Sure, it's been awhile since I have posted on here. Maybe even a year even. Life gets busy, we all understand that, but there's one thing that i don't we think we are all understanding and it has ss got my hackles up a bit. So I have come back here to write about it. Deep breath in, let's dive in...
Nervous system language is everywhere right now. Regulate, co-regulate, get back into ventral, calm your system down. I use these ideas every day in my counselling room, and I'm grateful for them. They've given so many people a way to understand why their bodies react the way they do.
But I've been feeling increasingly uneasy about something. Somewhere along the way, "regulate your nervous system" started to quietly mean "make the uncomfortable feeling go away, fast." We feel anger rising and reach for box breathing before we've even worked out what we're angry about. We feel anxious and rush to soothe it before asking what it's pointing at.
That's not always safety. Sometimes it's suppression with better branding. And sometimes the real work isn't calming down at all. It's learning to sit with your shit.
Feelings are information, not malfunctions
Emotions aren't errors in the system. They're messages from it.
- Anger often tells you a boundary has been crossed, or something unfair is happening.
- Anxiety often tells you something matters to you, or that a need isn't being met.
- Sadness often tells you that you've lost something, or someone, that was important.
- Guilt often tells you that you've acted out of line with your own values (or that you've been trained to feel guilty for having needs at all).
None of these feelings is the problem. They're signals. When we treat them as malfunctions to be fixed, we shut the messenger up before we've heard the message. The feeling might fade for a while, but the thing it was pointing at is still there.
Suppression doesn't switch feelings off
Here's the thing about pushing a feeling down: it doesn't actually leave.
Research on emotional suppression, including work by psychologist James Gross and colleagues, has found that hiding or holding back an emotion tends to keep the body more physiologically stirred up, not less. You might look calm on the outside, but underneath, your heart rate and stress response are still working hard. Suppression also takes a lot of mental energy, which is part of why it can leave us foggy, tired and disconnected.
So a feeling you never let yourself feel doesn't disappear. It waits. It shows up later as irritability, tension in your jaw or shoulders, a sudden outburst over something small, a low hum of anxiety you can't quite name, or a sense of numbness where your feelings used to be.
Your body learns from what you do
Our nervous systems are always learning, and they learn more from what we do than from what we tell ourselves.
If every time anger shows up you rush to calm it, your body gets a clear message: this feeling is dangerous, get rid of it. If every flicker of anxiety is met with an urgent fix, your system learns that anxiety itself is the threat. Over time, the feeling and the fear of the feeling get tangled together. Now you're not just anxious, you're anxious about being anxious.
In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), this pattern is called experiential avoidance: trying to escape or control uncomfortable inner experiences. In the short term it brings relief. In the long term it tends to shrink our lives, because more and more situations start to feel risky simply because they might bring up something we don't want to feel.
The irony is that we reach for regulation to build safety. But if we use it to avoid every hard feeling, we can end up teaching our bodies the opposite.
So where does regulation fit?
I'm not saying throw out your regulation tools. They matter, and sometimes they're exactly what's needed.
A helpful way to think about this is the window of tolerance, a concept developed by psychiatrist Dan Siegel. It's the zone where you can feel something and still think clearly, stay present and stay connected to yourself and others.
- Above the window, you're flooded: racing heart, panic, rage, can't think straight.
- Below the window, you're shut down: numb, foggy, flat, disconnected.
- Inside the window, feelings can be intense, but you can still be with them.
When you're way outside your window, regulation tools are brilliant. Nothing useful gets felt or understood when you're completely flooded. Use your breath, move your body, put your feet on the floor, reach for someone safe.
But the goal isn't to make the feeling vanish. It's to bring it back into a range you can actually stay with. Somatic therapists call this titration: touching into a feeling in manageable doses, steadying yourself, then turning back towards it. Regulate a little, then get curious. Over time, your window widens, and your body learns that big feelings are survivable.
Regulate so you can feel. Not instead of feeling.
A note for people-pleasers
If you're a people-pleaser, or you recognise yourself in the fawn response, this matters even more.
Many people-pleasers learned early that their anger wasn't safe. Being angry risked conflict, rejection or losing connection, so they learned to swallow it, smooth things over and keep everyone else comfortable. "Calm down before you speak" was the rule long before anyone called it regulation.
So when nervous system work becomes another way to quickly soothe anger away, it can accidentally reinforce the very pattern you're trying to heal. Your anger might be the part of you that's been silenced the longest. It's often the part saying, "Hey, that's not okay with me." It's where your boundaries live.
It deserves a hearing, not just a breathing exercise.
Regulation or suppression? A quick check-in
The same tool, like a slow breath, can either help you stay with a feeling or help you escape it. From the outside they look identical. What matters is what you're using it for. Next time you reach for a regulation tool, ask yourself:
- Am I calming this because it's genuinely overwhelming, or because I feel uncomfortable or ashamed of having it?
- Afterwards, is the feeling still allowed to be here, just more bearable?
- Do I understand it better, or did I just switch it off?
- Am I trying to widen my window, or trying to never go near its edges?
How to actually sit with your shit
Sitting with a feeling doesn't mean wallowing in it or acting on it. It means letting it be here long enough to learn something from it.
- Notice it. Where is it in your body? Heat in your chest, tight jaw, churning stomach?
- Name it. "This is anger." "This is fear." Naming a feeling can help take a little of the charge out of it.
- Steady yourself just enough. If it's too big, use a regulation tool to come back into your window. Feet on the floor. A longer exhale.
- Get curious. Ask: what is this feeling trying to tell me? What does it need? What boundary, value or loss is it pointing to?
- Decide what, if anything, to do. Sometimes the answer is action. Sometimes it's simply acknowledgement. Either way, you're responding, not reacting or escaping.
The bottom line
Regulation is a tool, not a goal. The aim was never to become someone who doesn't feel anger, anxiety or grief. It's to become someone who can feel those things and stay steady enough to listen.
So the next time a hard feeling shows up, before you rush to fix it, pause. Steady yourself if you need to. Then turn towards it and ask what it's trying to say.
Not every feeling needs regulating. Some just need you to sit with your shit.
As alwayss, don't get critical. Get curious. Emma xo
If you'd like support learning to sit with big feelings, especially if you're a people-pleaser or find anger hard to be with, I offer counselling in person in Bairnsdale and via telehealth.
