. I mean, that's part of my anxiety. I can't hear about the monkey getting rejected by its mother. Like, I don't want to put that on my pile of things that I'm worrying about. People who want to be like, oh, my God, did you hear this horrible story about eight people who were killed somewhere. I'm like, please don't add things to my pile.

28:59Margaret Ables:And it doesn't mean you must always listen to every detail of the terrible story about the moms who were in the avalanche. Like you don't need to participate fully in every bad thing that has happened in the world in a way that I think our phones make us feel sometimes. Yes. And again, this isn't bad. This is just if you have emotional dysregulation, you have a story for yourself that you won't be able to handle hard things because emotion is scary. So when we come back, let's talk about what we do if we're emotionally dysregulated. Okay, it is not spring yet and my feet always get cold way before the rest of me.

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31:55Margaret Ables:Well, the first thing is that emotional dysregulation is definitely treatable, both professionally, if you're at that state, and in your own daily life. There are things you can do like therapy, like anti-anxiety medication, and limiting your use of substances. If you are somebody who's prone to outbursts, look at how often you're maybe using things to numb yourself.

32:21Heidi Grant:Yeah, that's super interesting. And I think sometimes, you know, with anxiety and stuff, it's like, oh, my God, I just need a cocktail. I got to calm down. It's not actually helping your anxiety. It's really not. Right. I think another interesting thing that I'm seeing in your notes is acknowledging that emotional dysregulation has an actual cost because we try, I think, rightfully on the podcast to be like, it's OK. It's OK that you're feeling this. We don't want to ever add to mom's feeling. And on top of it, your emotional dysregulation is screwing up your life and your kids. We don't want to put anything more on moms than they already have.

32:57Heidi Grant:But I think that acknowledging that constant anxiety, anger, sadness is bad for you and your kids is very important. It is bad for your health. Stress is bad for your health. Things that are causing you to fight constantly with your spouse are bad for your family structure. And so we can skip the blame part, but we can also acknowledge that this is something that needs to be fixed for real. It's a real problem.

33:26Margaret Ables:It is a real problem, and it's more likely to happen, I think, to mothers in particular than perhaps other adults. There's this book called Mother Nurture. It's at least two decades old, but they talk about something called depleted mother syndrome, and they suggest—we're soaking in it. depleted mother syndrome. This is Dr. Jan Hansen and Dr. Rick Hansen. They say depleted mother syndrome occurs when demands on the mother increase, her resources decrease at the same time. Yes. As a result of the imbalance, like see also pandemic that we all went through this, that's a moment when somebody's emotional sensitivity to internal and external triggers becomes heightened.

34:05Margaret Ables:So I'm trying to say we are probably more likely as default parents to have to deal with emotional dysregulation because of the constant demands on us and the depleted resources we sometimes have to deal with all the things we have to deal with. It doesn't make you a bad person that you're emotionally dysregulated. Your stress might have created that. But you're also right that it's not great for anybody, including you. So trying to find a way out and deal with it without beating yourself up, because beating yourself up will probably just contribute to the negative feedback loop and will not actually do that much to improve the situation.

34:39Margaret Ables:So you can skip that part.

34:40Heidi Grant:Yeah. And I think that in the conversations we've been having on the podcast recently, I feel like it's been really helpful to me to kind of put your piece of paper between like, I don't judge myself for yelling at my kids and I don't judge other mothers for yelling at their kids. But at the same time, I can recognize that yelling is generally not a great disciplinary tactic. It generally signals emotional dysregulation and being out of control. And so I don't need to spend a lot of time judging myself for yelling, but I can still acknowledge that yelling is a sign that things are out of control.

35:23Heidi Grant:And therefore, yes, everybody yells. It's not something that we're like, listen, if you're yelling, you're failing. If you're yelling, you're a bad parent. But we also have to be able to say yelling is not useful. It is not the best way to parent. I'm a yeller. You know, my kids were imitating me actually while we were recently on vacation. For some reason, they imitate me with a really crazy New York accent. But they're like, they were just imitating me being like, get in the car. And like just doing this funny, like screaming impression of me. And I'm like, ha ha ha. But also, like, I actually have to try to stop doing that behavior.

36:01Heidi Grant:I do not want my children remembering me as a wall of yelling noise. Yeah. Which they won't because there are lots of aspects to my parenting. But I want to lessen the amount of yelling and up my amount of emotional regulation all the time.

36:18Margaret Ables:When we had Erin Cox on the podcast a couple of weeks back, she was talking about co-regulation. We were talking about talking to our kids about what's going on in the news and seeing kids being taken and, you know, masked agents outside schools. And she said that co-regulation was the key, that we need to do the work to be regulated ourselves because then that helps our kids regulate. So if dysregulation is contagious, so is calm and we can co-regulate. I'm wondering, is there ever any way when, like I said, that I'm like, I can't believe we almost missed this flight and everybody's laughing like, ha ha, mom, there she goes again.

36:52Margaret Ables:And I use that to like feel justified rage that instead can I borrow a page of like, oh, they're right. It's funny. There's an opportunity to join in the fun and the laughter there instead of the nobody understands me part. And I wonder if I could try to seek out that as an opportunity to co-regulate.

37:12Heidi Grant:If it's true, I think you can. I mean, I was laughing at the kids imitating my, you know, goofy screaming. And I think for all of my kids, it's been helpful. When we can laugh about things, it makes them less scary. But I think we also have to be careful not to laugh at things that are not funny. Like I have been very clear with my husband and my children that like, I'm not the butt of the joke. That's not fun for me. I don't find that fun. Our family is not structured around mom's an idiot dad's an idiot kids are idiots Our family is deeply structured around the fact that our cats are idiots and we like to call them dopes and stuff But that's it.

37:53Heidi Grant:We're allowed to goof on the cats and that's the only person So I think that you can't laugh things off But I think sometimes you laugh and sometimes at dinner that night when you're all like enjoying the destination that you've gotten to You can also say, hey, how are we going to travel so that it doesn't all fall on me to be screaming at everybody?

38:12Margaret Ables:Right. It is a mode you can fall into. Isn't mom annoying or isn't dad annoying? And it is it is pretty fun to be the parent that's on the other team in that case.

38:20Heidi Grant:Right. Like, oh, I know. There she goes again, being uptight and idiotic. Well, we all just enjoy vacation that she planned. Sometimes you do need to laugh it off, but sometimes you need to be acknowledged. Sometimes the last night of the trip needs to be, let's all hear it from mom who put this together and got us packed and made sure we were here on time. And let's all take a second to acknowledge that, you know.

38:42Margaret Ables:And sometimes it does have to be you own your stuff. Sometimes the flip side of this is that you do have to say, like, I'm sorry that I overreacted to whatever. I'm going to read you a quote here. When the emotional climate resets without apology or repair, resentment builds. That's what I was talking about, about being in the household with somebody who's chronically emotionally dysregulated. And it's either game time and everybody hide or we're not going to talk about that. Right. We're going to pretend that that didn't happen. And that's how resentment and confusion and long term attachment issues can build.

39:15Margaret Ables:So I think it can be tricky to bring it up without getting right back into the disagreement.

39:22Heidi Grant:Yeah. And I think that's where, yes, sometimes it is right to laugh it off. But if you laugh it off every time and then you're like, I hate these people who are such ingrates, you've got a problem. I have one child and we set each other off. I start something, it annoys this child, then I get mad and I don't have it with every child. But it's something that we've been able to talk about, sometimes with the help of a therapist and intermediary, sometimes on our own, to say, listen, you and I, for whatever reason, there's an old saying, the revolving door on the Irish bar, like the drunk tries to leave and then it comes back in and the fight starts again.

39:59Heidi Grant:That is our dynamic. We just cannot seem, once we get going with each other to get out of it, I get very dysregulated. I've talked before about, I have so much trouble letting stuff go. If I hear someone in the upstairs bedroom be like, what, I'm touching, she's so, I'm like running up the stairs, opening the door and like jumping in that fight rather than pretending I didn't hear it, which is probably the better choice. You know, like they're just blowing off steam. They're a teenager. I'm an adult. But I I realize that my emotional dysregulation gets triggered when we both feel frustrated. We immediately go to like opposite sides of the ring, put our boxing gloves on and just come at each other.

40:39Margaret Ables:Right. You can feed each other with that and you can also co-regulate, which is hard. But if you own your side of the street a little bit, right, it just try to be this is not easy for me to do. But to be like, yeah, I guess I am sort of uptight recently, right? And what am I going to do about that? And what are you going to do about that? It doesn't mean get out the hair shirt because you're not being nice to everybody all the time, but it means pay a little more attention to yourself. This is caused by stress. So maybe you need more sleep. Maybe you need to have a real breakfast. Maybe there are things you can do for yourself, more time to reset when your spouse gets home from work, whatever.

41:14Margaret Ables:There are things you can do to make yourself more regulated so that you're not in this place where you're unable to respond appropriately to things. It's nobody's fault and it's something that can be reset with attention and by owning it a little bit, I think, instead of everybody has to just not annoy me, right?

41:32Heidi Grant:Which is where I go to. Just don't say anything annoying. I think it's so much healthier and it's very hard to do and I don't do it often enough to say, hey guys, I'm having a bad week. I'm not even going to go into all the reasons why I'm having a bad week, but I'm having a bad week. Or, hey, you and I keep falling into this problem. My husband and I have gotten to a point where we have literally like a code word where I can feel myself getting just like I want to start going through everything you've ever done wrong. You forgot my birthday in 2000 and whatever, you know, and that I have said sometimes tonight is a no fight night.

42:09Heidi Grant:Just leave me alone. Don't talk to me. But also don't let me start a fight. I can feel it coming. It's really improved our relationship to say, I am a wet cat right now and just leave me alone. There is no good coming from interacting with the wet cat. Well said. The wet cat wants to bite and scratch.

42:29Margaret Ables:If you don't listen to podcasts on Spotify, or if you do, you might not know that you can leave a comment on podcast episodes. You can respond right there. Say, I like this part. or, you know, when Margaret talked about being a wet cat, I felt seen or whatever you want to say. Put it on Spotify. And comments, which we will respond to, also help Spotify know like, oh, this is a good episode that should be shown to more people. So if you listen to this podcast on Spotify or if you could listen to this podcast on Spotify, leave a comment on this episode. We'll see them and we would love that. Leave us comments.

43:02Heidi Grant:And like Amy said, we will respond, especially if they're nice and not mean. That's right. And with that, thanks so much for listening, everybody. and we will talk to you on the next episode. So long.

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44:07Heidi Grant:This is care uniquely tailored for you. At Midi, you will find that their mission is clear, to help all women thrive in midlife, giving them access to the health care they deserve, because they believe midlife isn't the middle at all. It is the beginning of your second act. Ready to feel your best and write your second act script? Visit JoinMidi.com today to book your personalized, insurance-covered virtual visit. That's JoinMidi.com. Midi. The care women. deserve.