1/ People who’ve experienced trauma are often told they have issues with regulating their emotions. In some ways this is true. However, if I’ve struggled in a stormy ocean while someone else never faltered in a calm pool, it’s not because I’m less skilled at keeping afloat.
2/ The way we characterize the struggles/challenges of traumatized people often dramatically underestimates both the reality of what they’ve experienced and the incredible skill they’ve shown in doing so. Let’s think more about how we characterize what the problem is.
3/ I constantly tell my therapist, I’m not bad at regulating my emotions. I’ve regulated my emotions through situations that would break a lot of other people. I could teach a master class in it quite frankly. The problem is there’s so damn much and even the skilled get exhausted
4/ Maybe it’s the medical model seeping into things: needing to locate the problem within the person. Maybe it’s the obsessive focus on “hope” that gaslights people this way. And yes of course we all can learn better skills/tools. But how we characterize things matters
5/ Note: my therapist is awesome and totally doesn’t reduce me to this or disagree with what I’ve stated above but issues with emotion regulation etc are common themes in trauma Dx/Tx and IMO we need to think seriously about recasting these concepts....
(Again something my tired brain is articulating poorly. I will try to write something more coherent later since I feel this is an important topic. Emotion regulation is just one aspect of it)
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