Part 2 of 3: Letters to My Sisters

Dear Sisters,

As I shared with you before, my role with Children’s Services was to investigate and assess reported allegations of child abuse/neglect. When talking with parents I always asked about their life growing up. Time and time again, once I heard a parent’s own childhood story it made me realize people don’t hurt their children because they are “bad parents” or stupid. People hurt their children because they are emotionally and psychologically wounded. When their wounds are triggered, they react. They don’t know how to change, or what else to do.

We all do the best we can with what we have. If we want to do things differently, if we want more harmony and peace in our relationships, if we want to have better coping skills when difficulties come along, we need first to understand our inner world and what happens inside us when difficulties arise and we are triggered.  We also need to heal our emotional/psychological wounds. And we need tools that really work to help us understand so that we can heal. When we master the tools, our life and our relationships change.  

During my own healing journey the first step toward understanding my inner world was when I learned about ‘disproportionate and recurrent reactions’ (drr). (See explanation below.) Understanding drr’s helped me understand why I felt and acted the way I did. I experienced great relief at this new learning because I realized I was not “just crazy” or bad. There were good reasons why I felt the way I did. This is not about excusing behaviour; it’s about understanding it. The first step toward changing is to understand why we feel and act the way we do.

A disproportionate and recurrent reaction (DRR) is a phenomenon of the sensibility which given similar circumstances, always reacts out of proportion to the circumstances that triggered it. These reactions can range from explosion, anger, aggressiveness or excitability on the one hand, to sadness, depression, dejection, flight, or even insensibility and suppression on the other.

- Persons and their growth: The anthropological and psychological foundations of PRH education, published by PRH-International (1997) p. 277.

It is important to note: The sensibility is one of five pivotal centres within the human person where feelings and emotions are experienced as sensations with psychological content, as opposed to purely physical sensations.

The nervous system acts somewhat like a “tape recorder”, keeping track of all the events of persons’ lifetime... The sensibility therefore plays a fundamental role in the process of self-knowledge because of its functions: to feel, to resonate, to transmit, record and reproduce messages.

- Persons and their growth p.100

We all have disproportionate and recurrent reactions.  We recognize our reaction is disproportionate in the face a person or event when strong, or painful emotions are triggered. When this happens we tend to either blame the other person for our feelings or put ourselves down for having these feelings. You’ve heard the saying, “She knows how to push my buttons!” We talk about people having ‘baggage’ and how their baggage causes problems for us. This tells us we all have disproportionate reactions at times to what others say or do, or to some event that we have difficulty responding to in an appropriate, balanced way.  We usually dislike ourselves or feel self-disappointment for over-reacting.

Some of us recognize that our reaction is disproportionate, but don’t know what to do about it; we feel we have no control at the time. We might notice these disproportionate reactions usually recur over and over under similar circumstances. Others are not aware their reaction is disproportionate and simply justify their reaction by blaming the other person and placing themselves in the role of a victim.  Some immediately suppress their feelings and withdraw into themselves. Suppression is a disproportionate reaction designed to protect us from experiencing feelings that threaten to overwhelm us. Suppression can sometimes be manifested in physical symptoms such as migraines, nausea, or stiffness in the jaw, neck and shoulders, etc.

Regardless of the way our DRR is manifested, in the privacy of our own mind we have a dialogue with our self about who we are.  And it is usually negative. We either tell ourselves “That’s just me, I have a short fuse” or we feel victimized, or we feel overwhelmed. Our reactions never help to resolve the problem and often make it worse.

We don’t have to have these outcomes. Disproportionate and recurring reactions, while understandable, are toxic. They poison our relationships and they poison our self-esteem. They can leave us feeling sad or depressed.  When our ensuing inner dialogue nurtures a negative self-image, nothing changes and we just settle into being the same person we were yesterday. Weeks, months, years go by and we haven’t changed much and our DRR’s continue. We settle into a less-than-satisfying way of living while we wear an “I’m OK” face for the world. Our emotional maturity is stunted and we are stuck. 

Up until I committed to my healing journey I used to have a great many disproportionate and recurring reactions! I was easily triggered. Mostly I lived a victim role – I was powerless and it was always someone else’s fault. I often felt misunderstood. I felt helpless, and I was unable to change myself or the other person.  I was afraid to address issues with others because I didn’t know how to do so without the risk of losing the others’ goodwill, friendship, or love. I believed if I disturbed the equilibrium of others I would not be liked, and I desperately needed to be liked. I didn’t realize it at the time but I had felt unloved, unwanted and rejected my whole life. I didn’t believe I was entitled to disturb anyone with my problems. I grew up believing I was a nuisance and a burden and I should not bother anyone.  I developed a habit of suppressing my feelings, storing them inside myself until a “last straw” event occurred, then I would explode in a rage.

As a child I repressed the outrage I felt about the humiliations and indignities I was forced to endure. I desperately needed to feel loved and I blamed myself for not being loveable, or even likeable. By the time I reached adolescence I held a deep belief that not only was I unlovable and a nuisance for existing, my body was not my own – my body belonged to someone else. All the rage I felt about that was repressed and I developed a strong dissociative mechanism in order to survive. I did not feel safe, not even in my own body. At the same time I dreaded rejection. Rejection felt like the annihilation of my soul. I didn’t speak up for myself. I carried all these buried, repressed feelings (my baggage) into adult life. As an adult my childhood memories were mere fragments and incomplete. I had relegated most of my memories to some unconscious, amnestic place inside me. The painful, repressed emotional wounds became my “buttons” – my triggers.

As an adult, a wife, and a mother, I always felt I had to please others. I did not know how to assert myself. I was a passive doormat. And as I said, something would happen that proved to be too much. It didn’t have to be something big – it was just “a last straw” event. I would burst into a rage (a very obvious disproportionate reaction!). I didn’t understand at the time that the “last straw” event was simply an event that triggered the rage I kept repressed for years. The “last straw” was more than my internal system could handle and a rage from deep inside would burst forth and spew out onto anyone who was in the way. 

During this time I had no conscious understanding of why I was so enraged. I was aware only of the immediate event – the trigger. I hated myself for it. I would berate myself so badly and feel terrible self-loathing. I would try desperately to escape these feelings and turned to food. I tried to numb myself. Food was my way to self-medicate. I tried to fill up a big emptiness inside. The emptiness was like a deep black hole of desolation and anguish and loneliness and self-loathing. My inner dialogue about how bad and utterly unlovable I was fed my very negative self-image. I believed there was something wrong with me.  

From there I would move into a phase of trying so hard to be different – trying to please everyone, trying to be agreeable, desperate to make amends for my rage. And once again I did not dare show displeasure or distaste for anything anyone said or did. I returned to my passive, doormat-victim role. I continued to numb myself with food. I was completely unaware of the root of my rage. I did not consciously remember a great deal of my childhood, but even if I had, I would not have made the connection between my rage and my past experiences.

I will stop Part 2 here and continue my story in my next letter to my sisters in two weeks time.

I have indicated several times that we need tools to help us heal but I haven’t explained what they are – I will talk about the tools soon. 

Please feel free to ask questions or make comments and share with me what you want to say. You don’t have to use your own name if you’d prefer anonymity. To leave a comment you have to log in under a Google+ page.  I look forward to reconnecting with you again, to share with you how I freed myself from my disproportionate and recurring reactions and my dysfunctional cycle of suppression-rage-suppression. Understanding it all was just the first step to finding myself.