Dr. John A. King proposes calling internal emotional deregulation an "incident" and outward expressions that affect others an "episode." Tracking both separately shows concrete progress: many incidents but few episodes means you're regulating better without affecting people around you.
Hey, how you doing? In my book, Deal With It, I talk about the need to develop a common language. The basis for the common language is to have common form of communication. One of the things that people with PTSD suffer from is they have these massive emotional outbursts or outrages, even if they're just internal. If I had an internal deregulation, I would call it an incident. If it then went external, it would then be called an episode. Now, how this was helpful is that an incident was only something that affected me, an episode affected others. I could get to the end of what I thought was a bad day, then look back at it and realise that I'd managed to keep it all in and manage it. I'd had a series of incidences but not an episode. Now, that enabled me to look at a month and realise that I might have had 1 or 2 episodes and maybe 20 incidences, but that I was progressing because I was learning to manage what was in me And it wasn't leaking out and affecting those around me.
