2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Irritability, anger, and a bad mood very often haunt people who have experienced a traumatic event. The main reasons for the occurrence of such conditions are increased excitability and reactivity of the nervous system, as well as a post-traumatic tendency to negatively assess life, oneself and other people.
People who have been exposed to a traumatic event are in anticipation of danger. Their thoughts are predominantly negative, in particular, these are the thoughts that “danger is everywhere”, “I attract misfortune,” “I cannot handle it,” “I will lose my job,” “my spouse will leave me,” and others. In addition, intrusions (intrusive memories, nightmares, flashbacks) suppress mood and lead to fear and anxiety.
In order to better cope with bad moods and regulate outbursts of irritability and anger, there are several fairly simple and effective tricks.
Practice relaxation, meditation, yoga, and other stress relief techniques
There are many practices designed to calm and relieve tension. This includes muscle relaxation, breathing practices, and exercise systems; martial arts schools offer whole systems that work to regulate emotions and relieve tension. Meditation reduces the excitement of the autonomic nervous system, reduces obsession with negative and sad thoughts, and expands the psychological capabilities of a person. Yoga, like meditation, improves psychological and physical functioning over time. Yoga not only calms, but also increases physical endurance, mental flexibility and reduces psychophysiological stress.
Scientific studies indicate the effectiveness of such practices, especially mindfulness, as a therapeutic approach aimed, in particular, at freeing the mind from negative thoughts. Many people who have experienced trauma join such practices and receive a lot of help.
Adjust rest
A tired and emaciated person has difficulty with irritability, and poor rest makes it difficult to have a positive perception of the world. So take care of yourself and adjust your rest. Every day, in addition to work and various activities, should contain resource activity, and most importantly - time for rest - a good book, meeting with friends, delicious food, good music, a walk, and the like.
Stop negative thoughts
Your mood depends not so much on the real situation around you as on your thoughts. Negative thoughts distort reality, adding to it anxiety, insecurity, fear, self-doubt and aggression. You don't need to trust such thoughts. Stop their flow by switching to something, reading a book, physical activity, chatting with friends, delicious food, hobbies. Even focusing on work, planning and implementing it can be a good way to get negative thoughts out of your head.
Manage triggers
It is important to notice, or better yet, make a list of everything that makes you sad, annoying, angry, or otherwise spoils your mood. Knowing your triggers will help you manage them. For example, avoiding such situations, people, activities or preparing for them.
Successful trigger identification promotes a greater sense of control and helps enhance emotional regulation.
Trigger identification can be described as a series of tasks
- Recognizing thoughts / feelings / sensations as post-traumatic
- Does the thought / feeling / sensation have anything to do with what is happening in reality now?
- Is the thought / feeling / feeling too intense given the current situation?
- Does a thought / feeling / sensation carry a memory of the past?
- Tali is the situation in which I experience triggers?
- Assessing current environmental stimuli and determining which ones resemble a traumatic event
- Interpersonal conflict
- Criticism or rejection
- Sexual Situations and Incentives
- Interacting with influential people
- People with physical or psychological characteristics that resemble the abuser
- Breaking personal boundaries
- Sounds (crying, gunshots), visual stimuli (twilight, bright light)
Express your annoyance, anger and bad mood in writing and through creativity
Describe the details of your traumatic experience and associated feelings and thoughts, afterwards, you can return to the notes, edit and supplement them.
The depicted images are a psychologically safe way that provides additional opportunities for reflection and cognitive processing of experiences based on metaphors and means of symbolic communication. The creative process provides stress relief, reflection and processing of traumatic experience, at the heart of this process are the mechanisms of decentering, externalization and symbolization.
The memory imprinting mechanism helps to understand why art therapy is effective in working with trauma survivors. There are two types of memory: explicit and implicit. Explicit memory has a conscious character and includes memories of various facts, concepts and ideas. Replaying the chronology of events can be seen as an example of explicit memory. Implicit memory stores memories of sensations and feelings, this also includes the so-called "body memory". There is a perception that in PTSD, memories of the traumatic event are not recorded in explicit memory. Problems also arise when the memories of the traumatic event, being fixed in the implicit memory, do not correlate with the events of the explicit memory. In other words, a person cannot correlate an event with the context of the appearance of sensations and feelings. Visual activity helps to connect implicit and explicit memories of a traumatic situation by the fact that a person creates a certain narrative and can realize why the memory of a traumatic event unbalances him.
Examples of creative exercises:
- Exercise "Cache for emotions." Find a symbolic place where negative experiences and bad moods can be placed. Any box or envelope is suitable as such a hiding place for experiences. Decorate your stash however you like. Draw your feelings on paper, collect photographs, find anything that triggers feelings. Place it in a specially crafted cache. If it helps you, then make this practice permanent by stowing every negative emotion you experience. Turn your actions into a ritual: sometimes get your feelings out of storage and examine them. This will strengthen the work of the imagination and help to eventually cope with emotions.
- Keeping an artistic diary of feelings. Create a special diary (album) for drawings and collages. Fill out the diary every day or refer to it when you feel the need to express your feelings and emotions.
- You can do exercises for creating visual images (pictures or collages), associated with pleasant events of the past, which is accompanied by the revival of pleasant memories and sensations. Examples of topics: “My happy memories”, “My favorite toy”, “My hobby”, “A place where I feel happy”, and others.
Be sincere with people who support you and care about you
Tell them that your irritability and bad mood have reasons and for some time you need respect and understanding. Say what it is in their actions and deeds that leads to a deterioration in mood and ask them to refrain from this, or offer an acceptable way to react to tension.
Increasing the general ability to regulate emotions
The main component of emotion regulation is the ability to correctly perceive and name emotions as they are experienced. Many people who have experienced a traumatic event have difficulty recognizing what they are actually experiencing. The description of emotional states usually boils down to bad / sad. In the therapy of people who have experienced a traumatic event, emotional states are regularly investigated; you can return this ability on your own. Choose an emotion from the list. It can be either a pleasant or an unpleasant emotion. Ideally, you need to choose the emotion that you are experiencing at the time of the exercise. If you cannot determine what emotion you are experiencing, select an emotion that you experienced recently, one that is easy to remember.
Below is a list of the most frequently experienced emotions (table).
A. Then connect your imagination to picture what your emotion looks like.
The drawing shouldn't mean anything to anyone other than you.
B. Then describe the action that matches your emotion.
C. Then try to think of a sound to describe the emotion.
D. The next step is to determine the intensity of the emotion at which you
focused.
E. Then qualitatively describe the emotion. Manifest
creativity. For example, if you are very annoyed you can
write that your blood "boils", or, if it is useless, you
you can write that you are a product that is sold with a 90% discount here
for the second year. Write whatever you want, describe physical, metaphorical, symbolic characteristics of emotion. The main thing
detail it.
F. Finally, describe your thoughts about the emotion. Describing
your thoughts, you should be able to finish the following
sentences: "my thoughts make me think that …" or "my
emotions make me think about ….
Describe your emotion:
Emotion name _
Draw an emotion:
Describe the associated action:
_
_
_
_
_
_
Describe the sound associated with it:
_
_
_
_
_
_
Determine the intensity of the emotion (from 0 to 100):
0_10
Describe the quality of the emotion:
_
_
_
_
_
_
Describe thoughts related to emotion:
_
_
_
_
_
_
_
Attention to oneself and loved ones, tracking the mental state, reactions and behavior contributes to both the search for self-help means and the timely appeal for professional help, and therefore the prevention and overcoming of the consequences of experiencing a traumatic event.
1. It should be noted that some people who experience acute overly strong flashbacks, rumination, who easily trigger traumatic memories, are sometimes more likely to experience distress when meditating. It is speculated that this effect may be due to the fact that meditation and mindfulness provide greater exposure, including memories and painful emotional states.
2. Read more about the problem of traumatic memories in the article: Dark Places: Traumatic Memories
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