Why Are Emotions Overwhelming

Most people avoid feeling their feelings because it can seem overwhelming. It can seem as if you sat with how you were feeling you might be swallowed up by the experience or washed out to sea. It’s an overwhelming sense that your emotional experience will be too much for you. A lot of anxiety is actually a result of avoiding or pushing down emotion that likely was pushed down because it felt overwhelming. I want to help demystify the emotional experience and help you understand why your emotions seem overwhelming.

Emotions seem overwhelming when they are unorganized. When we have not attached sensation and language to the way we feel, it causes our experience to be very chaotic and erratic, and we will have unwanted responses and lack understanding of why we are responding in that way which then makes us feel even more chaotic. An even somewhat organized emotional experience can be responded to and responded from in a way that feels more manageable. 

The most productive way to minimize emotions that feel overwhelming or help you get them organized, is to share them with another person you trust and feel secure with. We are designed as co-regulators. Meaning, when we turn to another and share about our emotional experience, the presence of another will allow us to feel more organized and our experience to feel less overwhelming. It is a sense of being held in the storm, our brain is wired for this experience. It is nothing mystical or magical; there is an actual biological process that happens related to chemicals and neurons in the brain that facilitates this response.

You might be thinking I don’t know how to do that or I don’t know anyone that can be that for me. Sadly, that could be true. As a society we have lost touch with the art of being “with” each other. We have become a society of pushing down emotion and avoiding or acknowledging the need to slow down and take notice of our internal world, much less share it with someone. Even if we did slow down and share, there is a good chance that the people in our life will see it as their role to come up with solutions or provide a positive spin on the situation. These interactions are not helpful when all we really need is someone who will allow us to share and be curious with us about what is happening inside us. 

So begin today, find a group of people you feel care and connect with and commit to learning how to allow each other the space to process and make sense of our emotional experience. In the therapy room when someone feels they can’t take an emotional risk, I always say, “that’s okay, let’s slice it thinner, can you tell them about the fear.” So I am going to say the same here. If it’s too risky to just jump in with your internal experience, just start with what it is like to talk about and sit with your emotions.