Regulation verse Dysregulation

Like night and day. You can not imagine a more viscerally and mentally different experience. Throughout my days I pass back and forth between regulation and dysregulation. Some days there's more regulation, while some days more dysreglation.

But this term doesn't mean much, does it? It sounds very general. What kind of experience does regulation and dysregulation describe? What sort of emotions are felts? What is the "affect" state in the body felt like? What is time experienced as? And how do you feel with change of pace? How does being worked upon by emotions feel like opposed to a dissociated hyperaware conscious state?

All these questions revolve about the issue of trauma. Dysregulation and regulation refer to mental responses to bodily viscera. If one feels bad, how does one handle it? If one is able to suppress negative feeling and focus awareness on something feel-good, then you are termed "regulated". If, conversely, you find yourself overwhelmed by visceral experience and unable to mentally handle these feelings, you are dysregulated. These are helpful terms for both clinician and client because they are general. 

Our emotions organize our thoughts. Our emotions have a mind of their own. Recent studies in interpersonal psychology has shown that human relationships regulate our emotional states. When people communicate, they have this innate drive to "co-regulate" with the other person. We do all sorts of things unconsciously to carry out these behaviors. In fact, the "social engagement system", as it is called by Stephen Porges, is able to carry out exquisitely nuanced shifts in response to external changes in communication. When two people are oriented toward "positive communication" i.e a state where both people are regulated, their nervous systems literally organize a sweet sounding melody between the two of them. Subtle changes induce responses that support effective social engagement.

What does this experience feel like, viscerally? Generally, a state of calmness. Your body feels light, muscles are relaxed and loose, voice carries bass, breathing is long and deep. These are often in the "background" of your awareness, even though it is the feeling state itself which facilitates connection to "thoughts of interest" to the self and ultimately positive social engagement.

The power of intersubjective field is infectious. When you're around people who are experiencing a laugh, it seems easier to physically feel it. As if their "energy" has begun to regulate my feelings, emotions and thoughts. I engage and communicate considering this behavior run of the mill, to mundane to take particularly seriously. But it is quite impressive beneath the surface.

Human emotionality operates in a very dynamic landscape. The directions are feeling "good" and feeling "bad". Innumerable subtypes exist within and between the directions. But there is always a general "thrust" either 'this way' or 'that way'. What is this thrust?

Of course, people can be dangerously disorganized people, bad people even, and still be emotionally "regulated" in some particular way. What is the hallmark of dysregulation? Dissociation. If you chronically dissociate, you exhibit a present inability to regulate emotional feelings. You are then a) chronically tense, or b) emotionally withdrawn. Dissociation is the mammalian response to painful experiences which can't be emotionally integrated; it both endangers consciousness - can drive it insane, but more importantly saps bodily energy. The dorsal tract of the vagus nerve regulates this autonomic metabolic response to severe levels of stress. If it goes too high, it initiates conscious withdrawal from the body by raising heart rate and releases endogenous opiates. This is the "numbness" feeling that dissociation causes. It distracts and demotivates consciousness from experiencing emotions.

When you're dissociated, the basic "thrust" of energy is towards conservation. Conversely, when you're embodied, in the emotional subjective present, you are living in the moment, in the flow of time. Consciousness is regulated by expansive feelings which enter and exit consciousness with little conscious input. Compared to a dissociated state, embodied awareness feels strange.

When you can't hear yourself think in a loud room, what do you do? You go to go to a quiet place. This is what dissociation feels like relative to a continuous flow of emotion. When you're embodied, all you "hear" is the "sound from without" i.e. the intense visceral feelings emotion produces. Dissociation conversely is like a quiet room. You feel your individuality more clearly, (albeit, it's deepest appearance in expression is pathologically repressed) you feel a heightened awareness of thoughts; you feel like your power of choice and deliberation, and your ability to become aware of all sorts of basic aspects of experience - the tone voice produces, changes in facial expression, etc in eery detail. I believe the pinpoint of deliberative self, the "thinker" is made extra aware of it's existence when you're dissociated. Without emotions to preoccupy you, become extra aware of yourself.

When were in the "flow" of things, were happy, relaxed, and at peace. Only when we resist the flow, only when we reject, resent, hate, do we experience the "tensions" of the world. If someone stays in this state long enough, or if he experiences a shock trauma, his body physically "contains" the undischarged, tense and dysregulated energy within it's neural network.

Insight

The experience of "toxic shame" is a gut cognitive reaction to unstable emotional feeling.