In one incident, [Taryn] Cregon [a mother] was getting ready for work and Zoe [her daughter] was getting ready for camp when, suddenly, Cregon heard hair-spraying in the living room. She’d recently bought a new couch and feared Zoe had spritzed it with hair chemicals. An argument ensued, and Cregon was left dumbfounded, wondering how her daughter could be so irresponsible and thoughtless ”” and then argue when called on it.
The dilemma is pretty typical, according to psychologist Laura Kastner, who along with Jennifer Wyatt wrote a recent book, Getting to Calm: Cool-headed Strategies for Parenting Tweens and Teens. For more than 30 years, Kastner has helped parents and children work toward greater calm in the home. In the hair-spray incident, both mother and daughter got tangled up in what Kastner describes as emotional flooding.
“When we flood, we are having neurons fire in this emotional part of the brain,” says Kastner.
One of the most horrible impacts of abuse in a young person’s life is that cognitive and emotional development can become arrested (to various degrees) at the age of abuse.
Abuse influences which pathways mylenate and which do not, and the emotional flooding pathways, being particularly prevalent in the 9- to 14-year-old, often become somewhat locked, creating life-long challenges for the abused person, usually a girl, and especially for those close to them.
What is called [url=http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/borderline-personality-disorder-fact-sheet/index.shtml]Borderline Personality Disorder[/url] in adults is primarily an expression of this mylenation situation, given that something over 80% of BPD adults were abused as children.
People in close emotional relationships with BPs — spouse, parent, child — most commonly feel as though they are almost always [url=http://www.amazon.com/Stop-Walking-Eggshells-Borderline-Personality/dp/1572246901/ref=dp_ob_title_bk]Walking on Eggshells[/url] in their attempts to avoid the next emotional-flooding explosion.
And that, to quote the late Mr Harvey, “is the rest of the story.”