ARE YOU A TRAIN WRECK WAITING TO HAPPEN?
The real estate agent, divorced, remarried, now with two sets of kids, working two jobs while trying to start a business. One night he dropped the milk carton spilling the contents over the kitchen floor resulting a spontaneous emotional implosion with sobbing fits of rage, while his wife and children watched in shock. He locked himself in the bathroom and remained in the fetal position until the ambulance arrived. He was hospitalized in the mental health unit and only sleep ended the sobbing.
The overworked bank manager discovering her husband's extramarital affair while she was trying to care for her terminally ill mother. When we met she was on leave from work struggling daily with full blown panic attacks, which included racing heart, dizziness, depersonalization, muscle spasms, labored breathing and throat constriction. Every admission to the ER found her in perfect physical health.
The construction supervisor, with chronic marital conflict, commuting from PA to NY two and half hours up and back every day. One Sunday night he decided he couldn't do it anymore and took a bottle of his wife's valium and was committed to a mental health unit.
HOW STRESS AFFECTS THE BODY
You believe you're invincible and employ the adaptive capacity of the frontal lobe to deny the signs of an impending break down. But deep within the reptilian inner braincore, and directly related to your failure to adapt to stress in healthy ways, fear circuits are beginning a neural alignment with physiological symptoms that will literally blindside you seemingly out of nowhere and all efforts of the adaptive frontal lobe to seek relief will appear futile. But make no mistake, over many months and even years you were building up steam for the crash.The first step of recovery is releasing the throttle of control. You can't do it all. Sometimes you need to let go the tiller and let the ship flow with the current. You can't control everything in your personal world and you certainly can't control other people. In fact most of life is simply outside your control and you need to sculpt the wisdom to recognize what is and isn't in your power to control. Utilizing your adaptive frontal lobe to pull back rather than storm ahead is a great first step. Attempts at controlling other people is an exercise of futility, because all control will incorporate opposing resistance on some level (keep that in mind when seeking compliance with children).
Look at your diet. Ignore what you eat at your peril. If the fuel that serves to motivate your body and brain is deficient, that deficiency will be evident in your actions and failure will be omnipresent and will include your failure to effectively cope with even minor problems, because your mood and mental state are in the pits of despondency. Most people fail to even recognize that they are often in the late stages of full dehydration due to the diuretic factors of sugar, empty carbs, caffeine, nicotine, alcohol and over prescribed psychiatric medications. Researchers are beginning to identify chronic inflammation throughout the entire body, based on poor eating habits, as a possible cause of depression and anxiety disorders.
Look at the dynamics of your most significant relationships and identify YOUR role in maintaining the chronic conflict. Even though the knee-jerk response is to blame, criticize, judge, label, diagnose, etc, the significant other, what about YOU? How do you do to provoke their response? What behaviors and responses can you change to generate more harmony and less conflict? How can you take responsibility for the emotional drama that you participate in and often magnify? How do you justify and rationalize your unhealthy behaviors? How can you take responsibility for yourself in ways that benefit yourself and others?
Emotional train wrecks often have many variables and factors greasing the tracks for sudden impact. Yet, even though impact seems spontaneous, it is often a culmination of many years of dysfunctional and maladaptive behaviors building in intensity through denial. The weight of that denial causes speed to accelerate making the crash that much more traumatic.
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