An Emotional Tug-of-War Between a Cat and a Little Girl

“Hello, Clarice—have the lambs stopped screaming?”

I will not be surprised if your answer is both yes and no. For now the lambs will not scream again. But, Clarice, you measure yourself by the standards of that dungeon, and one must not measure oneself too harshly; sacred tranquility must be won again and again. Because it is suffering that drives you forward; and to see suffering, suffering will have no end, never an end.

I will not come to visit you, Clarice. The world is a better place for having you in it. Do be as kind to me as I ask.

—From The Silence of the Lambs

Last weekend was a little different for my cat. It got a new little friend: a lively, adorable girl. She is a close relative of mine, loves cats, but has none at home of her own, and often visits other people’s homes to pet them.

At first cat and girl got along wonderfully. She poured all her tenderness and love on the cat, played with it, groomed it, found cat food and cans to feed it, and stroked it. The cat is humanity’s best companion animal; it can feel the love people give it, and clearly enjoyed the attention, as its expression showed.

But then things gradually changed. The girl’s ideas were odd: she built what she thought was a cozy cat bed. She began forcing the cat into it, forbade it from lying on the sofa or bed in whatever way it found comfortable, forbade it from watching the world outside through the glass, and demanded it play games on her terms.

A cat is a cat; it could not understand her commands. Again and again she lifted it from where it was comfortable and forced it into the bed, and even began using force. The cat grew fed up, finally assumed a defensive posture, and, when attacked, began to try to fight back and escape.

I told the girl the cat could not understand human speech and not to provoke it; if it scratched her she would not only be in pain but need rabies shots, which was a hassle. She scolded me angrily: didn’t I say my cat was a divine cat? Why couldn’t it understand her? How could it be so stupid? Then she flew into a rage at the cat, dismissed it as worthless, and swore never to play with it again.

This scene was terribly familiar to me; it is closely tied to the emotional dysregulation I study. The child is young, and I cannot yet tell whether this is simply what we call a child’s temper or an emotional-control problem. But I know her somewhat, and she does seem to lose her temper more readily than other children around her. At night she often cries out in her sleep; she seems anxious and frightened.

Usually, a person with emotional-control problems has been somewhat different from those around them since childhood. Their relationships with others break very easily, and so do their bonds with pets. Repeated broken relationships leave them themselves distressed; when emotional connections go wrong, they become more sensitive, suspicious, and insecure than most, and more prone to anxiety and depression.

When they grow up, this worsens in relationships with partners and children. They swing between two extremes: either clinging with tenderness or exploding with rage. Their behavior makes partners and children feel they are in heaven one second and hell the next. Over time this is unbearable, and such intimate relationships rarely last.

Because from childhood, sudden ruptures of emotional bonds have happened to them again and again, each agony unbearable. They are therefore very sensitive: at the first sign that a relationship might break, they end it first, to protect themselves. Fearing the blow of abandonment, they abandon others first.

But each abandonment is not meant. They watch the other’s reaction from a distance; if strongly begged to stay, they reconcile. If they realize they overreacted, they themselves return to make up. But after many such rounds, both parties are exhausted, and the relationship ends in rupture.

I have read widely in this area. Many shallower works attribute the phenomenon to parental upbringing and family environment; some authors even claim such people were simply unloved in childhood. But in reality, the vast majority of emotionally dysregulated people I have observed are not like that; they are born different.

They have far more sensitive nervous systems than most, and often also have somatic symptoms—which some doctors may attribute to mental stress, but which are not. Their nervous system is the problem; this is a physiological, not psychological, issue. Severe cases are comorbid with common neurological conditions such as ankylosing spondylitis, nervous vomiting, or migraine. I have personally observed at least three such people who involuntarily cry out in pain in their sleep; their suffering is not feigned.

After COVID, some people who had never had such problems suddenly became this way, which made me realize that when a virus can damage the nervous system, it can cause such problems. Attributing these issues solely to family-of-origin upbringing is shallow and wrong.

Emotional dysregulation does tend to run in families, because it has a genetic component. Some studies point to a group of genes on the short arm of chromosome 21, causing dysregulated secretion of key neurotransmitters such as serotonin. Other studies suggest that patients had oxytocin deficiency in utero and were often preterm or low-birth-weight.

Most scholars now believe emotional dysregulation involves genes, environment, and traumatic experiences, and is usually accompanied by cognitive and emotional dysregulation. Communicating with such people requires many specialized skills; most eventually develop psychological or psychiatric problems. Severe cases progress to major mental illness—bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, mania, paranoid psychosis, schizophrenia. This causes enormous suffering not only for themselves but for their families.

Usually, people who form deep emotional bonds with such individuals themselves have psychological issues to work through. I am a good example: at five I experienced the first suicide attempt by the person closest to me, and at thirteen I experienced a completed suicide of a close relative. Both hit me hard; the trauma did not basically clear until my forties, after years of my own deep study of psychiatry and neuroscience.

My own upbringing could offer useful material for psychiatry, but since many key people are still alive I will not go into detail, to avoid harming them. Perhaps in old age I will write memoirs, leaving a valuable document for psychiatric research.

My childhood trauma affected me deeply, making me different—specifically, over-empathic, over-tolerant, and perfectionist, so that in my first half I was pulled into many people’s suffering. In the second year of high school, my beloved teacher once took me aside in the corridor and said earnestly: “Zhiyuan, none of us is a savior; don’t take the whole world’s suffering on yourself.”

At twenty, my brother told me my compassion was overflowing, and that I would eventually be worn out by it. It turned out as he said: of the past ten years, nine were spent stuck in that mire, and I nearly lost my life. For me, a car accident was not an injury but a salvation; it triggered a great reckoning and matured my mind.

My maternal family is an outstanding clan; my mother had strong emotional regulation, loved well, and I was her favorite child, so I inherited those good genes. But my paternal side has serious emotional dysregulation—even psychiatric patients appeared among my grandparents’ generation—so strictly speaking my childhood environment was not ideal.

Moreover, my home was the village’s conflict-resolution center; from childhood I watched adults come to my father to settle disputes, yelling and wrangling, every one of them out of control, faces contorted. Those ferocious scenes must have affected me deeply; I grew up hating arguments and became a pacifist.

I watched with my own eyes how small-minded these people were—coming to blows over trivial matters, needing my father to mediate, even when they were close kin. From age eighteen, my father’s role shifted to me; villagers began coming to me to mediate disputes, and even now when I return home I still settle family conflicts. It is not hard to see why my MBTI is INFP (Mediator). In fact, more precisely, from junior high onward my father’s shadow fell over me; at school I was always the problem-solver at the center of the vortex.

Reading The Silence of the Lambs, I was deeply moved by the final passage, which I quote at the start of this article. It is a letter from Dr. Lecter to Clarice, the young FBI trainee. Clarice, because of a childhood trauma that never healed, grew into a woman with a fierce sense of justice and compassion—even risking her life to investigate serial murders. Dr. Lecter is a psychiatrist who is himself insane; he uses his expertise to analyze her and finally tries to control her psychologically.

The Dutch neuroscientist Dick Swaab, in his book We Are Our Brains, notes that none of the major events of a person’s life—an accident, falling in love at first sight, a decision that changes one’s life—is truly accidental; though they seem random, on close study they have deep causes, usually reflecting problems that arose as our brain developed under various influences.

Reading that book jolted me awake, and I began to reflect deeply on everything that had happened in my life. I finally saw that, as he said, all our errors and conflicts with the outside world stem not from outside but from our own mental immaturity.

Humans have not evolved to perfection, and human society has all sorts of problems. The genes we inherit and the childhood environment we grow up in are not our choice. Human society is in fact repeatedly out of emotional control; most people’s inner lives are not that strong, and outside disturbances cause many great stress. Cataclysmic events like war and plague drive many to madness.

Even if we ourselves are not emotionally dysregulated, it is hard to escape the influence of those who are. Our relatives or lovers may be such people; and even if no one close to us is, we inevitably meet them in work and life.

These years I have often wondered: how to solve humanity’s emotional dysregulation? How to ease the suffering of those affected and those around them? How to prevent the damage they inflict on the world? As far as I know, existing medicine has limited leverage here, and the mood stabilizers we use carry varying side effects. Perhaps we need more public understanding of the problem, and to explore ways for different types of people to get along reasonably.

Have the lambs in my heart stopped screaming? Perhaps, as Dr. Lecter said, people like Clarice and me always judge ourselves by impossibly harsh standards, driven forward by human suffering. For a while the lambs may seem silent, but in a crisis their shrill cry starts up again. No one can truly erase those memories engraved deep in the mind; all our forgetting is conditional.

Note: In The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice grew up with lambs, but once had to watch her little friends led to slaughter; the lambs’ screams as they were taken to the abattoir have echoed in her mind ever since.