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bladesparkI continue to live an interesting life, in the cursed sense of "interesting." The latest utter disaster to unfold around here is the fact that I have quit a very high dose of venlafaxine (a NSRI anti-depressant) cold turkey. This was not my idea. This wasn't my doctor's idea, either. This is the hellscape that is our healthcare system.
But now that I'm past the "horrific suffering" part of withdrawal and into the "things gonna be weird for a while" stage, which as I gather tapers slowly off over the next month-ish, I am fascinated by what this experience is revealing about my brain chemistry. I'm well aware that "I" am a jumble of specific neural pathways, chemical reactions, etc. but the degree to which my self is indeed defined by those things feels almost creepy to experience in a conscious and undeniable way.
One of the slow-tapering side effects is "lack of emotional regulation." Now that kind of thing is hard to put into words, but I'll do my best to describe what I'm experiencing, because it's not so much "emotions that cannot be controlled" as "emotions that get to go first in the D&D combat round of your life."
Let's pick something that is sentimental/sad, something that might make you cry, to use as an example. I'm gonna pick Wall-E, because it's one of the few movies that made me cry. Imagine you're watching a particularly emotional scene from Wall-E. Previous to this past week, when my brain begins to process something that invokes emotion, there has been a space between that and fully feeling the emotion, then a second space between feeling it and acting on it in some physical way. In those spaces one gets a chance to shove the emotion away, or to lean into it and embrace it. Today, however, as I was rummaging in my brain for examples, I thought of Wall-E, and instantly had tears forming. Absolutely no space, no choice, no room to not fully experience the emotion, no opportunity to not react to it. I thought of Wall-E, I was sad, my eyes welled up.
There are five foundational/fundamental emotions, according to modern psychology. If you need help remembering them, Inside Out is based on them, so Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Fear, and Anger. Guess it's Pixar day here!
Now, as described above, I am currently experiencing most of those emotions in a deeply weird way. Uncontrollable giggle-fits. Sudden tears. Complete inability to even consider eating weird foods. (I had to freeze the tripe I'd gotten to try from the dimsum place as a treat, since usually trying new, strange foods is my idea of a treat, but NOPE, not happening!)
Yet I am experiencing anger exactly and precisely the way I always have. When something infuriating happens, I immediately feel a stab of red-hot rage, and I find myself gritting my teeth, pulse going faster, etc. Mostly it happens over the net, but I will confess that on one in-person occasion I punched somebody in the shoulder pretty hard as an immediate reflex action. There is not and has never been any space for me to choose to feel or not to feel, to choose to react or not to react.
Now, I want to be a decent human being, so I have built up a laundry-list of various strategies over my lifetime to push back against the rage as swiftly as possible, but those are very much a cobbled-together mess of ways to not hit people, scream, and spend most of my time having infuriated meltdowns. They're not proper emotional regulation.
It's just that until having all my other, innate and instinctive, forms of emotional regulation shut down, I hadn't realized the true nature of the issue. I "have a temper" so I have to control it via methods that people who don't have a temper don't worry about. While I know that some people with "a temper" are deliberately engaging in toxic behavior, either consciously or partly unconsciously, it turns out that for me, "I have a temper" is a statement very much like "I have ADHD" or "I have synesthesia." It's yet another example of my brain chemistry and wiring being atypical.
Brains are so goddamn weird!
But now that I'm past the "horrific suffering" part of withdrawal and into the "things gonna be weird for a while" stage, which as I gather tapers slowly off over the next month-ish, I am fascinated by what this experience is revealing about my brain chemistry. I'm well aware that "I" am a jumble of specific neural pathways, chemical reactions, etc. but the degree to which my self is indeed defined by those things feels almost creepy to experience in a conscious and undeniable way.
One of the slow-tapering side effects is "lack of emotional regulation." Now that kind of thing is hard to put into words, but I'll do my best to describe what I'm experiencing, because it's not so much "emotions that cannot be controlled" as "emotions that get to go first in the D&D combat round of your life."
Let's pick something that is sentimental/sad, something that might make you cry, to use as an example. I'm gonna pick Wall-E, because it's one of the few movies that made me cry. Imagine you're watching a particularly emotional scene from Wall-E. Previous to this past week, when my brain begins to process something that invokes emotion, there has been a space between that and fully feeling the emotion, then a second space between feeling it and acting on it in some physical way. In those spaces one gets a chance to shove the emotion away, or to lean into it and embrace it. Today, however, as I was rummaging in my brain for examples, I thought of Wall-E, and instantly had tears forming. Absolutely no space, no choice, no room to not fully experience the emotion, no opportunity to not react to it. I thought of Wall-E, I was sad, my eyes welled up.
There are five foundational/fundamental emotions, according to modern psychology. If you need help remembering them, Inside Out is based on them, so Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Fear, and Anger. Guess it's Pixar day here!
Now, as described above, I am currently experiencing most of those emotions in a deeply weird way. Uncontrollable giggle-fits. Sudden tears. Complete inability to even consider eating weird foods. (I had to freeze the tripe I'd gotten to try from the dimsum place as a treat, since usually trying new, strange foods is my idea of a treat, but NOPE, not happening!)
Yet I am experiencing anger exactly and precisely the way I always have. When something infuriating happens, I immediately feel a stab of red-hot rage, and I find myself gritting my teeth, pulse going faster, etc. Mostly it happens over the net, but I will confess that on one in-person occasion I punched somebody in the shoulder pretty hard as an immediate reflex action. There is not and has never been any space for me to choose to feel or not to feel, to choose to react or not to react.
Now, I want to be a decent human being, so I have built up a laundry-list of various strategies over my lifetime to push back against the rage as swiftly as possible, but those are very much a cobbled-together mess of ways to not hit people, scream, and spend most of my time having infuriated meltdowns. They're not proper emotional regulation.
It's just that until having all my other, innate and instinctive, forms of emotional regulation shut down, I hadn't realized the true nature of the issue. I "have a temper" so I have to control it via methods that people who don't have a temper don't worry about. While I know that some people with "a temper" are deliberately engaging in toxic behavior, either consciously or partly unconsciously, it turns out that for me, "I have a temper" is a statement very much like "I have ADHD" or "I have synesthesia." It's yet another example of my brain chemistry and wiring being atypical.
Brains are so goddamn weird!