Hey everyone it's Anna Runkle here, also known as the crappy childhood fairy and
today I'm sharing with you one of the 20 videos from my brand new dysregulation
bootcamp and it's the weirdest most countercultural video of them all about
some of the quite frankly pleasant side effects of dysregulation. Now
dysregulation is normally something we consider bad, wrong, something to heal
from, but to be honest there's sometimes a payoff. But first let me just get this
out of the way, if you want to join the bootcamp click on the link in the
description section below this video and you'll get all the details of timing and
pricing and what's in it so that's the bootcamp and this particular video is a
sneak peek from it. The bootcamp delivers one video and one worksheet each day for
20 days, this video happens to be from day 3 and you see how that works right?
By focusing on dysregulation for 20 days straight, you get the opportunity to
really build your re-regulation muscles and start healing a huge portion of the
effects of early trauma that you've probably been living with all your life.
Now if you don't yet know what dysregulation is it's a common symptom
of childhood PTSD or complex PTSD where when you're triggered by stress or
certain kinds of experiences, your brain waves get dysregulated, your body systems
get dysregulated, your emotions get dysregulated and this, not so much the
memories of what happened, is what's likely affecting you most today so you
want to learn to notice dysregulation and heal it and start living on a level
playing field with everyone else so you can watch this simple video or you can
just cut to the chase and click on the links below in the description section
so you can sign up for the whole bootcamp. Here we go.
Hi again and welcome to today's video. In this one I want to talk about and
this will sound kind of weird, but the upside of dysregulation. There's
a little tiny something positive sometimes that can make dysregulation
kind of feel good short-term anyway. There can be kind of a little dance
inside between the part of dysregulation that just kind of occurs beyond our
control driven by processes deep in our nervous system and the little things
that we can do in response to the first signs of dysregulation. We can either
pull back and regulate or we can give into it and let dysregulation unfold. Now
why would we want to do that? This is just my personal observation, sometimes
dysregulation can provide a little relief under stress it's a very
expensive vacation from that stress but it's a way to check out and just take
the edge off. When things are horrible and intense like maybe you're in a
horrible argument with your partner, dysregulation can help you go from
burning inside emotionally to just being spaced out and emotionally numb. That
flood of emotions that hits when you're triggered, it's not something you're
doing on purpose but at times there may be a tiny choice to be made in there
about whether to hang in there and take steps to de-escalate the argument or to
maybe amp it up so that it gets bad enough to flip your PTSD switch and give
you that dysregulation break. That mode of dysregulation where you get so upset
that you suddenly go spaced out and emotionally numb, might also be called
dissociation and some people find that dissociation can provide a reset or a
reboot for an overwhelmed system like kind of like a thunderstorm after the
clouds have been building up. And I don't mean to make it sound poetic or
beautiful because using emotional blow ups to get calm has a terrible cost,
it'll destroy everything good in the long run including your relationship but
it's a technique of sorts that we maybe learned as kids when we needed to
distance ourselves from trauma that was happening right there and then for the
very good reason that we needed to protect our impressionable and tender
little selves. And it's natural and normal for kids who experience violence
and neglect to learn to checkout and thank
God we learned okay, we made it! And you know even in adulthood checking out can
be handy, it's a skill, I do it in the dentist chair and I've been doing it in
long boring meetings for years and I've done it in scary movies and I've even
had nightmares where I was getting chased by a lion and right when the
moment comes where I'm definitely gonna get killed and eaten even in the dream I
"Whoosh!" I check out and I block myself from having that experience so it is...it's
wired in there and while it's good for coping with giant dream predators it's
way better in adult life to learn to hang in there, protect yourself, and stay
in the driver's seat so to speak so that you can work things out. Otherwise this
cozy, comfy side of dysregulation can lead to greater trauma and more
self-sabotage. It's like drugging yourself so that's
what today's worksheets going to be about, exploring where and if you may be
getting some tiny payoff from dysregulation and planning how you can
give yourself that same payoff while still keeping your brain in the on
position.