I had a gut overreaction on a small issue today. After some time has passed and I was able to calm down somewhat to evaluate the situation, I realized that the appropriate level of response to what happened should’ve been an eyeroll or an eyebrow raise. Instead, I felt the blood drain from my face, my stomach dropped and lurched inward nauseatingly and my throat and chest tightened. My obvious upset in turn made the other person defensive and he raised his voice and declared that I have no right to have a problem with this, which made things worse.

I was too upset to go to the gym at lunch, so instead I went to lunch with my gym trainee and we talked it out over some Mexican food and margaritas. She feels that no one is perfect and the fact that I’m aware of my strong overreaction is a good thing. She said we all have things that we work on about ourselves, it’s good we aren’t people who can’t admit that they have a problem. She also feels that my panic attack gut reaction is a trained response resulting from the damage left by the last relationship. Basically, my body responded to a really small thing the way it responded to huge terrible things in the last relationship. Two totally different stimuli levels between now and then drew the same heightened level of negative physiological response.

This scares the shit out of me, because if I can’t cushion myself against external stimuli better, I’m gonna be on the same roller coaster ride that I was in and nearly didn’t survive the last time. I can’t deal with that again. I don’t want to be sad and sick all the time, always at the verge of nausea and tears. I honestly don’t know if my overreactions now are a direct result of past damage, which means that with time and distance I’ll get better (hopefully), or if this is just me, just this big ball of hypersensitive drama. I’m afraid it’d be the latter one.

I talked about this with Mr. W, who feels that any response a human has to external stimuli are learned, if not from past similar situations in relationships, then from some childhood trauma when our personalities were still being formed. This gets me off the hook somewhat in the sense that I can say, “It was because my parents abandoned me when I was younger, it’s not my fault.” But it doesn’t get me off the hook in that I need to normalize my emotional responses so that I can have good relationships again.

I also don’t want to give people the excuse of, “If we made her upset, it’s not our fault. She’s just crazy and she knows that. She just trips out.”