How I got Through My Bad Day: A Chain Analysis

I was planning on writing today about recognizing your achievements when your each a goal (especially for those who are competitive and highly driven), but it’s been a bad day. I woke up to a super triggery comment, read a few articles I should have avoided, and my mood plummeted from there. Add in a lack of sleep, and the soreness from working out for the first time in nearly a year, and you’ve got a recipe for a bad day.

 

So instead of talking about what I was going to talk about, I’d like to talk about chain analyses and applying skills to stop a bad day before it happens. Sometimes it can be hard to notice when you’re on the path to a meltdown. You might know that you’re having a bad day, but you don’t quite know why or you don’t know what you can change. I’m going to try to go through a chain analysis of my own day to give you all a conception of what it might be like to think about what’s making you anxious, unhappy, depressed, or stressed out, and then go through the steps that I could have taken (and may still take) at different points during the day so I don’t engage in any target behaviors (this is DBT speak for doing Bad Things like restricting, purging, drinking, self-harm, suicidal ideation etc.).

 

I’m going to start by talking about emotional vulnerability. I’m surprised this isn’t something that we talk about more often because it’s intensely important when you’re having a bad day or are on the verge of letting your mental illness take over. Emotional vulnerabilities are those factors that make you more prone to feeling extreme emotions. The most basic forms of emotional vulnerability are things like lack of sleep, lack of food, lack of exercise, use of drugs or alcohol, etc. These things make us sensitive and keep us from regulating our emotions well. Right now, I haven’t eaten since last night, I didn’t get enough sleep last night, and I have been working out more than I’m used to, leaving my body tired and sore. I’ve also been dealing with some headaches and bad tension through my shoulders and neck that are really fairly painful. These things are making me far more emotionally vulnerable.

 

However in addition to these very obvious forms of emotional vulnerability there are other things: are you stressed out and busy? What’s going on in the back of your head that’s stressing you out? Are you having relationship troubles? Are you unemployed? What other things are hanging over you that surround the events of the individual day or event that you’re trying to understand? For me, this includes a number of things. I recently changed jobs and I’m not good with transitions. I had some new information about my family that was Big and Important and Scary dropped on me this weekend. A number of my friends have been having relationship troubles recently and I’ve been worried and anxious for them. I also haven’t been keeping up on my blogging so I’ve been feeling overwhelmed and busy. Each of these things adds to that cloud of vulnerability that’s surrounding me today.

 

These are helpful concepts because if you start to notice vulnerabilities you can try to head them off. I’m going to go get something tasty and filling very soon, not let myself work out today, and try to get to bed early. Sometimes you can’t fix the vulnerabilities, or you get triggered or upset before you notice them. When you’re doing a chain analysis, the next step is to figure out what some of the precipitating events were. These can help you notice or avoid these kinds of events in the future, or if you’re in the moment, figure out why they bothered you and how to process/deal with the emotions you’re having right now.

 

So today the precipitating events were a few things. The most noticeable of them was getting a comment on a blog post about veganism that said “having an eating disorder is no justification for forcibly impregnating cows and keeping pigs locked up in tiny pens etc. etc.” The topic of veganism is an intense trigger for me. I was writing about this in the post, and this person chose to ignore that and tell me that I was wrong and bad for trying to take care of my own health needs. I felt disrespected, and I felt as if another person was confirming to me that I am not worth the food that I put in my mouth.

 

In addition to this, I saw another blog post defending “Blurred Lines” that made me throw up a little bit in my mouth. So I could see that the precipitating events to having my mood spiral out of control were that I felt people were challenging my values and my self-worth. So now I have a good understanding of what the problem is. I’ve had this difficulty a number of times before and so I’ve learned some techniques to help with it. One of them is that I try not to click on links that I know will upset me, and so usually I can head it off at the pass, but sometimes one gets by me or my morbid curiosity gets the better of me, and I can’t exactly not get the comments that are emailed directly to my inbox. Whatever your precipitating event is, it’s good to understand what it did to you and why so you can either avoid it in the future or figure out how to best tailor your response.

 

So my response was to reevaluate my values. Check the facts. Remind myself why I do the things that I do. Remind myself why I felt that Blurred Lines was offensive. And then I tried to radically accept that some people have different values from mine. I did some self-soothing, because I felt attacked and raw and afraid (especially when someone said the line in “Blurred Lines” that goes “you know you want it” is not rapey, cause damn is that triggering and not ok at all). This consisted of seeing my boyfriend for lunch and drinking a chocolate shake. I tried some distraction by playing Lumosity and by focusing on work. But I also did some self-care by allowing myself to tackle the simplest tasks at work first so that I wouldn’t get overwhelmed. Because I had figured out all of the ways I was riled up, I could address each of them. Now that I’ve calmed down some I’m willing to look again at these emotions, understand what provoked them, and understand how my use of skills actually worked quite well.

 

If you do engage in a target behavior, your chain analysis might include ideas of what you could have done differently. That’s why I find them incredibly helpful. They give me a framework with which to reflect on my experience without ruminating and becoming overwhelmed. You can even draw it out all nice and pretty like with bubbles and arrows and things. If you want to really break it down you can delineate your reaction into thoughts, emotions, actions, and bodily reactions (so did you clench your hands etc.). This chain analysis method helped me head off the nasties before they got too nasty, but I’d love to hear other suggestions in comments. Tea, hot bath, nap, delicious food, mindfulness, self-soothing…whatever helps you!

Staying Calm in a Debate

I’m having a rough day today. I’ve gotten in a number of heated arguments on facebook. These are not my favorite forum. I have a hard time disconnecting, and a hard time not getting emotional about things that mean a lot to me. Like the fact that sexism and racism are institutional things, not individual actions (dumbasses. Figure it out. Calling someone a dick is not the same as years of disenfranchisement, discrimination, beating, and abuse). I’m upset right now because people are playing on my emotions purposefully, while I have always tried to argue in all good faith. I don’t appreciate when people try to fuck with me just to make a point.

So I’ve gotten a bit emotional. I’m shaky. I can barely type straight because my hands are shaking. I don’t like it when people purposefully push me this far.

But I also think it’s important to try to come to some understanding of whatever a debate is about. I like closure. I did actually get to some points of understanding between myself and the people who were not agreeing with me. So despite being really upset, I don’t want to simply walk away from situations that upset me. I know that part of my inability to walk away is that I want to win. I want a conclusion. And I know that others want that too. I should stop. I really really should. It’s not accomplishing anything when I get upset. And it’s not accomplishing anything for me to “feed the trolls” as it were.

So how do I continue to advocate for my own position, defend myself, and stay calm? How do I continue to respect people (which is something I’ve been trying REALLY REALLY hard to do–Shawn, I really hope you feel I have, that’s always been my intent), while also respecting myself and bringing up controversial and critical points from the position of a minority group (either women or atheists?) How do I also listen to other people’s experiences and respect those?

I really don’t know. I think that I may be too sensitive to really engage in a lot of online debate. I think that every individual who wants to engage in activism needs to take a hard look at their own personality and decide what level of vitriol and anger they can take from others before deciding how far they want to engage in debate.

I’m starting to recognize that many times the greatest form of activism is taking care of myself and respecting myself. But oftentimes I don’t feel like that’s enough. I want to be able to pave the way for other people who are like myself have the space to express their opinions and their selves.

So what do you do when you get upset in online debates? I often find that talking to someone else and making sure I’m not crazy (because people love to gaslight me) helps a lot. I also find that having sources to back me up is really helpful so that I don’t have to do as much of the speaking myself. It helps to stay calm when I engage with something else at the same time as I am engaging in a debate, or if I self-soothe at the same time (pictures of kittens are good). What do you guys do to help calm yourself down in a debate? How do you deal with it when you become upset or frustrated? How do you continue to engage in activism or in debate when your fight or flight instincts start kicking in?

Staying calm is really important in my mind. I was spending some time defending the place of mockery in the atheist movement. I do believe that it’s ok to mock certain beliefs (transubstantiation anyone?) but I think there’s a time and a place for it. My family and I had a Holy Saturday celebration this past week in which we made pope hats to be silly about the new pope (some of us also chose pope names and dressed up in Argentinian garb). This was a private celebration that didn’t attack anyone, but did mock a bit of the ritual in the Catholic church. I think it was fine because it was a bonding activity, and it was highly enjoyable for us. When I’m trying to present myself as the face of an activist group or trying to understand another person’s beliefs or explain my own, I don’t find it helpful to use mockery (some people can do this to great effect. I personally don’t like it).

And so when I’m trying to engage in a discourse (which is different from personal and private enjoyment, or simply throwing something out there), I don’t want to get upset, get angry, personally attack people (which I never think is ok), or lose objectivity and clarity of thought. I want to be able to understand my emotions, use them as fuel for my arguments, but not necessarily let them skew my arguments: make sure that each of my arguments fits the facts, and proceed from the facts as best I can. It’s difficult because I exist in a realm of social justice understanding that many other people don’t inhabit. It’s hard to have to try to explain all of the assumptions that I come in with that I have spent a great deal of time thinking about and coming to conclusions about. It’s frustrating when people dismiss those assumptions despite the fact that I have read pages and pages about them. It’s hard to sum all of that up in a few sentences. It’s hard not to get frustrated when people bypass all of the thoughts that are going on in your brain, or assume that you haven’t already thought things through.

If and when I have time, I would like to start a series that addresses some of these assumptions that I hold: these include things like intersectionality, the nature of racism and sexism, how language changes, privilege and power, and other things. I suppose I could have linked to my privilege post already, but I’d like to have a ready set of them to send to people to give the background of my thought processes. Let me know what things you have a hard time explaining to others, and I’ll see if I can provide a cache of basic explanations of a number of social justice concepts that often get misunderstood or subject to ridicule.

In the meantime, I’m going to try to stay out of facebook debates, because it’s started to get triggering to me and I’ve begun to dissociate when they happen because I feel like I need to quash my emotions and that is really unhealthy for me. If people work purposefully to get me upset and I have to force myself to not react to direct attacks, that’s not healthy. It’s not the kind of activism I want to engage. I’m allowed to be angry about oppression that affects me.