Threshold

The theme of my sessions this week has been emotional thresholds. In partnership, we often struggle with being aware of our thresholds and depending on the nature of our relationship healthy vs. unhealthy, we often take on or suppress more than we can handle. We do this for a variety of reasons. We do this to “take care” of our partner, we claim they “can’t handle” anymore stress, we rationalize with they have anxiety/depression, we even say I can’t bother them with MY emotions, they are insignificant. We find reasons to not express ourselves. But is the lack of expression related to our partner or is it simply that we don’t know that even expressing the smallest of emotions can feel liberating.

My teenage daughter likes to share with me that we are living in a cancel culture, I don’t quite understand that concept, so I have to disagree and say that I believe we live in an invulnerable culture. It is as prevalent as COVID is, we just haven’t had to look at it as closely until the last year of this pandemic. With the ever-changing way people are living throughout this pandemic we have left our emotional processing somewhere pre-pandemic and we are now seeing the aftermath of it. It’s essentially like we systematically decided that there is no time for us to have an emotional process because we rationalize why we should be grateful for this last year’s “gift of time”. While I appreciate the pandemic slowing us down as a society, if in slowing down we lose our ability to maintain a healthy threshold, I’ll pass.

In the last year or so I was taught that with our work as psychotherapists, the universe has a way of putting client in our path that provide us with a mirror into ourselves. The parallels at times can be astounding. I often feel that a type of change is coming my way when I have a week where the theme of each of my very diverse clients blends together. This week the theme was clear, and it had me thinking that I needed to do research into the idea of emotional thresholds and once I did that I needed to identify if I myself had any idea what mine were. So, in the theme of being vulnerable, I identified that up until a month or two ago, I had none. In fact, up until a month ago, I had no idea how to sustain healthy boundaries. And when you look at the two concepts, boundaries and thresholds, you realize that they work together synchronistically.

What a realization that after almost 41 years, I have acknowledged that I didn’t know how to maintain healthy boundaries and that I didn’t know that being clear on what my emotional threshold was actually determined the level of emotional maturity that I would display in my partnerships, friendships, and even in my family system. That my ability to emotionally regulate would be contingent on the idea of knowing that by being vulnerable I would actually release the feelings and that I would create a more wholesome, easy to get along with human.

Over the last three months, I have identified fragments of myself that needed to be corrected. My emotional regulation, identifying my triggers, my reactivity, my trauma, my codependence, my attachment style, my need for control, the various CEOs in my head holding my belief systems hostage, and what I hadn’t really thought through is that within all of that self-awareness, the most important concept I needed to tie it all together was to have healthy boundaries and to know what my threshold was. I needed to learn that while it is ok to have negative energy that I needed to learn how to channel that energy appropriately. To disperse it in ways that isn’t unhealthy for me or for the person on the receiving end.

I have made a decision that I never want to live from a place of emotional scarcity. Living like that for most of my life has been at times painful. What’s more is that I didn’t know how much pain I was experiencing and how much pain I was causing to those that I love. I am an adult now (have been for some time). I don’t need to rely on my parents for my emotional regulation. I no longer need to be dependent on them as an authority figure in my life. I made the decision to merge my innocent childlike aspects with my years of experience (which I feel like I acquired in the last three months) and allow the two to merge to create a healthy more well-adjusted adult. One that embraces life and has fun while always challenging herself to be authentic and connected to herself. But also, being forgiving of myself when I default. Because let’s be honest, we all default sometimes.

Identifying my boundaries and threshold has opened me wide open. It has allowed me to live in my truth, no matter how painful the truth has been at times. I have given myself permission to authentically express my emotions no matter how big or small. But above all, it has helped me see that I am loveable no matter what emotions I have, that it is safe to express myself, and that the more that I do it, the more emotional maturity I develop and the less my negative attributes take to the surface. While I am still calibrating myself to all the newest parts of myself, I feel so much better knowing that I am reaching a level of emotional intelligence I didn’t know I possessed. I am more accountable for myself and the way that my emotional dysregulation can at times cause harm. That being aware of myself in the deep-rooted way that I have been allows me to stay mindful of myself. This isn’t easy work but what I realized is that not doing the work is not an option for me, there is too much at stake.