Revisiting my weekend

Unfortunately, after having set GIVE skills as one of my goals this weekend, I was not very good at following through. I spent Friday night and most of Saturday and Sunday irritable. I blasted my son over trivial things and was snappy and sarcastic towards my husband. I have spent time trying to figure out where this irritability is coming from but because I lack skills in behaviour chain analysis and struggle to sometimes get my head around observing and describing emotions I am really having a difficult time figuring it out. The only solution I had over the weekend was to try and de-escalate by distracting and self soothing as well as to stop myself carrying on (repeating myself, escalating more and more) by just shutting my mouth and literally biting my tongue. So here I am the Monday after still confused as to why I was, and still am, feeling this way. I have a few different scenarios, better known as vulnerability factors, that possibly could be contributing to this feeling of irritability. 

 1. Friday was my dad's birthday (he passed away just under a year ago and I have PTSD). 
Yet, I struggle to accept that this is the reason I am irritable because on Friday I had a great day. I felt fine. I wasn't ruminating, in fact, I was suppressing it.
2. A few things my husband did reminded me why our marriage is failing. I have days where I don't think about it (more suppressing) and days where it just smacks me in the face
3.  I have had a stressful week (by stressful I mean in my Borderline perspective I have had a lot on and I've been given bad news, all which overwhelms me). 
4. I reduced all my meal portion sizes on Friday (I have been overeating and comfort eating a lot since giving up alcohol and drugs in the last year).

With all of those things in writing I can now see where of course it would be normal for the average person (not just a person with BPD) to have these feelings of irritability after all the above situations. All anger and frustration comes from a place of hurt, sadness, disappointment and all kinds of other emotions. Suppression is also never a good thing but I guess it is just how I am dealing with things right now so I don't crumble. It's getting me by but unfortunately I do now see the consequences. 

I realise I am on the road to recovery and can't have the answers straight away. It feels like things would just be easier if I could do the skill of observing and describing my emotions as they come but because a multitude of emotions can occur so fast it is difficult to do this. As I think back to Friday when I first got cranky with my son it would have been better for me to fill out an observe and describe emotions worksheet. I did think of it, however, it requires you to fill in one sheet for each emotion. The problem is I didn't know which emotion started first and there were so many that I decided not to. This is where I think a behaviour chain analysis would have been good also. 

Anyway, looking forward, I think the following post on 'coping appropriately with feelings of anger and irritability' by Debbie Corso (another person with BPD with a fantastic Blog) is a great strategy to try while I am unsure of the exact origin of the irritability. Another thing I have tried today is reading my Emotion Regulation workbook again from DBT class. Just going over the goals of the Emotion Regulation module has really encouraged me to focus more on these skills. The start of the module explains (paraphrased by me):

The goal of emotion regulation is to decrease labile emotions. In order to regulate my emotions I need to observe and describe them and understand what they do for me. I need to reduce emotional vulnerability by using PLEASE MASTER skills and increase positive experiences. To decrease suffering I need to let go of painful emotions through mindfulness and change these emotions through opposite action. 

Here I have been madly distracting and self soothing with Distress Tolerance skills, possibly to the point of suppression, where I could have been focusing more on Emotion Regulation. It's not to say that Distress Tolerance skills won't come in handy, (I love them way too much), but for this moment it makes sense if I want to regulate my emotions and moods to focus on the module specifically designed for that.