Making Space for Difficult Emotions

How to help our exiles contain and embody what feels overwhelming

Many of the parts we call exiles struggle not because emotions are bad, but because those emotions have nowhere to go.
When a feeling arrives all at once—anxiety, grief, fear—it can overwhelm the body, and the exile experiences this as danger.

In those moments, the impulse is often to get rid of the feeling: distract, analyze, fix, or reassure.
But exiles don’t need emotions to disappear.
They need help containing them.

Emotions as Physical Experiences

Difficult emotions are not abstract.
They show up in the body as sensations: tightness in the chest, pressure in the throat, heat, tingling, a surge of energy.

Anxiety, in particular, is often experienced as a biological event—something like cortisol flooding the system. The heart rate increases, breathing becomes shallow, and the sensation may localize in one area, such as the chest or hands.

When all of that intensity is concentrated in a small area, the nervous system reads it as too much.

The work, then, is not to suppress the emotion, but to widen the container.

Diffusing Instead of Eliminating

In session, I often guide clients through a simple somatic experiment:

We start by noticing where the difficult sensation lives most strongly.
Then, very gently, we invite the body to spread that sensation out—perhaps into the arms, the hands, or the thighs.

The goal is not relief.
It is distribution.

By allowing the sensation to occupy more physical space, the intensity softens. The exile no longer has to carry the entire emotional load in one place. Often, even a very small shift—half a percent more capacity—is enough to signal safety to the nervous system.

Clients frequently report a lighter feeling in the chest or a slightly increased ability to stay present with the emotion.

This matters.

Because exiles are not strengthened by being flooded.
They are strengthened by discovering, slowly, that they can survive feeling.

Creating a Safer Home for the Exile

When we help emotions move through the body instead of getting stuck, we are doing something essential:
we are creating a safer home for our exiles.

Instead of forcing them to endure everything at once, we show them that the body can help, that support exists internally, and that feelings do not have to be catastrophic to be real.

Over time, this builds emotional capacity.
Not by pushing harder, but by softening the edges.

A Subtle but Important Shift

What I see again and again is that once an exile feels this kind of embodied support, their urgency eases.
They don’t need the emotion to disappear.
They just need to know they are not alone with it.

And as capacity grows, avoidance decreases—not because it’s forced, but because the body learns it can hold more than it once could.

This is how embodiment becomes healing.

Not by mastering emotions,
but by making room for them.