What is Emotional Dysregulation? How Does it Relate to Mental Health?

Emotional dysregulation is an emotional hyperactivity characterized by a person’s inability to control or regulate emotional responses to what is perceived to the individual as provocative or threatening stimuli.

Example #1: criticism can spark an emotional response so strong, it’s difficult to escape the spiral of negative feelings. As a result, the person can express these emotions through bursts of anger or by being passive aggressive.

Example #2: When a person is in fear of real or imagined abandonment, this can evoke an emotional response so difficult to control, that the person’s varied moods and reactions creates conflict with the threatened relationship.

I’ve been on the hunt for the “right diagnosis” for the past year, and what I’ve learned is that all roads really do lead down the same path; the commonality in many mental illnesses is trauma (both during childhood and adulthood), thus causing a dysregulated nervous system and the inability to regulate emotions.

My hope is that the information I’ve gathered (with the help of an even more inquisitive partner) will benefit someone out there searching outside the box for long term solutions that will help in getting your life back.

Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D., asks us to consider psychiatric medications in his book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. He notes that if antidepressants “… were indeed as effective as we have been led to believe, depression should by now have become a minor issue in our society.” He goes on to add that “……

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