Pavlovian Response

I feel so incredibly screwed up right now and completely at the mercy of Pavlovian-esque knee-jerk emotional responses. I hate it. Apparently it's amazing I have any friends at all.

A new friend of mine who I'm still getting to know was in a really bad mood tonight--this is the same friend who I've been having so much fear about, but I'm in a much better place now because I know without a doubt that he's not going anywhere--anyhow, seeing him in such a bad mood for the first time really frightened me, even though he didn't do anything other than tell me "I'm in a bad mood today." -- But it frightened me because when I was a child, when my father was in a bad mood he'd scream at us for even talking to him. So now that's a knee-jerk emotional response for me.

When I was sixteen, my grandmother died. The night before, she was sick in the bathroom, I asked her if there was anything I could do, and she said, "I'm just not feeling well." After school the next day, my sister and I found her dead. For years after that, any time anyone said "I'm not feeling well", my knee-jerk response to that was feeling a tightness of fear in my chest: "Are they going to die?" I finally figured that one out and after time I was able to let it go.

When I was sharing an apartment with my cousin a few years ago, when she did dishes she would always slam them around loudly. Growing up in my house, dishes, doors, or whatever were only slammed if you were angry. So my knee-jerk emotional response to my cousin washing dishes was an extremely frightened "Why is she so angry? Did I do something wrong?" I finally asked her about it one day, and she said she simply wanted to the get the dishes done quickly and therefore wasn't taking the time to be less noisy. And after even knowing that, it still frightened me and I had to talk myself through it.

And I think a lot of the fear I've been going through recently is also a knee-jerk response (now that I think about it.) But I mean, how do you turn them off? If you've been conditioned to react that way by your life experiences, how do you turn them off? Yes, it's gonna take time to recondition myself and talk myself through them, but in the meanwhile, it's gotta make it so hard sometimes for those who care about me.

I'm so frustrated right now.