A Love Story. Learning the Art of Self-Regulation.
“We are born in relationship, we are wounded in relationship, and we can be healed in relationship.”
– Harville Hendrix
Dysfunctional childhoods often lead to emotional dysregulation in children and adults. Conversely, stable and loving childhoods promote emotional intelligence.
This EQ sees the individual able to perceive, interpret, demonstrate, control, evaluate, and use emotions to communicate with and relate to others effectively and constructively. Some experts suggest that EQ is more important than IQ for success in life.
If we are to ensure our children have a chance of succeeding in life, we must first consider our own capacity for self-regulation.
Adverse Childhood Experiences.
‘Me and your mother have decided to separate.’ The brutal blow of this announcement, delivered by my father when I was just eleven years old, shattered my psyche into shards in an instant. I would spend three decades painstakingly recovering it from what felt like the four corners of my own earth.
He moved out almost immediately. There were strange flats to visit, bedsits. Jackie, his new partner arrived on the scene. She didn’t like children.
My mum started dressing strangely and going out in the evenings. Weird men began to appear at our house. My sister would ‘look after us’ and we would watch horror films. I started having nightmares. My ability to concentrate at school plummeted.
Then, John moved in, we were not consulted. He was just there one morning when I woke up and never left. Apparently, he was my mother’s new boyfriend. I thought he was the ugliest and most revolting man I had ever seen.
My world lost all its previous, beautiful childlike colour. The innate enchantment of my youth drained away. An all-pervading grey emptiness settled around my soul. No one appeared to notice, or to care. Not a word was uttered on the matter.
A casual haunting of a young life. A hollowing out of the truly familiar, the bedrock of a child’s reality and wellbeing. The silent injury adults inflict on their children as they renege on their contracts with one another.
Between them, Mum and John smoked more cigarettes than you would believe possible. The house was polluted. Giant overflowing ashtrays. No clean air to breathe. They drank and had parties, and more weird men came to the house. I felt scared a lot.
Dad took lots of stuff from the house whilst we were out one day. Furniture and pictures off the wall. Just gone. Mum raged. The house got sold and we moved out. Our schools changed and John’s children moved in. The age of my innocence was dead.
It turned out that John liked to frighten children. Hurt them in fact. He had a violent temper and was perpetually miserable. His worst perversion, was his tendency to strangle one of us when we did something that angered him.
It is hard to explain the terror this evokes. The effect on the brain and nervous system of an unsuspecting child.
My mother, now on a concoction of prescription and over the counter medication, was not in a fit state to intervene. The house became dirty. I imagine, this was the beginning of a personal tendency of mine to dissociate. I left the building psychologically, packed my bags.
I physically left home at age seventeen. I would have gone anywhere. I entered the first of a few weird relationships. A desperate attempt to move away from the squalor of my life with mum and John.
No education. One awful flat to the next. The jobs I took as bleak as the flats. I drank and ate to numb the pain of my own empty and lost existence. My heart was as broken as a young heart can be. My brain and nervous system frazzled.
A New Beginning. Hope Returns.
Then, in another twist of fate and in a moment, my life took an upward turn. In a nondescript room in Portsmouth, when I was in my early twenties, single and now sober three years, he walked in.
All strength and size. All steady, straight and safe. Decent. I don’t know how I knew it, but I did. He was beautiful. Perhaps the goodness in him called out to the goodness in me. Clear as a bell. I headed the call.
We had the same phone. He asked if I had read the manual. I laughed.
We went roller skating on the beach. He drove me to London in the night. We talked. We shared our unfortunate stories. An instant understanding. He moved in. We were inseparable. I joked he had wings. I felt I was being rescued.
We spent three months on the Gulf of Mexico. A much-needed embrace. We were two kids living the beginning of a profound love story.
We forgot the world.
He reached down to that unbroken girl in me, and she reached up and took his hand. I urged him to think and to speak, he urged me to feel and to move.
A Dysfunctional Dance Threatens.
The honeymoon period obviously did not last. It never does. We each dragged the psychological baggage of our respective childhoods well and truly into the room of our relationship. It screamed out to be heard. We had no choice but to listen.
The complex dance between the avoidant and the insecurely attached began. Round and round we went in lock step, hurling insults or withdrawing, each labelling the other as ‘the problem’ or withholding our love in various ways and to varying degrees. We went on like this for some time.
When Charlie, our now eleven-and-a-half-year-old son was born, we made a bold decision to stop threatening to leave one another. Literally, emotionally and physically. We would say to each other often, it is you and me forever my love, so we better make our relationship a nicer place to be. We steadily became more accepting of each other’s darker sides, more compassionate and forgiving. We each recognised that we both had work to do.
This revolutionary change of approach saw the dawn of a new age, the age of self-regulation. The profoundly absent template that had not been modelled by our parents.
The Dawning of Self- Regulation. Love in Action.
“Before we can provide corrective emotional experiences for each other, we must learn how to tend to our own immature parts, to our own reactivity, to our avoidance, our long-suffering frustration. We must master the art of relational mindfulness and retake the reins.”
– Terrence Real
Self-regulation is a facet of emotional intelligence. It is the ability to engage control over our own thoughts, emotions, and impulses. This ensures we can act in ways that align with our values and allows us take steps towards what we want rather than what we do not want. It means we can pursue our dreams and our long-term goals and is at the heart of healthy and mature relationships.
Adverse childhood experiences can leave us plagued with overwhelming negativity, anxiety and insecurities. This nervous system dysregulation can render us prone to avoidance or attack with our nearest and dearest.
If we are to heal and grow, and if our relationships are to survive, we need to develop a capacity to pause when we are faced with a difficult thought or feeling. Take some time to consider it before we act, so that we can decide what might be the best way forward given the circumstances.
Steps for Developing Self-Regulation
- Tune in to the moment. Pay attention to what is going on inside you. Are you thinking negative thoughts? Is there tension in your body? Notice such things without judgement. Practice mindful breathing as this will help you gain some space around the thoughts or feelings.
- Practice cognitive reframing. This involves changing thought patterns which threaten to create bad feelings towards a more positive emotional outcome.
- Start to increase your awareness and understanding that in every moment you have a choice in how you think, feel and therefore behave. It might feel as though this is not true, but it is. The more we show up and take responsibility for what we are bringing to the moment, the more empowered we are to act in healthy ways.
Examples of Self-Regulation
- You notice feelings of doubt regarding your own worth. You acknowledge this lack of confidence might be due to receiving little encouragement from your parents. You decide to take better care of yourself by considering what you need to do to improve how you feel about who you are. You start running, painting or attending a meditation class.
- You have thoughts that you might not succeed at a new endeavour. You wonder if this might be an unconscious attempt to self-sabotage which you would like to change. You replace the doubtful mindset with one that is more hopeful and encouraging. You commit to the challenge and dare to have a go regardless of the outcome.
- You wake up in the morning in a low mood. You don’t reject it; instead, you allow it to be. Then, rather than taking it out on your loved ones, you put on your trusted walking boots, go for a hike and come back energised and pleasant to be around.
- Your boss is angry one morning. You notice you are worried it might be because they are not happy with your performance. You remind yourself you just had a glowing appraisal. You later find out they had come into work after an argument with their spouse and had not yet cooled off.
- After a defeat, you feel disappointed and somewhat low. You have a chat with someone you are close to and express your loss. You discuss what you learned, and this makes you feel better. You then dust yourself off understanding nothing is lost, just experienced gained.
A Return to Love.
My enduring relationship with Russell, and our ever-increasing capacity to self-regulate has transformed me from a severely traumatised, highly insecure girl to an empowered, capable, confident, and mature woman. Russ is similarly strengthened.
I am proud that we didn’t give up, and more importantly that we worked out that it was dysfunctional and abusive to keep blaming each other for every bad feeling or behaviour we each struggled with.
You would be hard pushed to persuade me that there is anything better for our health and wellbeing than an increasingly strong, sane and secure intimate relationship.
It has been more healing for me than all the therapy I have had over the years. I am obviously not knocking therapy; good therapy can be instrumental when it comes to increasing self-awareness and personal growth.
I am suggesting however, that a long-term, increasingly secure relationship has way more to offer the individual trying to grow. This is because we are immersed in our intimate relationships, and they bring out the best and the worst in us all. In this way, they have the potential to show us the truth of who we are, our strengths and our weaknesses. If we can but develop a tolerance for looking rather than avoiding or distracting ourselves from this challenging aspect of the human condition.
“Anyone can become angry—that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way—this is not easy.”
– Aristotle
In this modern world of increasing outward focus and overconsumption, many appear dysregulated. Upset, angry, anxious and paranoid. As a result, relationships do not appear to be holding up. I am sure many more relationships would succeed if people understood the fundamental need for self-regulation.
If people stopped blaming each other and the world for their thoughts and feelings and learned to attend to themselves in a more mature, consistent and loving way, we might see a reduction in problematic addictions and behaviours. We might witness a much-needed decrease in the mental health conditions that appear to be plaguing our youth.
Russ and I are about to celebrate our twenty-year anniversary next month, and our relationship is one worth celebrating.
It sure is good to be in control of yourself emotionally, to be centred and to develop a focussed mind. It is also an accomplishment indeed to become a place of safety, security, and peace to those around you.
