emothings in Each Day

I came here to write about this, but then I ended up posting it elsewhere first. I’m editing it because journal context is not the same as forum context.

So I’ve been working with Tina on emotional dysregulation.
In November I had decided that I wasn’t going to stifle my emotional outbursts anymore. Except they never really bursted because I stuffed them back down before they could erupt. I spontaneously felt like I was on the verge of tears, triggered by all kinds of things. I have always felt out of control of my emotions because this would happen sometimes multiple times a day. So I decided I wasn’t going to stifle that anymore and see where that surge took me.
I expected it to get awkward, because it happened a lot at work, and like most workplaces, they reeeaaaallllyyyy don’t like crying ladies where I work.

Then in December we had to put our cat down. My husband cried for days leading up to it, and for days after. I could not cry leading up to it. I cried during the process, and when we buried him. I didn’t cry after.
These days I think of sadness, but I feel hollow and empty. Of note, this is pretty much how I reacted when my father died 20 years ago.

In general, I have felt very disconnected from my body most of my life. I don’t understand feelings or internal sensations the way my husband seems to.

I also take things very literally. I have read a lot of posts and watch a lot of videos by people with both autism and adhd. I relate to a lot of it.

One thing I think I’ve been misunderstanding (because literalism) is meltdowns/shutdowns. I don’t know what I was thinking before, but after months of wildly unregulated emotions, those surges I get never result in tears. It results in something in me slamming shut. Even when I try to encourage the surge, it always snaps shut.

I realized this might be what people mean by either meltdowns or shutdowns, or both?
There have been a few times in my life where things felt so hard that I can’t speak for hours. When I’m tired or overwhelmed I sometimes have no idea how to get what is in my head to come out of my mouth. Sometimes I don’t speak because speaking feels so pointless, and I don’t know how to say anything of value.

I talked to Tina today about all of this, using the words meltdown/shutdown, and she told me that sounds exactly like what is happening. I talked about how I can know things but not feel them (like grief for my cat). We have talked a lot over the last year about how I can’t reason my way out of emotional dysregulation.

We did a visualization exercise that was supposed to connect my brain to my body. At the end she had me visualize me in my chair, in the room, in the city, in the country, in the world, in the universe. It was supposed to “put things in perspective”, instead I felt a deep sense of pointlessness, something I struggled a lot with when I was depressed, including suicidal ideation. She was genuinely surprised that that’s where I went, we’d worked so hard to dig me out of the hole I was in when we first met.

I feel like this should have been a break through but I kind of feel just as confused and lost as before.