Abuse

[Vanilla]

Emotional Flooding in Reactive Abuse- What is it?

I found this on the info us website and thought it could be useful here.

Emotional flooding is the term given to the feelings of one partner who are so overwhelmed by their partner’s perceived negativity and their own reaction to it that they become swamped by dreadful and intense feelings. re

Any person who is engaged in and experiencing emotional flooding cannot hear without distortion or respond with clarity in a dispassionate way.They find it hard to organise their thinking and they instead fall back on primitive reactions. They just want things to stop, or want to run or, sometimes, to strike back. They react and do not relate. Emotional Flooding is a self-perpetuating hijacking of our brain preventing us to see common sense. Some people have high thresholds for emotional flooding, easily enduring anger and contempt, while others may be triggered the moment their partner makes a mild criticism.

What happens to the body during Emotional Flooding?

The technical description of emotional flooding is in terms of heart rate rise from calm levels. At rest, womens heart rates are about 82 beats per minute and mens about 72 (the specific heart rate varies mainly according to a person’s body size). Emotional Flooding begins at about 10 beats per minute above a person’s resting rate; if the heart rate reaches 100 beats per minute (as it easily can do during moments of rage or tears), then the body is pumping adrenaline and other hormones that keep the distress high for some time. The moment of emotional flooding is apparent from the heart rate as it can jump 10, 20, or even as many as 30 beats per minute almost instantaneously.

Muscles tense and it can seem hard to breathe. There is a swell of toxic feelings, an unpleasant wash of fear and anger that seems inescapable. At this point—full hijacking—a person’s emotions are so intense, their perspective so narrow, and their thinking so confused that there is no hope of being rational, taking the other’s viewpoint or settling things in a reasonable way.The fight or flight choice is all that one can see.Emotional flooding is an apt description

High alert state

The problem begins when one spouse feels emotionally flooded almost continually feeling overwhelmed by their emotions, always on guard for an emotional assault or injustice, becoming hyper-vigilant for any real or imaginary sign of attack, insult, or grievance, and overreacts to small things. If a husband is in such a state even his wife saying innocently something like “Darling, we’ve got to talk,” can elicit the reactive thought, “She’s picking a fight again,” and so trigger emotional flooding. It becomes harder and harder to recover from the physiological arousal, which in turn makes it easier for innocuous exchanges to be seen in a sinister light, triggering emotional flooding all over again.

The emotionally flooded person thinks the worst virtually all the time, reading everything in a negative light. Small issues become major battles. Feelings are hurt continually. Over time, the partner who is being flooded starts to see any and all problems in the marriage as severe and impossible to fix or reconcile.They cannot see that the emotional flooding itself sabotages any attempt to work things out. It seems useless to talk things over, and the partners try to soothe their troubled feelings alone by leading parallel lives, and living in isolation from each other, and feel alone within an R.

In this downward spiral the tragic consequences of deficits in emotional competences are self-evident with a reverberating cycle of criticism and contempt, defensiveness and the ability to stonewall, distressing thoughts and emotional flooding they see nothing positive about the other and ultimately about themselves. The cycle itself reflects a disintegration of emotional self-awareness and self-control, of empathy and the abilities to soothe each other and oneself.

Physiologically Men and Womens bodies react with Emotional Flooding differently

That conclusion, reached in a study by Robert Levenson at the University of California at Berkeley, is based on the testimony of 151 couples, all in long-lasting marriages. Levenson found that husbands uniformly found it unpleasant, even aversive to become upset during a marital disagreement, while their wives did not mind it any where near as much. Men are prone to physiological emotional flooding at a lower intensity of negativity and secrete more adrenaline than do women into their bloodstream when emotional flooding occurs.In men that adrenaline flow is triggered by lower levels of negativity perceived as coming from their partner whereas the effect is slower in women. It seems that women cope with negativity better than men. Furthermore it takes men longer to recover physiologically from emotional flooding. (I read the study and it doesn't discuss habituation, so this may only apply in more traditional cultures)

This suggests the possibility Clint Eastwood type of male imperturbability (stonewalling) may represent a defence against feeling emotionally overwhelmed and their heart rates drop by about ten beats per minute, bringing a subjective sense of relief. But—and here’s a paradox—once the men started to stone wall, it was the women whose heart rate shot up to levels signalling high distress. This limbic tango, with each sex seeking comfort in opposing gambits leads to a very different stance toward emotional confrontations: men want to avoid them as fervently as their wives feel compelled to seek them. As one spouse observes withdrawal by the other from engagement, the volume and intensity Increases starting. Both are then open to emotional flooding.

Defensiveness or stonewalls is responded to with frustration and anger and so adds contempt, the stonewaller falls into the innocent-victim or righteous-indignation thoughts that more and more easily trigger emotional flooding. Leading to a cycle of stonewalling and increased response.

So how to avoid emotional flooding?

The teaching of emotional intelligence is so important. For the stonewalled the advice is not to sidestep conflict, but to realise that The expression of a grievance may be doing it as an act of love, trying to keep the relationship healthy and on course (although there may well be other motives by an abuser). When grievances simmer, they build and build in intensity until there’s an explosion. When they are aired and worked out, it takes the pressure off. Stonewallers need to realise that anger or discontent is not synonymous with a personal attack in a healthy R. Emotional flooding is something to be avoided and defused so that partners can communicate and not just lash out at each other.

In abusive patterns abusers may deliberately trigger emotional flooding to gain control or achieve an effective one up.

Amended and cut down as a very long post.

V