“You don’t die of it, but my hyperemotivity kept me from living serenely and fulfilling myself for twenty-seven years. I was handicapped by myself, in fact. I understand it as a teenager.
At 13, swimming is my passion and I join a regional club, without thinking for a second about competitions. The big day of the premiere, I have the impression of dissolving myself, a tsunami of palpitations oppresses me and I lose all my means. When I get on the starting block, I no longer know how to swim the front crawl or how to dive. Result: when the top sounds, I jump into the water instead of diving and I do my 50 meters breaststroke. This is the first humiliation inflicted by my hyperemotivity.
I take everything I am told
From then on, avoidance strategies will become my allies so as not to suffer excessively. Because being hyperemotional is very violent, because the emotions felt are themselves very intense. I put too much affect, too much empathy, too much of myself in everything I experience, whether positive or negative. Everything moves me, a nothing can weaken or revolt me and I react to the power of a thousand. Anything that slides like a duck’s feathers in other people, at best, disturbs me, at worst, brings me down. I take everything I am told and everything I see head on.
One day, for example, the pediatric Samu passed in front of me, screaming sirens, I burst into tears, thinking of the child, injured or sick, struggling to survive. No passerby was crying, as I was devastated. In the face of ordinary everyday events, it’s the same. For a neighbor to greet me curtly, without his usual courtesy, can parasitize me the whole day. I feel bad, as if caught at fault, and I think about it, wondering what I could have done. It also happened to me to be in all my states after a spat with the salesperson of a hotline or because my landlord was claiming her rent, even though I had already made the transfer. It takes me hours to find a semblance of balance, it’s exhausting. And for a compliment, same thing, but in a positive version. The nice little word, although very commonplace, gives me great pleasure and I get high for hours.
It kept me from teaching
Intellectually, I am able to reason with myself and relativize, but it does not work when I am overwhelmed by my emotions, I lose all discernment. Concretely, this leads to a feverish state where I feel, depending on the cause, anguish, sadness, panic, fear, anger, performance anxiety, but it can also be a jubilant joy. When I am happy, I follow it deeply. Everything is always exacerbated.
It kept me from teaching English, the job I dreamed of. I became a translator. However, I am an associate professor thanks to my written notes, but orally, I am a shadow of myself, I have the impression of gambling my life, without knowing why, moreover, and I don’t know anything about anything. My social and love life has long been very poor too. A lack of attention, a remark, even a relevant one, or an awkwardness is enough to hurt me deeply and, in the long run, I lose confidence in the relationship.
Folding in on myself then becomes less painful. But to no longer take any emotional risk, I was not experiencing anything either.
This is what prompted me to consult, at 27 years old. I was at the same time unhappy and at the end of constantly living with the feeling of walking on a thread stretched in the void. Some days I was literally drained, as if I had had several sleepless nights. And I was somatizing with pain in the neck, stomach cramps or contractures in the jaw.
In therapy, I felt the knots loosen
For 7 years, I did therapy with a psychoanalyst psychiatrist. I had a visceral urge to push out of myself the overflow of feelings that had been stuck for so many years.
In a few weeks, I felt the knots loosen. And I understood that I had to welcome my emotions and no longer fight against them, in the same way that one does not go up a river against the current, at the risk of being exhausted and drowning, but we let ourselves be carried by the current until we can reach the bank. At the same time, I took African dance lessons to reconnect with my body and distract myself from my emotions and everything that spins too quickly in my head. Today, my hyperemotivity is still there, but it no longer tyrannizes me and it no longer slows down my impulses, I manage to adapt more often and to calm the game inside me. Moreover, since the start of the school year, I have been giving English lessons in an association. I feel free.
Find out more:Hyperemotional. Survive the inner storm, by Virginie Megglé, ed. Eyrolles
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