Episode #20: "Affect Regulation: Why It's Critical for Everyday Life"

 

I am taking notes on Episode #20 from the Podcast THE PLACE WE FIND OURSELVES.This episode is entitled "Affect Regulation; Why It's Critical for Everyday Life." Today, Adam is talking about AFFECT regulation. I wrote about this topic in Episode #56 as well. You can download the image above, here. I also took notes on Adam's talk on this in his 12x12 Conference. You can read that here.

AFFECT exists on a spectrum and that spectrum is shown on the image above. You want to be in 5 to 6. When you are in the 5 to 6, you are regulated. It is the zone of optimal arousal. You are not dysregulated when you are in 5 to 6.

HYPOAROUSAL

As you move down the scale, you are in a state of LOW arousal. This is the 1-3 range. You will feel things like: numbness, shallow breathing, difficulty concentrating, feeling checked out. This range correlates with emotions like shame, hopelessness, and despair. These people may not appear to be dysregulated. They often look calm or present. But they are just as dysregulated as someone on the other end of the spectrum. AFFECT regulation in this range means invigorating and awakening your bodily sensations of feeling numb or shut down. 

HYPEROUSAL

As you move up the scale, you are in a HIGH arousal state. This is 8-10. Racing heart, faster breathing, tightening in chest, sense of being jittery. This is a sense of being amped up inside. You may be feeling terror, panic or range. AFFECT regulation in this range means calming and soothing your bodily sensations of terror, panic, or range. 

DYSREGULATION

Whenever you are out of 4-7, you are in a state of dysregulation. Both the high and low areas are dysregulation. Everyone gets dysregulated. But some people get dysregulated more easily. And some can get dysregulated by things that are more subtle. When you become dysregulated, your body's greatest goal, is to get back to a regulated state. 

Self-regulation simply means, getting back to the 4-7 zone.

Some people have a hard time regulating themselves. This is the double-whammy of trauma! If you have a history of trauma, you will get dysregulated more easily. And you will also have a much harder time getting regulated again. Not everyone's brain has the same ability to self-regulate.  

Why does AFFECT REGULATION matter so much? 

Developing the ability to self-regulate is absolutely integral to living the life the way God designed it. Your ability to self-regulate does the following:

1. The ability to self-regulate is the foundation to which the sense of self develops. When a seven-year-old calms herself down in her room, she is learning what it means to have a self. I can exert control over my body to make my insides feel better. Your ability to regulate your AFFECT makes you feel safe. When you can do this well, you can enter states of hypo- or hyper-arousal without becoming incredibly dysregulated. 

2. All dysfunctional ways of being in the world (addictions and compulsions) are at their core, an attempt at AFFECT regulation. Whenever you become dysregulated, you will do whatever it takes to get regulated again. You will drink more or work more or fight more. 

3. This is integral for healthy human relationships. When you are dysregulated, the pre-frontal cortex is offline. When you get dysregulated, the other person gets the sense that "the Wendi that I know isn't there." Your limbic brain takes over and your rational brain goes offline. The other person than looks more like an enemy than a friend. The vast majority of fights with your partner is a desperate feeling to regulate your insides. You are reading your partner's AFFECT. When your husband shuts down in a conversation, your nervous system picks up on that, and you interpret that to mean they don't care about you or what you just said. This is crucial information for negotiating relationships and feeling safe in them. AFFECT is conducted non-consciously from brain-to-brain. You notice split-second changes in tone or facial expressions and these communicate to your limbic brain, the other person's AFFECT. The exchange in AFFECT is the fundamental way that we know what we mean to one another. 

People who are prone to states of dysregulation, tend to behave in ways that alienate others. When you get dysregulated, your partner can't heart what you are saying. And when you shut down, your partner feels like you just abandoned them. The person we are talking to, picks up on things and their nervous system doesn't feel safe. The ability to regulate AFFECT preserves connection between people. When you are dysregulated, what you need most is connection with another person. That connection brings you back into a state of regulation. This Catch-22 can lead to am immense sense of powerlessness. 

Dysregulation leads to alienating behavior which leads to an immense sense of powerlessness. This dynamic is one of the most agonizing byproducts of trauma: feeling at the mercy of bodily sensations that make you react in ways that alienate others at the very moment that you need connection with them. 

Why are some people better able to regulate their AFFECT than others?

The answer is attachment. The entire concept Adam's Podcast is really about. Infants and toddlers have many experiences of moving from a comfortable regulated state into a state of dysreguation. They become cold, wet, hungry, frightened. These little ones have extremely limited ability to regulate their own AFFECT. In response to these unpleasurable states, they express their displeasure or fear or panic through facial expressions and body posture and vocal utterances and crying. 

This is a critical moment!

Will the child's caregiver pick up on the child's signals and respond to the child's distress and help them get back into a regulated state? 

Ideally this process will happen thousands of times and the child accrues a storehouse of getting dysregulated and moving back into regulation through the support of their caregiver ... and a secure attachment is formed!

The way an infant learns to regulate their AFFECT is by having it regulated for them by a caregiver. This is what builds the brain structures. 

This is the first gift of a "good enough" caregiver. There is no greater gift that a parent can give to a child than being attuned to when the child is dysregulated and helping them move back into a regulated state. This process results in the building of the portions of the brain that will allow the child to one day regulate their own AFFECT. 

The key is Attument

ATTUNEMENT is the key. The primary caregiver's most important job is to attune to the infant's internal states of arousal. An attuned caregiver can reliably appraise the situation and read the child's nonverbal communication. Caregivers can respond to their infants and reading them. 

Now, parents out there! Don't panic. Parenting, for even the best parents can be characterized in "adventures in misattunement." A child doesn't need their caregiver to get to right it every time. They child needs their parent to ....

1. Want to attune

2.  Get it right about half the time

3. Reattune when they get it wrong

You needed your mother to realize that she wasn't attuned and to seek to find you and reattune. This applies to your relationships with parenting your own children and relationships to your partner as well. 

Has the caregiver engaged their own story?

However, attunement is only the first half of the process. The critical question is: Is the caregiver able to up and down regulate their child? This can be answered by whether the parent learned it themselves. For insecurely attached persons, the ability for them to regulate your child's AFFECT is almost entirely a function of the degree to which you have engaged your own story and made sense of the tragedy and abuse of your OWN upbringing.

A caregiver who has not addressed their own trauma, will be unwilling or unable to regulate their own child.  

The brain of a child with affect-regulating parents, looks very different from the brain of a child without affect-regulating parents. Critical structures in the right hemisphere of the brain will be built in the child! Moreover, the child will develop descending fibers from their orbital prefrontal cortex and those fibers will go down into their amygdalia which allows them to regulate their own AFFECT!

What attuned parenting does is builds a right hemisphere that can down and up-regulate itself! Prolonged misattunement or unresponsiveness can result in chronic emotional dysregulation for the infant or child. And in these cases, the child's brain does not develop the necessary pathways between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic brain and they cannot regulate their AFFECT very well.

"Affect is at the core of our being, a measure of our heart. It excites us and deflates us, connects us and distances us from others. It organizes us and undoes us." 

What is happening inside your body is so important! Are you listening to your own body?