How to Deal with Difficult Emotions: A Somatic Approach

Ever Feel Like You're Drowning?

I want to talk about something that comes up with almost every person I work with, regardless of what originally brought them into my practice. Whether it's chronic pain, relationship patterns, burnout, or a trauma history, at some point we land in this territory: what do I actually do with my emotions when they feel like too much?

If that resonates, you're in good company.

Most of us grew up in environments where emotions were managed for us, minimized, or treated as inconveniences. Someone cries and hears "don't cry." Someone gets angry and hears "calm down." Someone feels anxious and hears "you're fine." Over time, those responses teach us something powerful: that our internal experience is something to override, suppress, or fix as quickly as possible.

And we get good at it. Really good. We learn to push through, power on, keep going. Until, eventually, the body starts sending louder signals. Chronic tension in the jaw and shoulders. Digestive issues that don't resolve with diet changes alone. Sleep disruption. Pain that persists despite stretching, rest, and medication. These signals are often the body's way of saying: there is unprocessed emotional material living here, and it needs attention.

Emotions Are Physiological Events

One of the things I find most helpful for my clients to understand early on is that emotions are whole-body experiences. Before the conscious thought "I'm angry" or "I'm grieving" forms in the mind, the body has already registered the experience at a cellular, muscular, and nervous system level. Your chest tightens. Your stomach drops. Your throat constricts. These are real, measurable physiological responses, and they happen faster than cognition.

The scientific term for this capacity to sense what's happening inside your own body is interoception. A 2020 systematic review in Frontiers in Psychology by Pinna and Edwards examined the relationship between interoceptive awareness, vagal tone, and emotional regulation across multiple populations, including people living with chronic conditions. What they found consistently was that people with greater interoceptive awareness (a stronger ability to perceive and interpret internal body signals) demonstrated better emotional regulation and greater psychological flexibility. In plain terms: the more fluent you become in your body's internal language, the more capacity you develop to move through difficult emotional experiences without shutting down or becoming overwhelmed.

This is also supported by neuroimaging research. A 2024 study published in Translational Psychiatry showed that interoceptive training, meaning structured practice in tuning into heartbeat, breath, and internal sensation, produced measurable changes in the functional connectivity of the anterior insula cortex, one of the brain's key regions for body awareness and emotional processing. Participants who completed the training showed reduced anxiety levels and fewer somatic symptoms. The brain reorganized itself around the simple, repeated act of listening inward.

The Role of the Nervous System

Your vagus nerve, the longest cranial nerve in the body, runs from the brainstem all the way down through the chest and abdomen. It serves as a primary communication highway between the brain and the organs, and it plays a central role in how your body shifts between states of activation (stress, alertness, mobilization) and states of rest (calm, digestion, connection).

Stephen Porges' Polyvagal Theory, most recently updated in Clinical Neuropsychiatry (2025), describes how the autonomic nervous system operates through a hierarchy of states. When we feel safe and socially connected, we're operating from what's called the ventral vagal pathway: our breath is full, our facial muscles are relaxed, our system is open to processing and integrating experience. When we're under threat, real or perceived, the system mobilizes into a sympathetic response (fight or flight) or, if the threat feels inescapable, collapses into a dorsal vagal shutdown (freeze, numbness, disconnection).

What I see in my clients regularly is that people who have been living with chronic stress, unresolved trauma, or prolonged emotional suppression are often cycling between activation and shutdown without much access to that ventral vagal state where emotional processing can actually happen safely. They're not resistant to feeling. Their nervous system hasn't had enough consistent safety cues to allow those feelings to surface and move through at a pace the body can handle.

Why "Letting Go" Falls Short

Emotions have a physiological arc. They rise, they peak, and they complete. But they can only complete when the body is given the conditions to discharge the activation that accompanied the emotional experience in the first place. Emily and Amelia Nagoski refer to this as "completing the stress cycle," and it's one of the most practical frameworks for understanding why so many people feel emotionally stuck even when they cognitively understand their situation.

You can know, logically, that a relationship ended for good reasons. You can understand intellectually that the car accident years ago wasn't your fault. You can remind yourself daily that the work deadline is manageable. And yet the body still carries a charge, a tension, a sense of something unfinished.

That's because the physiological response that accompanied the original experience was interrupted and never completed. A 2015 paper by Payne, Levine, and Crane-Godreau in Frontiers in Psychology examined how trauma becomes stored somatically, highlighting that defensive motor responses (the impulse to run, push, curl inward, or brace) often get interrupted during overwhelming experiences, leaving the body in a state of suspended activation. The stress cycle stays open.

This is exactly what somatic therapy is designed to address.

What Healthy Emotional Processing with a Somatic Approach Actually Looks Like

In my practice, working with emotions somatically involves a few key elements that I teach every client:

1. Noticing before naming.
   Rather than jumping to analyze what you're feeling or why, the first step is simply making contact with your body. Where do you feel something? What is the quality of that sensation: heavy, hot, tight, buzzing, hollow? This builds interoceptive capacity over time, and it creates a crucial sliver of space between you and the intensity of the emotion. You go from being consumed by the feeling to being in relationship with it.
   
   
2. Lending presence and breath toward discomfort and sensation.
   When discomfort shows up in the body, most people instinctively hold their breath or breathe shallowly. This is a natural protective response, but it also keeps the nervous system in a mobilized state. Slow, diaphragmatic breathing activates the ventral vagal pathway and sends a signal to the entire system: we are safe enough to be here with this. Three to five full breaths, directed gently toward the area of tension. You're not trying to make anything disappear. You're accompanying yourself through it.
   
   
3. Prioritizing somatic processing through movement.
   Emotions, by their nature, are meant to move. The word itself contains "motion" and you can think of e-motions as "energy in motion," When the body is given permission and safety to move, the stress cycle can complete. This might look like gentle rocking. Pressing your hands into a wall. Shaking through the arms and legs. Curling into a ball. Making sound. Stretching long through the spine. These are your body's natural discharge mechanisms, the same ones we can observe in animals after a threat passes. When my clients allow this kind of organic, intuitive movement, I often watch something shift in their face and breath within minutes. The charge softens. The system reorganizes.
   
   
4. Respecting your window.
   Every person has a window of tolerance: a range within which they can experience emotion without becoming destabilized. Part of the skill of somatic work is learning where your edges are and working at the margins without flooding yourself. If something feels too big, too fast, or like you're about to be swept away, that's valuable information. It means your system needs more support, more pacing, more co-regulation before going deeper. You can touch the edge of something, then return to stability. A little at a time. This is how capacity builds.

What You Can Do Today

You don't need to wait for a therapy session to begin practicing this. The next time you notice frustration, sadness, restlessness, grief, or even unexpected joy rising in your body, try pausing for thirty seconds. Place a hand somewhere on your body that feels grounding (your chest, your belly, the side of your neck). Notice what sensation is present. Breathe toward it without trying to change it. And if your body wants to move, even subtly, let it.

That's enough. That's the practice. Over time, these small moments of attending to your body compound into something profound: a felt sense that your emotions are survivable, that your body is trustworthy, and that you have the internal resources to be with what is here.

Your body has been carrying this inner wisdom for a long time. And it's patient enough to wait while you learn to listen to its messages.

If you're ready to explore what somatic emotional processing could look like with personalized guidance, I'd love to connect. Book a free consultation call here and let's talk about where you are and what you need.

References:

Payne, P., Levine, P. A., & Crane-Godreau, M. A. (2015). Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 93.

Pinna, T., & Edwards, D. J. (2020). A systematic review of associations between interoception, vagal tone, and emotional regulation. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1792.

Porges, S. W. (2022). Polyvagal Theory: A science of safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16, 871227.

Porges, S. W. (2025). Polyvagal Theory: Current status, clinical applications, and future directions. Clinical Neuropsychiatry, 22(3), 169-184.

Translational Psychiatry (2024). Interoceptive training impacts the neural circuit of the anterior insula cortex. 14, 233.