emotion management disorder

Emotional management disorder is neither a "glass heart" or a "poor personality" as the public mistakenly believes, nor is it a self-control problem that can be corrected by willpower alone. It is a persistent dysfunction in the three core aspects of emotional perception, regulation, and expression. The triggers may involve multiple dimensions such as innate neurological traits, acquired growth environment, and traumatic events. Mild conditions can be improved through independent adjustments. In severe cases, they will be included in the scope of psychiatric clinical diagnosis. There is no so-called "universal one-size-fits-all solution."

I just received a 26-year-old Internet operation visitor last week. During the weekly meeting, the leader asked two questions about the logic of the plan. I couldn't help crying on the spot. I told myself repeatedly in my head that "this little thing is unnecessary", but I couldn't stop the tears. When I got home from get off work, I threw half a box of cat food at the cat who had made no mistake. After throwing it, I hugged the cat and cried for half an hour. It was useless to scold myself over and over again. When she came, the first thing she said was, "Am I hopeless for my emotional management disorder?" ”

In fact, I have heard too many similar questions. What is interesting is that the attribution of such problems in different fields is very different. In the field of neuroscience, the journal "Affective Neuroscience" published a set of research data in 2023: About 12% of people are born with amygdala activity that is 37% higher than the average. When encountering negative stimuli, their emotional arousal is twice as fast as that of ordinary people, but it takes nearly twice as long to subside. To put it bluntly, it takes 3 seconds for others to feel uncomfortable after hearing criticism. This kind of people will be furious on the spot. They may hold back what others have digested in half an hour, and they may still be choked until the next day. Most scholars who hold the physiological view believe that the emotional regulation problems caused by this kind of innate neurological traits are not "bad temper" at all, but the hardware foundation is different from others. There is no need to force yourself to be as "emotionally stable" as others.

But don’t blame all problems on genes. At least among the nearly 300 cases I have come into contact with, more than 70% of emotional management disorders are ultimately traced to a lack of emotional acceptance during the growth stage. This is also the core view of the cognitive-behavioral school: If your emotional expressions were never accepted normally when you were a child. If you fall down and cry, adults will say, "It hurts to cry. Isn't it embarrassing?"; if you fail in an exam, you will be sad and say, "Who told you that you don't work hard?"; if you throw something in anger and you will be scolded for "turning against you", then you have not learned how to coexist with negative emotions since you were a child. You are either used to holding it in or can only explode. Naturally, you will not have the ability to flexibly adjust when you grow up. I once had a 32-year-old programmer visitor. When he was a child, his father would punish him by making him stand when he was angry. He could only eat when he stopped crying. Now when there is a bug at work, his first reaction is never to solve the problem, but to suppress the problem first. On the weekends, he often breaks out over trivial things. Last time, he argued with the rider for half an hour because the delivery was 20 minutes late. Even after hanging up the phone, he felt baffled.

The solutions on the market now actually go to two extremes. One group advocates that "emotional stability is the best match for adults" and teaches you to hold back no matter what happens, not to lose your temper or cry, and to be the master of your own emotions.； The other group says, "You must vent all your emotions to avoid getting sick." They teach people to throw stress balls and yell at the sky and the earth without caring about other people's feelings. I have seen pitfalls with both methods: a client of the former tried hard to hold it in for half a year, and at the end of the year, a physical examination showed that she had type 3 breast nodules. ； There is a girl in the latter who believes in "truly expressing emotions", and she will start a fight with her colleagues and friends if they have any problems. She has changed three jobs in half a year, and she doesn't even have a friend with whom she can make a date.

I have been doing emotion-related cases for nearly 6 years, but I feel that the best method is not so mysterious, and even a bit too simple to say: when the emotion comes up, stop for 3 seconds, not to hold it in, but to feel your pulse. If it beats fast, take 3 deep breaths. First, distinguish your current anger. Is it "brought about by the current incident", or is it "the grievance and pressure that you have accumulated for more than half a month, and you are using this little thing to find an outlet"? Many people say that they can't control their temper. In fact, most of the time they don't understand that the person you are angry at is not the person in front of you at all, it just happened to hit the outlet of your emotions.

Oh, by the way, don’t just label yourself as having an “emotional management disorder”. Occasionally crying all night because of a broken love, or throwing a cup because of irritation due to continuous overtime work, it is not a problem at all. According to the standards of DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition), only when this disorder lasts for more than 3 months and has significantly affected your normal work, social interaction, and intimate relationships, such as being afraid to communicate with others normally, or unable to help but quarrel when talking, and unable to complete work tasks, then you need to consider whether to seek professional intervention.

To put it bluntly, emotions are not meant to be "managed". The more you treat them as enemies and control them and suppress them, the more they will work against you. The little girl who used to love throwing cat food sent me a message last week, saying that this time the leader raised the issue of her plan again. She touched the mint candy in her pocket on the spot, peeled one off and held it in her mouth. She didn't shed tears. She even went to buy the cake she had been reluctant to buy before. She said that she used to be like a balloon that was fully inflated and would explode as soon as it was touched. But now she has learned to let herself relax from time to time and has never exploded again. In fact, there is no such thing as perfect "emotion management". The so-called improvement is just that you are finally willing to sit down and have a few words with your emotions.