Recurrent bursting into tears urge

Hi everyone,

Do you feel sometime you are about to burst into tears, despite nothing external triggered you!! it's happening to me sometimes esp after an intense inner turmoil and negative self talk. I'm sure crying it out is a good thing, but this theme has been recurring lately more than often and I'm not sure why.

My first thought was hormones, but I don't even know if you are male or female. There is male and female menopause though. I think men like to call it mid life crisis though.
Are you on any medication for depression?

I'm a male . No I'm not on any medications

Well that helps knowing you are male Do you think it could be depression? Are you in an age group where mid life crisis would be an issue?
How's your health? Do you have any ideas on it?

Yeah definitely the depressive posture has something to do with it, but it's a low grade chronic one that I think I have. it intensifies sometimes to the abandonment depression during internal triggering. I'm in my early 30's and overall healthy!!.

I don't shy away from crying as a male, neither shame myself. Grieving is irreplaceable part during recovery. But I don't know I noticed it's happening lately more than often.

Depression can have that effect on a person. It makes sense that anyone with C-PTSD could also be suffering from depression, so it is fairly likely.

Some personal experience of mine, when I've had more flashbacks than usual or had dealt with triggers for days on end, all followed by two days of peace; I'd find myself crying a bit because it was frustrating that my mind did this to me. Hell, half of the time I had no idea why I was actually crying other than feeling an intense amount of inner turmoil.

Trauma does more than cause flashbacks and all of those traditional symptoms of PTSD/C-PTSD. It also weighs on us in very heavy and long lasting emotional/sub-conscious ways.

I'm glad that you are a male that can express your emotions, everyone should. Do you have a counselor? That might be the best person to run this by if you do. Something is going on to make you sad enough to cry, ya know?

I find that when I get extremely stressed out, that tears are often a result. I think it's do to frustration with the situation, or sometimes frustration with myself for letting the situation get the best of me.

You're right Trace14, Unfortunately I don't have a counselor or therapist yet to turn to in such moments. I hope I can find a therapist who is safe and good enough that will help in the long run.

Yeah, chronic low grade depression that is amplified during flashbacks, I can relate.

The issue I'm facing is when I'm in this state of hurt and inner turmoil I barely have access to the coping skills and strategies I'm learning to manage my non-visual flashbacks. Are you able to recognize you are actually flashing back to the abandonment depression? How you can control and prevent from devolving into shame spiral that accompanies the inner critic attacks?

My current struggle is I can't dis-identify the inner critic as an installed parental messages and detach from it. it feels that the critic is just me, me is attacking me so to speak. It's so hard for me to di-identify and recognize.

Right, we sometimes interpret our affect dysregulation as a stress. Stress as Pete Walker explains in his book is our inability to regulate our affects (inhibiting anger when we should express our anger to un-just treatment from others, or when we sacrifice too much trying to seek approval, etc). I'm trying to be more mindful but when I'm relapsed to my vulnerable state (which happens frequently) I just feel so fragile and hurt, my self-esteem evaporates suddenly and I regress to my old habit.

I'm wondering if you can relate to this, and how do you bring back yourself to a more protective state when you are hurt inside.

Truthfully, I have no answers. I feel as though I'm to my critic's mercy. I wish I could help more.

I don't have a good feel for why this happens to me. I've read a lot of Pete Walkers work and can relate to a lot of what he says. I've determined that I'm a Fawn/Freeze so I tend to not speak up when I'm bothered by something. As the stress builds, there is those tendencies towards tears, but it's not every time either. Stress tends to build up to a "breaking point", and once it breaks, I go into a depression. Sometimes I can cycle like this during one 8 hour work day, sometimes it takes a whole week. I basically have no control over it, it's something I need to work on. Tears don't come all the time, and when they do, I generally am able to isolate myself, and once they come the stress is relieved. Other times, instead of tears, I go numb (dissociate). I go into dissociation more often than into tears.

Sorry -- not really much of an answer, but a good discussion anyway.

Yeah. I've determined that I'm a fawn-fight person according to Pete's typologies. I'm also puzzled over this type of classification, cause sometimes I can relate to every developmental arrest despite my Fawn is my major type. I can relate as being Fight when I lash out at sometime, I can relate when I Freeze in dissociation, I can relate also to the Flight response. I think Pete Walker want to simply the idea of the "disowned parts" of the self. I think the disowned parts of the self as described by John Bradshaw and Gershen Kaufman is analogous to the developmental arrests that Pete Walker classified as the 4F's.

However, owning the disowned parts of the self is also challenging to me. Basically, when we become mindful that every part we hate expressing is the developmentally arrested one, we will end up expressing everything we are afraid of expressing, right?! which to me sounds messy. I mean identifying the disowned parts is also a puzzling thing.

from what I read so far, the idea of the fragmented self and not feeling being whole is very compelling to me and I can relate a lot to it. As long as we feel fragmented and not whole we will devolve into our basic defensive mechanisms that will cause problems to us and others. I'm very puzzled as how we can bring wholeness to our fragmented being. I hope this does make sense to you!.