Emotional Disregulation
Just because we’re all born with the ability to identify specific emotions, doesn’t mean we’re required to understand and regulate them. They’re like teeth. Today’s accepted minimum criterion for oral hygiene dictates that everyone should brush their teeth twice a day, while flossing and mouthwash are highly encouraged by dental professionals. Routine trips to the dentist are encouraged to maintain the health of your mouth, but even those who don’t make regular visits are expected to seek treatment when problems arise, such as cavities or gum disease. Additionally, society strongly suggests you take steps to prevent and/or correct issues with the alignment of your teeth or jaw if they fall outside an established standard, and there are further levels of cosmetic treatments that are marketed for those looking to achieve the collective definition of “the perfect smile”.
I realize it’s going to be a tough sell if I continue on the path of this metaphor and equate what I’m encouraging you to do with not brushing your teeth and letting your gums rot, so I’m going to leave it there and quickly side step out of that fart.
I like having teeth too.
But emotions can’t chew your food, so they aren’t worth all the attention and work that’s required to achieve the level of mental health that is promoted in Placeholder.
Now that you have a better understanding of what emotions are and the excuses that have allowed them to become an accepted part of our reality, we can begin your detox process and move you from a place where you depend on your emotions to navigate your life, to one where you detest and avoid them at all costs.
Giving up requires vacillating between suppressing emotions and becoming overwhelmed by them.
Relinquishing your sense of control and awareness of your emotional experience is the foundation for breaking down your motivation and eroding away at any hope you may hold on to when you imagine your future. Given that you already have a number of tools to regulate your emotions deeply ingrained in your subconscious, this will be an ongoing challenge that you will need to refocus your attention on over and over before it feels natural, but laying the groundwork here will make later concepts much easier to attack.
Much like a tumor that has been allowed to proliferate throughout the body before being identified as the dangerous cancer that it is, I can’t simply cut out your emotions, send you home with some antibiotics and highly-addictive painkillers, and congratulate myself for curing you while your newfound dependence on opioids rapidly destroys the lives of you and your loved ones.
For one thing, I don’t have a medical degree.
So, since the malignant emotions will still exist while we pursue our treatment, we can at least learn methods to use their power against them.
Goals of Emotional Disregulation
Complicate your experience
Increase your vulnerability
Increase your suffering
Complicate Your Experience
Nothing is black and white, everything exists in some grAy area, or so the cliche goes. But that’s stupid, because gray is a mix of black and white, so therefore everything is black and white. Duh. The saying should go “everything is black AND white”. This will be a recurring theme for us, so now is as good a time as any to introduce it. Actually, it’s probably the best time.
PICTURE OF BLACK-GRAY-WHITE WORLD
You’ve been encouraged to make your gray area home somewhere in between the Black House and the White House, but it’s time to list that sucker on Zillow and get a nice travel pillow, because you’re going to start splitting your time between the two extremes.
*You can’t regulate yourself if you don’t understand your emotions
Generalize Your Emotions
The main enemy in our fight to give up is accuracy and specificity in our thoughts. Our goal is to zoom out to the biggest picture and blur out the most details whenever we have a thought. For instance, instead of focusing on the particulars of sitting with my left leg crossed over my right, chewing gum that lost its flavor ten minutes ago, and using my laptop to research, outline and discuss the importance of achieving emotional disregulation, the only thing my brain would say if asked what I am doing this second is “writing”. My ultimate goal is to filter out all the minutia until the most specific thing I am aware of is merely that I exist, but that’s like endarkenment level givingupedness.
And yes, I know I used the word “unlightenment” in the last chapter, but that’s a totally different thing than “endarkenment”, so get over it.
In terms of emotions, employing the zoom/blur function means reidentifying your emotions when you notice you’re having one. You might feel affection for your father, compassion for your best friend, and lust for Jean-Claude Van Damme, but essentially you feel love for all three of them. Gets a little creepy when you start equating the stirring in your loins that builds while you’re watching a montage of JCVD buns, with the pleasant appreciation of the thoughtful birthday card your dad sent, yeah?
Good.
The less specific you are when naming your emotions, the more you will grow to distrust and ultimately dread them.
ANY TIME YOU CAN NAME A SPECIFIC FEELING YOU ARE HAVING, REIDENTIFY IT AS ONE OF THE SIX UNIVERSAL EMOTIONS AND REFRAME YOUR RESPONSE ACCORDINGLY
Simplifying your description of your emotions to its basest form is only one way to remain ignorant to your experience, because labeling a feeling as one of the universal emotions, doesn’t mean it is the primary emotion.
Ignore Information
If the function of emotions is to tell us something, we want to plant our fingers uncomfortably deep in our ears to block out any information that could potentially lead to some personal insight.
Remember that fight or flight response? Rather than letting fear signal you to run away from the angry bear snarling ferociously in your face, take a few minutes to survey the situation and decide how you want to proceed with your day. Who knows, maybe the bear will respect your thoughtful approach and make you an honorary member of the Secret Society of Sentient Sbears. Or maybe it will bite your face off. But the point is, you didn’t let a silly emotion boss you around.
Maybe you don’t find yourself fending off bears that often. That’s ok, there are other ways you can avoid letting instincts dictate your decisions. Take a sniff of that suspicious looking milk in the fridge at work. Doesn’t smell great, does it? Are you having a strong desire to put as much distance between the offensive beverage and your mouth as possible? That’s that stupid bitch disgust trying to tell you what to do. Drink that pungent milk. Eat those rancid eggs. Lick those noxious balls. It’s your life, fucking live it.
Ignoring or misinterpreting our emotions can also motivate ineffective action, thus perpetuating a cycle of frustration. The butterflies in your stomach that flutter at the thought of an upcoming job interview signal that you harbor some fear about not getting the position. Recognizing the fear is a little too thoughtful for my tastes, but there’s still a chance to turn it around. Rather than using the fear to motivate yourself to prepare diligently for the interview, you can instead let it demoralize you and prompt you to seek jobs that are so far below your skill level that you are almost guaranteed to secure them.
And as a bonus, which we will discuss in more detail later on, when your motivation is to avoid an emotion, each time it returns will be more and more devastating, like an antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria eating away at your sanity.
The effects of inaccurately identifying your emotions can extend beyond your personal processing and lead to communication issues with people forced to make sense of the muddle you’re presenting them. By expressing emotions that aren’t in line with your root emotion, you open yourself up to opportunities for miscommunication and invalidation.
Increasing Vulnerability
Wanna know a secret? I don’t write this shit in order, nor did I start with any sort of comprehensive outline of how anything was going to tie together, so yet again I’ve found myself rearranging the entire structure to fit a new idea. Fortunately, I’ve come up with a significantly more organized plan that makes so much more sense than before. Unfortunately, that means I have a bunch of half-assed sections that barely made sense in their own context, and because I’m way more motivated by maintaining my word count than I am by creating quality content, I now have to awkwardly force them to be relevant to my new points.
Would it be more efficient to write the new sections from scratch, rather than spending time desperately trying to find a way to use 500 words that barely made sense when I wrote them two years ago?
Yes.
Have I given you the impression that we should should be making rational choices?
I hope not.
Ok, let me go see what I can do. Here’s some hold music. Or…here’s the book version of music. Go dig out your recorder from fifth grade and make a video playing it while I’m gone #givingupformeagan
The good news is, the topics in a few of those sections are way more relevant than I thought. The bad news is, the reason they are all incomplete is because I did a terrible job writing them and clearly just abandoned ship when I realized how far I had strayed from any semblance of a point. This is actually a great example of what I will be, or, if I moved everything around again have already, talk(ing/ed) about regarding how we should view our relationship to our past/present/and future selves. Past Meagan clearly didn’t care that Present Meagan was going to have to deal with her sloppy ramblings, because at the time she was Present Meagan leaving a problem for Future Meagan, and seeing how I’m currently Present Meagan, not Future Meagan, I can’t actually be mad, since I also am not concerned by the problems of Future Meagan.
It’s going to make so much sense.
But so far nothing I’ve written in this section has been on topic, so it’s probably time to get back to it before this becomes another dead-end document that I promise myself I’ll finish up another time as I quickly move along to something else.
Emotional Triggers
You can’t always predict when an emotion will strike because these nasty predators can be triggered to attack by the slightest stimulus.
A whiff of a familiar cologne on a fellow commuter.
A voicemail notification from an unknown number.
The third eviction notice slid under the door of the apartment you are squatting in.
Seemingly benign events like these can spontaneously evoke a myriad of emotions at a moment’s notice.
That smell may rekindle nostalgic thoughts of your beloved late-grandfather, filling you with sadness as you remember how the bastard cheated you out of millions when he forgot to add you to his will.
The unidentified caller could remind you that you’re waiting for results from an STD test you put off for way too long, and you feel disgusted thinking about some of the people you raw-dogged during your recent work convention.
The sound of paper across the floor, accompanied by the shouts of government law enforcement officials, might fill you with fear as you are transported back to the time a drug lord sent his goon’s to shatter your kneecaps after you couldn’t pay him because you snorted all the coke you were supposed to sell.
You are probably well aware of a few of your personal triggers. They’re probably something boring like the holidays or Adele songs. You may have even conquered your fear of encountering them by finding methods to prepare for and cope with the responses you have when they pop up.
Stop it.
Either forget your coping mechanisms or get some new, more unpredictable triggers. Actually, do both. The more the merrier! Instead of your bullshit approach, we want to live in permanent state of paranoia, anticipating that at any moment we are mere seconds away from having a complete mental breakdown.
How To Cultivate Fear of Emotional Triggers
Don’t identify your triggers
Don’t have a strategy for dealing with your triggers
Plan your life around avoiding any known triggers
Ignore emotional responses to triggers for as long as possible
Get mad at yourself for ultimately being overwhelmed by your emotions
Give up
Not knowing if/how a random moment during a routine day might initiate the fall of the first, in a very long line, of emotional distress dominos is incredibly stressful. Which is exactly what we’re going for! We’ll talk further on proper worrying techniques later, but for now just remain constantly on guard for all possible emotional triggers.
Accumulate Negative Experiences
You know how you can’t control the rise of bile in your stomach whenever you are reminded of shrimp, ever since a jumbo binge on a spoiled batch of the rosy little crustaceans led to a weekend destroying a defenseless toilet with violent assaults from all ends of your angry digestive system?
That’s close to the kind of total body aversion we are after, but I want to get all the senses on board. Below are some examples of things you can do to strengthen the distress you should be feeling when you experience an emotion.
Sight
watch your parents have sex
look at pictures you found on the dark web of Steve Bannon in his tighty [very much not] whities
Smell
keep a rotten potato in your pocket
take a hefty whiff of a sweaty hippy dude’s pants
Touch
step on a man-o-war jellyfish
Give your tongue a series of paper cuts
Sound
mix a track of babies crying underscored by vuvuzelas
listen to Fox News
Taste
drink coconut rum
lick Guy Fieri’s buttcrack
Increasing Suffering
Automatic Responses
Since emotions come pre-programmed we can't typically choose our immediate reaction to a stimulus, so it seems unfair to judge this subconscious response. But society has classified certain feelings as good/bad, and therefore there are certain reactions that are considered right/wrong.
When our nature doesn't align with our nurture it causes distress.
If you constantly find yourself not having any appropriate emotional responses then you're probably a sociopath and only pretending to be happy. So just pretend to be miserable. Easy as that. But it was my idea, so I’m still counting it as a win for me. Also, you should still keep reading so you can properly impersonate a givingupper. I don’t need people out there half-assing it, ruining the cause for the rest of us.
We’re off to a good start. You know emotions are bad. They may be innate from birth, but a vast majority of our reactions to them exist because of the nurture part of life.
Thanks Obama.
Let's do a little experiment. Some role-play, if you will.
What if someone came up to you and said “you look nice today”. You might think it’s perfectly logical to feel happiness as a response, but that’s because you’re dumb. What, too harsh? I thought you figured out by now that everything you know is a lie so that’s pretty much going to be the appropriate answer to most of my questions.
And if you were hoping for a different kind of role-playing, e-mail me at:
DandDisthecoolest@dungeonmastermeagan.com
Or
Iwanttodocrazysexstuff@dungeonmastermeagan.com
That happiness trying to inject itself into your mind is a product of a lifetime of lies you’ve been subliminally ingesting. While you were still sitting in your own chocolate poopy pants, various forces in society started working some Pavlovian voodoo on you, molding your reactions to fit the accepted call-and-response system in place at that time. It’s just like the midnight showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show. No one really understands why they are periodically shouting random shit at the screen, but everyone knows to go along with it and not ask questions, unless they want to spend the rest of the night on stage with an over-the-hill Frank-N-Furter in their lap.
It’s a dark, tangled web of happiness, but I’m here to rescue you from the ugly tarantula that is our culture! Do tarantula’s even create webs? Hang on, I gotta look this up. Ooo, number three on the search suggestions! Hmm, I guess they don’t spin webs to catch their prey, but they do make silk and use it to keep the dirt out of their little spider homes. That’s pretty cool. But it fucks up my metaphor.
Never mind, a terrifying series of google searches has indicated that most of the big creepy looking spiders actually hunt their prey, rather than creating webs. I mean, that’s even more terrifying, so lets nix the web analogy and instead imagine you’re being chased down by a giant Huntsman spider in Australia, and I heroically throw a grenade at it and shield you from the blast with my body.
Stop getting off topic! Do you want to learn or not?? Ok, good. I want to teach. We’re a match made in The Container Store with an unlimited gift card. Or whatever you imagine heaven is like.
Anyway. Now that we know how to be super aware of our shit, it’s time to use these mind powers to get The Man out of your head. Next time you feel yourself have an automatic emotional response to something, slow down and run through all the other possible responses you could have instead. Let me show you how it’s done:
“You look nice today”
Are they being sarcastic? Do they know something I don’t about a giant fashion faux pas I’m making? Are they trying to draw the attention of the whole room to my ugliness?
Are they suggesting I look like shit every other day? Why do I even bother getting up an hour and a half early to do my hair and makeup everyday if most of the time I look like a dumpster fire?
Are they trying to get me to give them a bj in the bathroom? What is it about my aesthetic that is radiating a “gives public head” vibe? This place totally doesn’t have the kind of bathrooms where I’d let my knees touch the floor.
Are they trying to gain my trust so they can yank me into the back of their windowless van and steal my eyes for their latest basement art installation? What if he doesn’t even kill me, then I’ll be blind and I won’t get to see any more new Marvel movies!
Boom. I was able to justify feeling anger, sadness, disgust, and fear in response to that statement. So many options! And guess what, you don’t have to pick just one. The more emotions you feel simultaneously, the more difficult it will become to understand your experience, and the easier it will be to give up!
CARRY A LIST OF THE SIX EMOTIONS AND EVERY TIME YOU HAVE AN AUTOMATIC REACTION TO SOMETHING, COME UP WITH A REASON WHY EVERY OTHER EMOTION COULD BE VALID. EXCEPT HAPPINESS. AND ALSO JUDGE YOURSELF FOR HAVING AN AUTOMATIC RESPONSE IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Emotional Avoidance
The fun part of dominos isn’t watching a few tiles fall over. Once that chain is set off, there’s nothing more satisfying than watching the entire line rapidly collapse in turn.
And that clicky noise. I loooooove that.
Point being, you don’t want to stop the process mid-sequence by trying to understand what you’re feeling. On the contrary, you’re in for quite a show if you refuse to admit you’re feeling anything at all, until the compounding stress of repressed emotions turns into a wave of agitation that overwhelms your psyche and washes you into an ocean of unidentifiable distress.
It shouldn't take long before this scrutinization exhausts your brain and it will attempt to release itself from the constant torture by eliminating all positive automatic responses. Now you've wiped the pre-existing reactions you used to have, but haven't replaced them with anything concrete yet, so the next step in avoiding peace of mind is to start ignoring your emotions completely. Don't focus on breaking apart your responses to stimuli or understanding the experience generated from it anymore. Instead, we are going to start working on fully enmeshing yourself with whatever you’re currently feeling and spontaneously realigning your identity to match.
Until this point you probably thought emotions were a natural occurrence that naturally ebbed and flowed throughout your day/week/year/life. Hopefully by now you’ve realized that’s not the case, and in reality having any emotion is a huge character flaw. Moving forward we will use emotions to define us, both the refusal to feel them and the failure to prevent them. Since we no longer accept that emotions come and go as a part of life the next logical explanation is that this emotion could last forever. You don’t know, you can’t predict the future.
You know how when you have a cold and you can’t believe you ever took breathing through your nose at night for granted and you are sure the rest of your life is going to involve raw, chapped nostrils? Then, one miraculous day, you find you’re able to fall asleep without a stack of seven pillows holding you upright, and a few days later the alligator skin around your nose no longer resembles Rudolph. You forget all about the trials you endured and go back to taunting the gods of mild illnesses by skipping your Emergen-C chews and ignoring when the stranger you’re drunkenly making out with says the think they’re coming down with something.
This is what your new emotional experience is going to be like. Every emotion should feel like that cold you thought would never end, until the next one comes along and you, again, forget everything you knew about any other state of being. Repeating this cycle will erode away at your sense of self and make room for a multitude of personalities to evolve, which will rotate through to match your current, unpredictable mood swing.
Previous