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 onceā€”anxiety, grief, fearā€”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 donā€™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 eventā€”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 sy...
