Childhood Trauma can keep you Dysregulated and Ungrounded

Emotional Dysregulation is when you don't really know how to regulate stress and other difficult emotions, or you weren't taught how to soothe yourself when you were younger. It may be because your parents don't really know how to regulate their emotions themselves or they suppress you or shut you out for expressing your natural healthy feelings. In my case it was both. I've noticed this pattern in my clients as well, where they feel ungrounded.

My childhood was filled with physical, emotional and mental abuse from both my parents. My mother burnt my body when I was 5 years old and my father never protected me. This abuse continued until I left home at the age of 21. So naturally due to this trauma I did not want to be in my body. I wanted to keep myself busy and stay disconnected from reality.

A few years later, I realized I had Childhood PTSD and put myself in therapy, but I kept talking about my trauma with my therapist, repeating the stories again and again just kept re-traumatizing me! My therapist wasn't giving me any effective tools to regulate my stress, I thought changing therapists would help but it was no good. I found that therapists are really good listeners, but not very effective when it comes to moving on from the problems and providing healthy solutions. Some therapist are simply ill equipped to do so and some of them want you to keep visiting them and not get to the root cause of the problem.

After one of my therapy sessions, I realized I was just not feeling good, 'this is not how I should be feeling after a therapy session!', I thought to myself. I went online and read about Dysregulation and finally understood why I was feeling the way I did.

I've noticed there are 2 main reasons for being dysregulated: