When Feelings Come Too Fast: Working With Emotional Overwhelm and Dysregulation

Today I want to look at something that comes up a lot on the healing childhood trauma journey, which is how we deal with intense emotions. We’re often told that we need to feel our feelings, and for many people, especially those who have lived in detached, dissociated, or numbing states, learning to feel again can be incredibly important and healing. It’s something I’ve had to work through myself.

But there’s another end of the spectrum that doesn’t get talked about as much. Some of us don’t struggle because we feel too little. We struggle because we feel too much, too quickly, and too intensely. Our emotions can come in like a flood. It feels dysregulated. It feels like we don’t have much choice or control over how emotions arise or how they come out.

What I want to explore here is what we can do when emotions feel overwhelming, and how we can slowly bring back a deeper sense of agency in our emotional lives.

Let me start with a common example.

Imagine you’ve agreed to meet a friend at 2:00. They’re late. Ten minutes go by. Fifteen minutes. You text them and there’s no reply. Suddenly, you feel this surge of anger. Something gets triggered. It feels dismissive. It feels rude. Beneath that, there’s often a sense of rejection and shame being activated.

By the time they arrive, you’re already fired up. There’s an angry outburst. They’re confused or startled. Then it turns out they couldn’t access their phone. Afterwards, there’s this sinking feeling that your reaction didn’t really match what happened. The anger felt disproportionate to the situation. Then comes the guilt, the retreating, the pulling away, the isolation. And the cycle continues.

This is what emotional dysregulation can look like. It’s not that emotions are wrong, it’s that they feel out of balance with what’s actually happening.

One of the most important shifts here, and something I talk about over and over in my work and in this blog, is awareness. The power of awareness can’t be overstated.

If we’re not aware that something is being triggered, and we fully believe that our anger is only about the friend being late, then there’s very little room for change. We end up outsourcing the problem to the outside world. It becomes all about what others are doing wrong.

But when awareness starts to come online, something changes. We begin to notice that maybe the anger isn’t really about this situation. Maybe it’s touching something much older.

If you’re reading this and you’ve made it this far, you might already be at that point. You might already be asking, “What is actually going on in me?”

That doesn’t mean people never treat us badly. Sometimes anger is appropriate. That’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about those moments when emotions flood us, feel uncontrollable, and start affecting our relationships, our work, and our sense of self. There’s often an inner knowing that says, “I don’t want to keep being driven like this.”

The first step is simply noticing. For example, noticing that when someone is late, it feels like rejection. That rejection connects to something from childhood where you felt uncared for or unseen. The anger then becomes a protective response, a way of defending against hurt.

The moment we see that, even a little, something shifts. We move from total identification with the emotion into a position of witnessing. Even if it’s only five percent, that space matters.

So the first piece is awareness without trying to fix, change, or suppress anything. Just noticing. This is what I do. This is what it feels like. This is what it’s connected to.

Now, when it comes to interrupting the intensity of the emotion in the moment, there are various techniques that can help. Dialectical Behaviour Therapy talks about things like putting your face in cold water. How practical that is in real life is another question.

On a more realistic level, noticing early signs and grounding in the body can help. Slowing the breath. Feeling your feet. Bringing attention back to physical sensation rather than the story in the mind.

Another powerful option is co-regulation. As children, when we became overwhelmed, a regulated adult could sit with us and help bring us back into rhythm. As adults, reaching out to someone who feels steady can help us settle. That might be a friend, a partner, or someone you trust.

Nature is also a powerful co-regulator. Putting your hands on a tree. Getting into the ocean, a river, or a pool. Nature isn’t dysregulated. It doesn’t rush or panic. Being in contact with it can help our nervous systems find balance again.

That said, none of these techniques really work unless something deeper is already in place. They don’t work if we still fully believe that the problem is “out there” and that our reaction is completely justified. If there’s no awareness, there’s no motivation to interrupt the cycle.

This is why awareness is the most powerful piece. Awareness without self-blame or self-criticism. Just recognising that this reaction isn’t actually about what’s happening now, but about something inside that wants understanding.

Practices like meditation or sitting quietly can really support this. Not because they fix us, but because they help us build the muscle of awareness when we’re not triggered. Then, when intense emotions do arise, we have more capacity to notice them rather than be completely taken over by them.

So there are things we can do in the moment, and there are things we can practice outside of those moments. Both matter. Over time, they build a sense of choice and space where there used to be none.

I hope this has been helpful and that it’s made sense. If you have reflections or experiences you want to share, feel free to leave them in the comments. Thanks for being here, and please take care of yourself.

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