At a Glance
Dealing with difficult emotions can feel overwhelming, especially when past experiences or trauma make feelings seem unsafe or uncontrollable. This blog explores why emotions feel intense, the impact of avoiding them, and how therapy provides strategies, including grounding techniques, to regulate emotions and build resilience for healthier emotional well-being.
Why Dealing with Difficult Emotions Feels Overwhelming
Do you ever feel like your emotions come out of nowhere, too big, too fast, or too much to handle? Maybe you find yourself snapping at someone you care about, crying when you least expect it, or shutting down completely. You might feel ashamed for being too sensitive or confused about why certain situations affect you so deeply.
The truth is that dealing with difficult emotions can feel overwhelming, unpredictable, and even frightening. This doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you. Often, it means something inside you is asking to be seen, understood, or cared for.
I’m Dr Sonney Gullu-McPhee, a Chartered Clinical Psychologist with postdoctoral training in Schema Therapy, EMDR, DBT, and Compassion-Focused Therapy. In this blog, I’ll explore how to deal with emotions in a healthy way with therapy. If you often feel overwhelmed by how you feel or stuck in emotional patterns, therapy can help you feel more stable, connected, and emotionally empowered.
Contact me to book a session to help you in navigating overwhelming emotions.
What Are Emotions, and Why Do We Need Them?
Emotions are part of our evolutionary survival system. They are internal signals that help us respond to the world around us. Joy encourages connection. Sadness invites reflection and slowing down. Anger alerts us when a boundary has been crossed. Fear prepares us to respond to danger. Even shame, while deeply uncomfortable, evolved to help us maintain social bonds and avoid rejection.
Emotions are not good or bad. They carry important messages about what matters to us, what feels unsafe, and what needs attention. They often arise before conscious thought, shaped by memory, relational learning, and our nervous system’s detection of threat or safety.
When emotions are acknowledged, felt, and expressed safely, they tend to move through us naturally. But when they are dismissed, punished, or suppressed, especially early in life, they can become harder to regulate. This can lead to emotional flooding, avoidance, shutdown, or a sense of being hijacked by feelings we can’t fully understand.
Why Do Difficult Emotions Feel So Intense?
While emotions are meant to help us navigate life, some can feel deeply overwhelming. This intensity is often not just about what is happening now, but about how your nervous system and emotional memory have developed over time.
Attachment theory suggests that early caregiving relationships shape our emotional responses well into adulthood (Bowlby, 1988). If you were supported, soothed, and understood as a child, you likely developed the ability to self-regulate. But if your emotions were dismissed, criticised, or neglected, you may now feel unsafe or uncontrollable. Your nervous system may interpret strong emotion as a threat in itself.
Trauma research has shown that emotional memories, especially those tied to early pain, are stored differently in the brain. According to LeDoux (1996), the amygdala encodes these emotional memories non-consciously and rapidly, bypassing the logical brain. That’s why you might have trouble dealing with difficult emotions and react strongly to something without fully knowing why.
These emotional patterns can become hard-wired. If sadness, anger, or fear weren’t allowed or were met with disconnection, you may now experience those feelings as intolerable. This is known as dysregulation and is common in individuals with complex trauma or developmental adversity (Herman, 1992; van der Kolk, 2014).
Polyvagal theory (Porges, 2011) also explains that when your body perceives threat, even emotional or relational threat, it can activate protective responses like fight, flight, freeze, or shutdown. For those who have rarely felt emotionally safe, even small triggers can activate big emotions.
Intense emotions are not irrational or excessive. They are learned responses that made sense at the time. Therapy helps you understand their origin, regulate their intensity, and provide strategies for dealing with difficult emotions so that you feel in control.
What Happens When We Avoid or Suppress Emotions?
Many people grow up learning that emotions should be hidden, fixed, or avoided. We’re praised for being strong or logical and often discouraged from being vulnerable. As a result, you may have never learned how to deal with emotions in a healthy way and instead learned to push emotions down or escape from them entirely.
This might show up as overworking, emotional detachment, perfectionism, people-pleasing, or using substances or distractions to numb out. While your strategies for dealing with difficult emotions might offer short-term relief, over time, they can leave you feeling disconnected, anxious, or overwhelmed.
Research shows that suppressing instead of dealing with difficult emotions activates the stress response. Gross and Levenson (1997) found that inhibition increases physiological arousal. In contrast, putting feelings into words reduces activity in the amygdala and calms the nervous system (Lieberman et al., 2007). In other words, avoiding emotion increases distress, while naming and processing emotion supports regulation.
How Therapy Can Help You in Navigating Overwhelming Emotions
Therapy creates space for you to reconnect with your emotions in a safe, manageable way. In my approach, I draw on Schema Therapy, EMDR, DBT, Compassion-Focused Therapy, CBT, and mindfulness-based strategies to support you in developing emotional clarity and resilience.
Together, we begin by noticing your emotional triggers and the patterns that follow. You’ll explore the origin of these responses, whether in childhood, past relationships, or protective habits and start to gently shift how you relate to them.
In Schema Therapy, we look at the different “modes” or parts of the self that carry emotions. You might have a vulnerable child mode that feels small and scared, a critic mode that shames you, or a detached protector mode that shuts everything down. By becoming aware of these modes, we can work with them instead of against them, understanding what each part needs, and helping you care for them in a more compassionate way.
If trauma is involved, EMDR helps to reprocess emotionally charged memories, so they no longer feel overwhelming. DBT and mindfulness-based strategies give you real-world tools for regulating emotions as they arise. Compassion-Focused Therapy supports you in developing a kinder internal voice, especially if you tend to judge yourself for how you feel.
Therapy is not about eliminating emotion. It’s about helping you in navigating overwhelming emotions and responding to your feelings with awareness, confidence, and compassion.
Practical Tools to Help You Feel More Grounded
You can learn grounding techniques in therapy to help in dealing with difficult emotions. However, you don’t have to wait until you’re in therapy to start feeling more emotionally supported. Here are a few tools, such as breathing techniques and grounding techniques, including 5-4-3-2-1, that you can begin using right away:
1. Name the Emotion
When you’re feeling overwhelmed, take a moment to pause and put the emotion into words. Say to yourself, “This is sadness” or “This is anxiety.” This activates your prefrontal cortex, which helps reduce emotional intensity in the amygdala. You can expand this by saying, “It makes sense that I’m feeling this way,” which adds a layer of self-compassion.
2. Soothing Rhythm Breathing
This breathing technique helps bring your body out of a stress response. Sit comfortably and place one hand on your chest and one on your belly. Breathe in through your nose for a count of four, hold for a second, and breathe out through your mouth for six. Repeat for a few minutes while focusing on the steady rhythm and the gentle rise and fall of your breath.
3. The STOP Skill (from DBT)
This is useful when you feel emotionally hijacked.
- Stop what you’re doing.
- Take a step back, even mentally.
- Observe what you’re feeling, sensing, or thinking.
- Proceed with intention. Ask yourself, “What do I need right now?” or “What would be the most caring way to respond to this?”
4. Grounding Techniques, 5-4-3-2-1
This sensory-based tool helps anchor you in the present when emotions feel overwhelming.
- Name five things you can see.
- Name four things you can touch.
- Name three things you can hear.
- Name two things you can smell.
- Name one thing you can taste or say something kind to yourself.
This helps slow the mind and reconnects you to the safety of the here and now.
You Are Not Too Much, Your Emotions Make Sense
If you’ve ever felt like navigating overwhelming emotions is too intense, too unpredictable, or too much to manage, I want you to know this: your emotions are not the problem. They are signals, often from younger, protective parts of you, that are longing to be seen, heard, and held with care.
Therapy gives you space to understand your emotional world and build trust in your ability to feel, respond, and regulate. You don’t have to carry your feelings alone. With the right support and grounding techniques in therapy, you can begin to feel more stable, more connected, and more yourself.
If you’re based in the UK and looking for psychological support, I offer therapy both online and in-person in Petersfield, Hampshire. Together, we can help you feel more emotionally grounded and at peace in your inner world.
Call +44 7584 354041 or email info@drmcphee.co.uk or visit www.drmcphee.co.uk to arrange a 15-minute consultation to see if we’re a good fit.