In trauma therapy, when we talk about an inside threat, we are talking about threats that emerge from the body, like having gone through cancer or schizophrenia, something that feels traumatizing because it’s happening inside of us.
But there is another inside threat that doesn’t get named nearly enough, and that is when one feels threatened by emotion itself.
It’s not a fear of what is happening to you, it’s the fear of what is happening inside of you. When feelings start to move.
So let’s talk about what this actually looks like.
Emotion is a strong internal experience. For someone with enough internal structure and containment, the emotion will rise and then it will pass. I tell my students and my clients: this is an emotion. It starts, it goes up, it peaks, it comes back down. It ends.
But if you never got that emotional scaffolding, then you don’t know how to interpret what you’re sensing, understand there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the things that you can do to help support that process.
Instead, the person tends to become aware of the emotion when it’s halfway up to the peak, and it feels frightening because it’s surprising, and they have learned that expressing their emotions can have significant social consequences.
Like any internal dynamic that’s not optimal, this started as an adaptation, a necessary way of functioning because the person didn’t have what they needed.
So if somebody never learned to feel emotions as a safe thing to feel, as soon as an emotion comes up, they experience that as danger. Which means we should avoid it.
So the fear isn’t about the content of the emotion or what the story is telling me. It’s about the felt sense of the physical force of the emotion. It’s the actual sensation arising in the person that they are fearful of.
And that fear of the emotion will change the story this person tells versus somebody who isn’t fearful of emotion. And this fear of the emotion is going to shape the story that the person will tell of their life as much as the events will shape that story.
So I’m going to give you examples of what this looks like.
I see this a lot in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy trainings that I organize in the Denver area. In this modality, you can start by processing the paper cut you had last week and then wind up all the way over to being abandoned by your mom. The depth is real in this modality. So even seasoned clinicians—who are often the ones taking this training—will discover that they’re not as comfortable with emotions as they thought they were. They start to bump into their own dissociation and dysregulation when those big, powerful waves start to move inside.
So what does that look like? You’re cruising along, you’re processing something, and then all of a sudden you hit something inside. And this wave comes over you and you start floating away, or you lose your words, or you pop out of the experience and start intellectualizing. Or maybe something flies out of their mouth like “I don’t do shame.” They’re trying to be a good practice client, but try as they might, they pop out of the experience and start switching into all these different defensive strategies.
That is in no way voluntary. That skipping is not intentional. And it’s not chaotic—it’s logical in terms of how the instinct functions. That practice client is desperately holding onto their sense of sanity when they do that, and it’s a sign that emotion is being registered as a threat in the system.
So we also see this in the broad culture. If you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, well, that sounds like a lot of people I know—or yourself—that’s correct. There are a certain narrow handful of emotions that we can experience culturally that are sanctioned and okay, and then there are others that are embarrassing or shameful to feel. So anytime those embarrassing or shameful emotions come up, we funnel all of that into anxiety.
I happen to live in Colorado, and we have a ton of triathletes and mountain sports people. And many of them will endorse that part of the reason they got into that sport is because it’s easier to manage their emotions by burning off all of their energy on the mountain than it is to actually feel the feeling—of which they don’t really know what to do with.
So I’m going to be honest about where this shows up for me. I’m pretty comfortable with my anger with certain people. It’s not explosive. I can get a little edgy, but I’ll be direct about what it is that I want and need with people that I know. But with people that I don’t know, I can switch into a defensive part where I’m actually angry, but instead of feeling anger, I feel confused and a little dissociated.
So what that means is I feel threatened by anger in certain contexts—my own anger. So when someone does something that my system perceives as unjust, instead of feeling the anger, my breath stops, I freeze. I try to make it about me and not them. I try to figure out how I caused them to act that way, instead of having a clean, clear, direct experience of: I didn’t like that they did that. Now I feel angry. What am I going to do about this situation?
So these are just small signs that I feel threatened by anger coming up inside of me in certain contexts. The emotion itself is activating defense mechanisms before I’m even aware that I am feeling that emotion.
So avoiding emotion in this way, for these reasons, is not irrational. It’s highly adaptive. It either worked at some point, or it continues to work in a culture that doesn’t do very well with a wide variety of emotions.
But the downside—and the reason we ought to feel incentivized to develop a broad range of emotions—is that without that broad range, I’m not functioning with as much clarity as I could have. Because when you cannot feel the full texture of an emotion, and even the intensity of it, you’re operating with limited information. It tells you what’s important to you, what you want, and what’s been violated. A person who is always bracing against emotion is operating with limited data. We’re not fully in reality without our emotions.
So the work here isn’t just to blow up your emotions, have the biggest emotions you can possibly find, push the emotion. We’re not doing that. What we are doing is building up the banks of the river. We’re creating the container so that I can hold the emotion in myself long enough for it to fully process—beginning, middle, and end—without dissociating, which is kind of like blowing the banks of the river, or exploding, or being caught off guard that there’s even an emotion there. I want to create a sturdy enough container that orients toward and includes emotion intentionally, so that I am operating with all of the data.
So if emotion never became something that you experienced, but just something that you chronically brace against or check out from—then you’re missing out on a really huge, helpful part of life. Not to mention, when we brace against negative emotions, we tend to also brace against positive emotions, and so you’re missing out on a lot of pleasure.
