How to Deal With Emotional Pain and Avoid Overcontrolled Coping

How to Deal With Emotional Pain

Something that’s been coming up with a lot of my clients lately (and to be for real, in my life as well) is how to get through painful emotional experience.

This sounds so much easier than it is. Especially if you’re someone who (like me, and many of my clients) try to cope well, challenge or change emotions, push that energy to something productive, stay busy.

Which is a lot of ways to say - to control emotions.

There are many times when being skillful at regulating emotions is especially important and valuable! And therein lies a dialectic, where it’s also important to experience and express emotions without attempting to control or diminish them.

Why?

When we control or diminish our emotions they get stuck, get bigger, get unmanageable. And when we compensate with more control, our lives end up revolving around all the things we have to do to “manage” our emotions, to control how we’re feeling, to problem solve and resolve all emotional experiences.

Some of these things we do to manage or control our emotions can look like ruminating or thinking exhaustively about the trigger to the emotion, avoiding activities and places that trigger these emotions, making to do lists, schedules, agendas.

And then we don’t get to live the life we want to live. Our goals fall to the wayside because we’re too busy or exhausted managing stress and grief and pressure. Our creativity becomes difficult to access, we distance from our relationships.

We have to be able to feel things, and get through feeling things, in order to live the life we want.

So how do we do this?

Exposure!

Exposure Therapy for Anxiety and OCD

Exposure Therapy: How to Deal with Emotional Pain

When we practice exposing ourselves to emotional activation, and track the rise and fall (the ebb and flow) of our emotional waves, our minds and bodies become acclimated to living with emotional movement. Over time, this results in decreased sense of overwhelm by emotions, and an increased sense of presence with the current moment.

One of my most favorite ways to practice this is through the guided RAIN meditation by Tara Brach. She guides listeners through a meditation practice that activates an uncomfortable or painful emotion, and follows through with ways to observe, understand (not analyze), and compassionately relate to our emotions.  You can try this out here!

Exposure therapy is a modality that also helps us build our tolerance of painful emotions, reduce our overcontrol responses to emotions, and be more present in the present moment. This is a modality I offer my clients in therapy, where we address triggers to painful emotions that are often avoided or controlled in some way.

This modality also works really well when overcontrol behaviors  develop into OCD. I collaborate together with my clients to design exposure exercises that target OCD symptoms and help them free up time and mental space for the things they actually want to be focused on. Learn more about this approach here.

Do you feel like you might worry too much or think too much about certain things? One of the most common ways people control their painful emotions is with compulsive rumination.

I recently went on an adventure, one that I've been imagining and planning for a very very long time, and it was so much! It was fun, it was tiring, it was change-making, it was lovely. I had a lot of worries and anxiety throughout it, but above all, my main desire was to be able to feel totally present with a sense of awe and wonder.  And I did! With lots of practice around mindfulness and exposure to emotions.  

That's the crux of the matter with controlling emotions, if you shut down one, you shut down them all, so in order to feel one you must feel them all.

It's important to remember, feeling our feelings willingly and mindfully does not mean we bypass the message those feelings are sending us about change needed in ourselves, our relationships, our world.  It makes so much sense that there's a lot of grief and rage pouring through us with everything that's happening near and far.

When we willingly feel our rage and grief, this enables us to take action; we can harness the ferocity of that rage and use that energy to mobilize and resist, we can allow the love that grief brings with it to fill us so we can be with and support our neighbors.  Feel these emotions and let your wisdom guide you to the next steps to take.

 We humans can gravitate towards overcontrol in response to painful and uncomfortable emotions. Overcontrol occurs when we engage in behaviors that seek to control our emotions, external or internal triggers, environmental circumstances. This can look like refusing to go to certain places even if you want to, emotionally shutting off and intellectualizing in response to conflict, creating rigid goals and timelines for goals.

Compulsive Rumination

One of the most common behaviors of overcontrol is compulsive rumination. Compulsive rumination on its surface looks like excessive worrying, or “thinking something to death”. Compulsive rumination can feel like driving a mental train down a very familiar track of thoughts, attempting to predict future events or problems, attempting to solve every possible problem.

Compulsive rumination can be hard to recognize because we might believe it is helpful problem solving, even though we never arrive on a solution that fits exactly right or our anxiety persists no matter how much we think about it. We might believe our compulsive rumination is using good rational coping skills, and it might moderately reduce some anxiety, but in order to keep anxiety at bay we have to keep ruminating.

Compulsive rumination can make our brains feel hijacked, taken over by constant thinking and analyzing, problem solving, and planning. When we use exposure therapy to reduce compulsive rumination, people often feel like their mind is free to pay attention to the things they want to, spend time on creative projects, and be mindful of their relationships. Exposure work creates mental space!

Sometimes we might feel like compulsive rumination is out of our control, like we’re just stuck worrying all the time, but the good news is it is something we can build skills to regulate. Just like mindfulness practices that guide us to pull our attention away from distractions and onto a specific target, we can skillfully interrupt compulsive rumination and put our attention to the present moment and present discomfort that the rumination is trying to solve.

Compulsive Rumination

 OCD Rumination: How to Stop

When we redirect our attention to the present moment, to the present emotions and sensations of discomfort we’re experiencing, we’re engaging in an exposure exercise. When we practice these exercises consistently over time, our mind and body acclimate to emotional activation so we don’t need overcontrol behaviors, like compulsive rumination, to manage.

Exposure work can be really hard because it centers on fully facing the things that activate our painful emotions (like fear) head on, and immersing ourselves completely and wholly into that emotional activation.  Kinda like a cold plunge for our brain.

While exposure work is something all of us do anytime we’re getting out of our comfort zone, focused intensive exposure work will really help change habits and behaviors including compulsive rumination. Exposure work is emotionally activating by design, so it’s helpful and important to do this work with help and support and therapy can be a great place to get this.

In therapy we collaborate on exposure targets and plan exposure exercises together. I support folx in monitoring progress to goals, trouble shooting any issues that arise and celebrating milestones. We also have space in therapy where folx can fully feel, express, and move through painful emotions that come up with exposure work. Check out my website if you want to learn more about exposure therapy.

The bottom line is this: you don’t have to settle for an overwhelmed busy brain in order to not feel anxious. 

Want to start therapy today?? Book an appointment to work with me here! 

I offer DBT, EMDR, and other trauma focused therapy to help calm emotional overwhelm and process trauma. You can also listen to my podcast, Initiated Survivor, anywhere you hear podcasts. Follow me on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Youtube to get awesome survivor content. 

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