Experiencing stress, trauma, anxiety or interpersonal conflicts can bring up a mix of intense emotions, leaving you feeling overwhelmed or “flooded” and unable to think straight or make clear decisions. These overwhelming feelings can then lead to withdrawing from others, feeling irritable, feeling paralyzed in making decisions, doom scrolling, behaving in a reactive way that you may feel regret or shame about later. While these emotions can feel all-consuming, they are manageable through learning emotion regulation skills. In working with your therapist, you can learn to manage your emotions by understanding their function, practicing skills to manage them in-the-moment, and implementing long-term strategies to maintain your emotional well-being. 

You don’t need to wait until things feel untenable to start your therapy journey. People can benefit from therapy even when they’re not in a crisis. A sign that you might benefit from therapy is if your emotions feel like “too much.” One good question to ask yourself is “Do I have my feelings and feel my emotions? Or do my feelings and emotions have me?”  Do you find that you have difficulty maintaining relationships, are frequently irritabile in your daily life, spend too much time doom-scrolling, drop activities you enjoy because you don’t feel up to them, have difficulty with sleep (either sleeping too much or not enough)? Do you quickly feel abandoned by other people or worry that they are abandoning you? That you are here reading this means you are curious and open to self-reflection. Therapy is the perfect partner to your own self-reflection and a great next step in learning how to regulate your emotions to work on your behalf instead of against you.