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Emotion Regulation
An 8 Step Roadmap for Managing Difficult Feelings
Emotions can be overwhelming sometimes. Here's exactly what to do to manage them.
Posted October 1, 2024 Reviewed by Abigail Fagan
Key points
- Everyone gets flooded with powerful emotions sometimes. Those emotions can make us suffer or even act rashly.
- Being able to handle intense feelings is a key life skill that many aren't able to learn as children.
- There are 8 steps that will enable you to take control of your feelings instead of being at their mercy.
Have you ever felt flooded?
I don’t mean “water in your basement” kind of flooding… I mean emotional flooding. It’s when your emotions take over and overwhelm you. Flooding makes it difficult to think clearly, process your emotions, and take appropriate action.
It’s common to become emotionally flooded when you are dealing with stressors without the skills it would take to manage them. Perhaps you experience something that takes you back to a traumatic event (in other words, you are triggered). Or perhaps you experience intense emotions without piecing together that there is a trigger in the first place.
Emotional flooding can scare people away from wanting to process their feelings. Over and over again, clients in my psychology practice express fears of exploring feelings that hold deep pain. It’s such a valid fear, especially when my clients have been taught (directly or indirectly) that their emotions are unimportant, bad, dangerous, or burdensome.
In order to decrease emotional flooding, it’s crucial to develop a relationship with your emotions. If you don’t have a relationship with your emotions, chances are high that “in-the-moment coping” will be extremely challenging for you. The only way out is through. Unfortunately, there aren’t shortcuts or workarounds. It’s instrumental to have a roadmap for getting through your emotional overwhelm.
First, let’s talk about why you might have a rocky relationship with your emotions in the first place.
Childhood Emotional Neglect: A Wall Between You and Your Feelings
Childhood is the time when kids are learning, growing, and absorbing everything in their environment. But what happens when their environment is one that doesn’t make space for emotions? What happens when their feelings aren’t acknowledged, responded to, or validated by their parents?
What happens is this: you learn to push your feelings down in order to cope inside your childhood home. This sets you up to create a wall between you and your feelings, resulting in a lack of access to the world of emotions. The wall stays with you into adulthood… making sure your emotions stay blocked and ultimately creating a sense of confusion and emptiness. This is the consequence of childhood emotional neglect.
Sooner or later, one or another of your suppressed emotions will burst through the wall. And what an overwhelming experience it can be to have your emotions rise to the surface without the tools you need to deal with them. Since your feelings weren’t embraced in childhood, you missed out on learning how to identify, manage, and express your feelings. So, when feelings break through the wall today, you’re left feeling emotionally flooded.
The good news is that it’s never too late to learn invaluable emotion skills. Below I’ll teach you how to manage your feelings when they rise to the surface and decrease your feelings of overwhelm.
8 Steps to Manage Difficult Emotions
1. Welcome the feeling.
This is the most important step of all. Allowing your feelings goes against everything you believe. When raised with emotional neglect, you learn that emotions should be avoided at all costs. But that’s what created the wall in the first place. Try to fight the urge to push down your feelings and instead get curious.
2. Create language for the feeling.
Identifying something can make it less scary to deal with. See if you can come up with feeling words that match your internal experience. Powerful emotions tend to be a mixture of multiple feelings in one. Here’s an example: hurt, sad, disappointed, and hopeless.
3. Don’t give the feeling too much power.
A feeling doesn’t define you. Imagine yourself in the driver’s seat and your emotions as passengers. You don’t need to let them drive. But perhaps they have some very helpful information to share to get you about where you need to go.
4. Cry if you need to.
Tears are your body’s way of processing and releasing emotions. Don’t hold back, allow whatever comes to the surface. On the other hand, you do not have to cry to process your feelings so please do not pressure yourself to do so.
5. Understand that processing a feeling decreases overwhelm.
The more you allow space for this feeling, the less it’ll take over and overwhelm you. Imagine that your difficult emotions are quicksand. The more you fight and resist, the further you sink. The secret to getting unstuck from quicksand is to stop fighting and accept… you’ll float to the top.
6. Imagine the feeling as a wave.
No matter how big a wave can be, they always come to shore. Your feelings are just the same. Ride with the wave and make it to shore safely.
7. Breathing can help you.
Take deep breaths as you process a difficult emotion. Close your eyes and on your inhale imagine you are breathing in strength and clarity. Remind yourself you are building your ability to tolerate the strong feeling that you’re having. As you breathe out, imagine the feeling releasing from your body. Do this over and over again as needed.
8. Welcome the feeling back again in the future.
Intense emotions need to be felt and processed more than once before they resolve. Each time you allow this feeling in, take note if it gets easier to process. Chances are it will. Treat your feelings as though they are your friends — be kind, open, and compassionate to them. Invite them back again after the visit is over.
Breaking Down Your Wall
When we talk about healing, we frequently talk about the before and after. What happened (or in the case of childhood emotional neglect, what didn’t happen) and how people have healed. But what about the messy middle? When you’re actively going through the healing process and dealing with painful emotions.
It’s not glamorous or easy, but it’s the reality of healing. To get to the other side and heal, you need to do the work of breaking through the wall that stands between you and your emotions. You are quite literally relaxing the restraints and allowing your feelings to come to the surface. Not to overwhelm you, but to take control of them. It is the restraints themselves that are actually creating the tension and overwhelm you might be experiencing.
Give yourself what you didn’t get in childhood… an environment to listen, accept, and effectively manage the emotions you feel. When it floods, the green of your garden may fade and the growth of your vegetables may be stunted. While you can’t take control of the weather, you can take control of your emotions. Give them your attention. Water them. Walk through the eight steps above.
That is how you nurture yourself and heal.
Watch in the coming weeks for a follow-up post about settling difficult feelings for the long term.
© Jonice Webb, Ph.D.
References
To determine if you might be living with the effects of childhood emotional neglect, you can take the free Emotional Neglect Questionnaire. You'll find the link in my Bio.
