Transition into dysregulation. . .
Greetings, friends. I've been working the past month or so on dissecting disordered attachment flares in order to better understand how they start and how they resolve. I have a good protocol in place for deescalating anxiety once it's already taken over but, to be honest, it's hard work and I've been in a place where I'm doing that work over the course of hours trying to get my cognition to shift back.
Which led me to the question: How do these shifts get started in the first place? An intervention there might be just the jiu jitsu needed to put in a little bit of labor on the front end to avoid a whole lot of labor on the back end.
In going back over a flare I had on Sunday, I was able to observe a transition period where I could tell that my cognition had shifted but that I wasn't aware of any meaningful anxiety driving it. In time, of course, said anxiety arrived and I spent three hours grinding away on myself about things I literally don't care about at all before I was finally able to deescalate and transition back to regulated cognition.
That transition arrived, as do most of them, when I realized that what I was mad about wasn't what I was upset about. I had received two phone calls, each bearing their own kind of upsetting news, right before I had to run to an obligation and moderate a class with fifteen other people in the room. I remember sitting there actively fighting off the urge to flee the room until it was suddenly ok.
Now I can see that I wasn't, in fact, ok but that my avoidant persona had done what he does so well and turned off the emotional awareness tap. And that's why I couldn't feel the anxiety that eventually tipped me over.
So even though it sucks that I had a flare and that I was more unpleasant to be around for that three hours, it feels like it was time-well spent in the sense that I now have more data from which to draw in order to head the next one off at the pass. My working protocol now is to take notice immediately when I have that sense of being dysregulated without accompanying anxiety. It means that something happened. It's my hope that tracing my 'blankness' back to the moment where it occurred will give me the opportunity to properly connect the feelings to that, rather than attaching it to ambient details and spending hours trying to make the accounts balance on something that just isn't true.