When we talk about AFFECT, we are talking about your INSIDES. It is the felt sense of what is happening in your body. It exists on a spectrum as you can see in the image below.
1 is complete SHUT DOWN!
1-4 is HYPOAROUSAL: Arousal is low. Numbness or shutdown. Shallow breathing. Difficulty concentrating. Checked out. Emotions such as shame, hopelessness, and despair. People here may not appear to be dysregulated. They are just as dysregulated as 7-10 but is not as obvious.
5-6 is RELAXED EXCITEMENT: Regulated. Nervous system is regulated. A zone of optimal arousal.
7-10 is HYPERAROUSAL: You experience racing heart, faster breathing, tightening in stomach. Panic, terror, rage can accompany you here. When someone is here, it is obvious that they are dysregulated.
10 is RAGE!
Everyone gets dysregulated at times, however, some people get dysregulated more frequently than others, and some get dysregulated by more subtle stimulation than others.
If someone walks into a restaurant with a gun and holds up the restaurant, everyone in there will get dysregulated. But some people will get dysregulated when an argument occurs at a table right next to you.
Not everyone's brain has the same ability to self-regulate!
Why does affect regulation matter so much? Increasing your ability to self-regulate is absolutely essential to living life the way God designed it.
Why is Affect Regulation so important?
There are three main reasons that affect regulation is so important, and Adam highlights these in this lecture:
1. Your ability to self-regulate lies at the core of feeling that you have some measure control over your insides. Affect regulation gives you the confidence that you are a self and independent of your environment. When you are little, one of the ways you develop the "I am a self" is based on your ability to self-regulate your insides. A child first learns this through self-regulation. When a seven-year-old is calming herself down in her room, she is learning what it means that she has a self. In a dysregulated state, we do not feel safe. You want to learn how to be angry or laid back without having to go into hyper or hypo-arousal. Your ability to regulate your affect makes you feel somewhat safe in the world.
2. All addictions and compulsions are, at their core, attempts at affect regulation. Human beings are driven by a need to regulate are insides/arousal. Whenever you become dysregulated, you will do whatever it takes to get you back to a sense of regulation. You will do whatever it takes to bring your body out of the extremes of hyper or hypo arousal. You are not an alcoholic or workaholic. You are committed above all to bring your body into a state of regulation.
3. Affect regulation is really important for interpersonal relationships. An impaired ability to self-regulate, reeks havoc in interpersonal relationships. Our story can make it harder to self-regulate. And this makes relationships fraught. When you are dysregulated, you are no longer emotionally or fully present. Portions of your prefrontal cortex go offline and you are no longer present. Your ability to choose is diminished. Your defensive limbic brain has taken over and your rational brain has started to shut down. Your ability to send and receive signals for interpersonal safety has become compromised. This keeps you in a physiological state of feeling that the other person is more like an enemy than a friend. The vast majority of interpersonal conflict is driven by both parties desperately trying to regulate their insides and having a hard time doing it.
You are constantly reading your partner's affect. You are doing this all the time. Your observation of your loved-one's affect informs you of their inner state (intentions) and what YOU mean to them. When your husband checks out of a conversation, your nervous system picks up on that and you interpret that to mean he doesn't care about you.
Affect tells us about another person's subjective state and this is crucial information for negotiating relationships. This is conducted non-consciously right brain to right brain. (Through pauses in speech, a barely perceptible change in pitch, etc ...) Your right brain is a power house in reading changes in vocalization and facial expressions. You are reading the other person's affect. And the exchange in affect is how we determine how important we are to each other.
People who are prone to states of dysregulation tend to behave in ways that alienate others. For example, when you get enraged, it is very hard for your partner to hear what you are saying. Likewise, when you shut down, they feel abandoned. The ability to regulate affect preserves connection between people. When a person's affect gets dysregulated, some measure of rupture is inevitable. When you are dysregulated, what you need most is connection with another human being -- especially someone who is important to you. This is because connection brings you back into a state of regulation.
This cycle of dysregulation and alienation leads you to an immense sense of powerlessness because you can't make the dysregulation stop which makes changing your behavior even more difficult. This is one of the most agonizing aspects of trauma. It's this feeling that I'm at the mercy of my bodily sensations that make me alienate my loved one at the very moment that I most need connection.
So, why are some people better able to regulate their affect than others? Why do you get dysregulated so easily when others don't? And why is it so hard for you to get back to a regulated state. This has to do with attachment.
Your ability to self-regulate was largely determined by your relationship with your caregivers early in life.
Infants and toddlers have many experiences of moving a from a comfortable state to a state of dysregulation. Hungry. Sick. Frightened. Wet. But they have extremely limited ability to regulate their own affect. So they cry. They have different facial contortions. They have vocal utterances. This is a critical moment when they are conveying their dysregulation to their primary caregiver.
Will the child's caregiver pick up on their attempts to communicate distress?
A good-enough caregiver is attuned to the child's signals; they will respond by identifying the child's source of distress, and then they will help them move into a regulated state. Having their affect regulated by another is how a child learns how to regulate their affect for themself! This teaching experience between caregiver and child will ideally happen thousands of times. And then the child accrues a storehouse of implicit memories of being able to move from dysregulated to regulated state all through the guidance, support and "withness" of their primary caregiver.
This occurs through the "withness" of the child's primary caregiver.
Infants are dependent on their primary caregiver to regulate for them interactively. In fact, the child learns how to do this is by having their affect regulated by another. There is no greater gift that a parent can give to their child than being attuned to when the child becomes dysregulated and helping that child move back into a state of regulation.
Why is that such a precious gift?
Because the relational process of being attuned to and responding with care by re-regulating the infant's body results in building brain structures that are necessary for the development of a brain that can self-regulate. These develop through the interaction between the child and their primary caretakers.
Attunement is the key. The primary caregiver's most important job is to attune to the ebbs and flows of the infant's insides. And the child doesn't have words. So the only way to understand the infant is to pay exquisite attention to the infant's non-verbal communications of distress. A "good enough" parent reliably appraises the child's non-verbal cues, and the child communicates that it is dysregulated via facial expressions, vocal pitch, body posture, etc. Caregivers can discern when the infant is dysregulated by reading non-verbal communication from the child.
Parents, don't freak out that you have failed. Our job can be called "adventures in misattunement." We are going to mess it up! We just need to want to get it right half the time and reattune when we get it wrong. You don't have to get the kid all the time. You need to realize when you miss it and seek to find the child again (reattunement).
Attunement applies to all close relationships.
So once the caregiver is aware of the internal state of the infant thru attunement, the question becomes ... Is the caregiver willing and able to regulate the child's affect? And this depends on whether they are able to self-regulate themself! The adult has to be in a place that they can offer a gift of interaction to the child!
For insecurely attached parents, the ability to regulate their child's affect is almost entirely dependent on how much they have been healing and learning to engage their own story. A caregiver who has not engaged their own trauma will have difficulty regulating their child. Period.
So what does good parenting do for a child's brain?
If you, as a child, had attunement and interactive regulation provided to you from your caregivers, then you received the necessary neural circuitry to regulate your own affect. And that's a big deal! A very big gift! The brain of a child with affect-regulating parents, looks different than the brain of a child without such parents. If the parent is able to attune to the child's shifts and to respond to the child either by down or up-regulating their hyper or hypo-states, then critical structures are built in the child's right hemisphere and ... what a gift you have given your child.
Moreover, in addition, the child will develop descending fibers from the prefrontal cortex down to the amygdalia and the child will develop the capacity for self-regulation that will serve them very well in life. If you as the parent are doing this right, you are building a competent right-hemisphere in the child's brain that can down and up-regulate correctly and easily.
When that doesn't happen? Prolonged misattunement can result in chronic emotional dysregulation. What happens in those cases? The child's brain does not develop the necessary pathways that allow them to self-regulate. (In other words, you become an adult with attachment and dysregulation issues.)
Okay, so what do you do if you realize you have difficulty regulating your affect?
1. Get in relationship with people who know how to self-regulate and who know how to love (interactively regulate) and spend as much time with them as possible. Get in relationship with securely attached people!
2. Find a good therapist. And GOOD is more important than THERAPIST!! They must have engaged their own story and have grown themselves if they are going to help you grow. A good therapist is someone who has engaged their story at a deep level.
3. When you are dysregulated, use a bottom-up approach rather than a top-down approach to bring calm to your body. Top-down approaches rely on your cortex to THINK your way back to calm. That is not going to work as well as bottom-up which relies on attuning to your body and working with your breathing to bring your nervous system back to a state of calm.
A year of kindness toward your own heart will take you further on the healing journey than a year of weekly therapy with your dream therapist.
Here's a statement to keep in mind:
The harm that you do to yourself through self-contempt is oftentimes greater than the harm that has been done to you.
This means harshness from you to you. From Wendi to Wendi. The opposite of self-contempt is kindness. Self-contempt will block your healing process more than any other single factor. And the anecdote is kindness. Romans 2:4 "The Kindness of God leads to repentance." If that is true, why do you think being harsh with yourself is the best way to grow?
When you ponder in your imagination being kinder to yourself, what fears come up? What might happen if you are kinder to yourself for the remainder of today? Can you practice kindness to your own heart?
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