Understanding Reactive Tendencies

Feelings in motion can be considered emotions. But when they become negative and overpowering, they can be considered reactions. Although they vary in cause, everyone occasionally experiences them.

“Human emotions can be intense and powerful sometimes, leading people to behave in ways they later regret,” according to the “Tips for Reducing Emotional Reactivity and Building Emotional Stability” article in Better Help (September 7, 2023). “Virtually all of us are prone to being affected by strong emotions from time to time, but those who are particularly emotionally reactive, may have even more difficulty maintaining control in the face of intense feelings.”

In many ways, a reaction can be equated to a sneeze. It cannot necessarily be predicted when the next one will occur, but when it does, it exerts tremendous force and temporarily assumes control of the person until it exerts its effects and passes, giving him a feeling of release and relief. The purpose of both is to rid him of something, but so powerful can they be, that trying to stop either in midstream takes tremendous effort and restraint, can be overtaxing to the system, and leaves a feeling of incompletion and dissatisfaction.

Although both entail a momentary loss of control, a reaction can cause a temporary disconnection from reality.

“In that moment, our perceptions of the situation are altered,” according to Natalie Buchwald in her article, “What is Emotional Reactivity and How to End the Cycle” (Manhattan Mental Health Counseling, June 13, 2023). “The emotional charge prevents us from seeing the situation for what it is. Instead, we react. At this point, there is no listening going on anymore. Our emotions and defenses are driving our behavior.”

This occurs because a person is unaware that he is operating from a different part of his brain and responding to something from his past that he believes is occurring in his present.

Trigger-caused reactions have numerous characteristics and identifying them can aid a person in avoiding them. They include the following.

· Determining, if at all possible, the situations or reactive causes, which can either be conscious or subconscious.

· The intensity of them.

· The appropriateness of their intensity to their cause.

· Their durations.

· And the amount of control, reasoning, and rationality that has been lost during them.

Reactions are neither pleasant to the person who experiences them, since they entail mental, emotional, and physiological effects that may take significant time to reverse and recover from, nor to the ones who field them, often resulting in disbelief, hurt, disappointment, and ultimately, strained or altogether severed relationships.

“Spending time around an emotionally reactive person is like tiptoeing through a minefield,” according to Deborah Tayloe in her “Emotionally Reactive People Display these Seven Behaviors and Don’t Realize it” article (Power of Positivity, May 21, 2023). “Your friends and family virtually walk on eggshells to keep from affecting you. It makes for an emotionally stressed conversation that nobody is enjoying.”

Some people, who can be compared to rubber bands who can become easily stretched to their snapping point, exhibit greater reactive tendencies than others.

Hard-wired, emotionally reactive ones, for example, trigger because of the most insignificant reasons. They are usually unable to distinguish major reasons from minor ones and sometimes resort to catastrophizing or engaging in all-or-nothing-at-all thinking. A trivial matter can be elevated to such proportions, that they fully believe that the world is about to come to an end. Griped by overwhelming emotions, they are convinced that it will.

Limited-perspective people, who fail to see or understand the other person’s view, can also be reactive-prone, as well as those who cannot fathom their own fallibility. They believe that they are correct in their views and they have no ability to consider alternatives.

Children particularly, who do not have the development or maturity to see things from perspectives other than their own, fall into this category, and may be prone to protesting outbursts if they do not get their way.

Those who are chronically exposed to unstable, out-of-control others, such as alcoholic, rageful, and/or dysregulated parents or partners, are also prone to reactivity. Lack of safety and stability, and exposure to those who cannot take responsibility for their actions, fail to understand the detriment they inflict and consequently never apologize or make amends for their actions. They leave those in their wake with long paths of unresolved issues, which have been internalized, but continue to exert numerous negative and sometimes-lifelong effects.

Hypervigilant, living on the edge, sometimes suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and anticipating the next disaster, they are particularly reactive-prone.

Reactions can also occur because of temporary circumstances. Those who are tried, ill-feeling, lonely, hungry, and have recently been triggered by something are more prone to such tendencies than those who have not been.

Without understanding, most of these people do not seek to correct these tendencies and often fruitlessly shift the blame to others for having caused them. While they may have served as external stimuli, the spark occurs internally, within them.

A reaction, to a degree, is like a bomb. When it explodes, the person goes with it, as it harnesses the very essence of his soul and life force for fuel to ignite it, causing him to lose control, stability, and beingness, and it may take hours or even days for them to dissipate, once again allowing him to regain composure and be at cause. The combined, cumulative effects of triggers further confound the situation by creating hairpin ones, leaving him less and less likely to take the corrective action he most needs to minimize them, because to do so would only reignite the very reactions he seeks to avoid. This is nothing short of the “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” conundrum.

Despite the internal emotional flooding, explosive sensations, and loss of control that occur during such times, there is both an origin and a purpose for them.

The origin is the thalamus, which can be considered a so-called router of information. Incoming stimuli, which can number in the hundreds of thousands at any given moment, enter the brain through it and it then relays it through two possible paths—the slow upper one or the faster lower one.

In the case of the slow upper route, it sends it to the cerebral cortex for processing and understanding, and finally to the hippocampus.

In the case of the fast-lower route, the information is sent directly to the amygdala if input approximates past life-threatening experiences, enabling it to close off the upper pathway to reasoning and rationality and forge a direct link to the hypothalamus, which activates the fight-or-flight response system, unleashing high levels of cortisol, increasing the blood pressure and heart rate, and constricting the blood flow to the extremities. The purpose is to gear the person to either defend himself against or escape from a situation it anticipates will inflict similar hurt, harm, detriment, or trauma as the original one.

Victim to these internal sensations, the person may not necessarily know why he is being so affected, but something compels him to act or react and they generally will not subside until they are satisfied that he has.

“…When conversation or situations are moving so fast, we don’t even realize how we got so upset,” advises Ariadne Platero in her article, “Understanding and Taming Your Reactivity” (Psychology Today, January 28, 2021). “This is usually when something said or seen triggered an old and raw emotion—maybe a past trauma or familiar pattern—and our brains get hijacked. At this point, we are no longer able to process carefully and thoughtfully. And we are no longer able to stand down and take stock.”

Since no one is able to reconfigure his brain, it is an integral part of him—and something he must work with and sometimes work around to avoid and reverse his destabilizing, dysregulating reactive tendencies; and it may require significant effort to achieve something that can only be compared to diffusing a bomb.

“Emotional regulation—that ability to control how we react to strong emotions—can be learned and mastered through practice,” according to Buchwald (op. cit.). “Therapy and self-examination make this process more effective.”

Self-stabilizing, emotional reregulating strategies vary according to the person and their severity, but usually begin by determining the patterns that identify the people, interactions, situations, circumstances, and even places that cause him to trigger.

Because of their volatile, unearthing effects, they may need the intervening, helping-hand of others, particularly a trauma-trained therapist who is versed in stabilizing a person’s amygdala to avoid additional reactions, or the Higher Power of his understanding, who desensitizes, diffuses, and diminishes the severity of them, as occurs in any number of twelve-step programs.

As they reduce and the person gains increasing control, he can apply other and self-interventions as he negotiates the world, such as becoming aware of their antecedents, pausing to think, taking a deep breath, reciting truths, like “How important is all of this,” asking himself how significant his current situation is in the scheme of things, and responding with greater rationality, as opposed to reacting before he achieves this level.

Reacting is a replay of something that proved detrimental in the past, but remains unresolved in the present. Understanding and reversing its tendencies can free a person from their shackles and enable him to pit his stronger side against his weaker one—and win.

Robert G. Waldvogel has earned the Interdisciplinary Certificate in Behavioral Health for Late Adolescence and the Emerging Adult and a Postgraduate Certificate in the Fundamentals of Cognitive Behavioral Treatment at Adelphi University’s School of Social Work. He has led Twelve-Step support groups on Long Island for almost fifteen years, and created the Adult Child Recovery-through-Writing, and the Strengthening Our Spirituality Programs taught at the Thrive Recovery Community and Outreach Center in Westbury. He is a frequent contributor to Wisdom Magazine.