Emotions - It's all in the Body!

Feeling It All: Emotional Regulation, Suppression, and Flooding

Emotional intelligence is often reduced to a catchphrase—"just regulate your emotions"—as if it's a switch we can flip. But what does it really mean to regulate emotions? And what happens when we can’t—or when we suppress instead? In this blog, we will unpack emotional regulation, suppression, and flooding.

Emotional Regulation: Not Control, But Connection

Emotional regulation refers to our ability to experience emotions without becoming overwhelmed while expressing them in congruent and adaptive ways. It’s less about controlling emotion and more about maintaining coherence between body, brain, and environment.

From a somatic perspective, regulation begins in the body. When our nervous system is within its "window of tolerance" (Siegel, 1999), we can feel emotions without becoming dysregulated. This is the foundation of somatic experiencing, a body-based therapy developed by Peter Levine.

Our prefrontal cortex or “our thinking brain” plays a key role in top-down regulation—helping us reflect, reappraise, and contextualize emotions. But when the limbic system (the emotional brain), especially the amygdala (the fear centre), activates, our thinking brain is turned off. Chronic stress or early trauma can lead to amygdala hyperactivity and under-functioning of our prefrontal cortex, which impairs our ability to regulate (van der Kolk, 2014).

Our capacity for emotional regulation is deeply shaped by early caregiving. Secure attachment fosters co-regulation in infancy, helping children internalize self-soothing skills. Without this, individuals may develop coping strategies, which manifest later as difficulty tolerating or expressing emotion (Schore, 2003).

Emotional Suppression: The High Cost of Shutting Down

Emotional suppression is the conscious or unconscious inhibition of emotional expression. It might feel like regulation on the outside—but inside, it's a very different process.

Suppression is often a survival adaptation, children learn to mute emotions to maintain proximity to caregivers, especially if those caregivers are emotionally unavailable or punitive (Fonagy & Target, 2002).

Neurobiologically, suppression relies heavily on top-down control, but at a cost. Research by Gross and John (2003) shows that habitual suppressors have higher sympathetic arousal (heart rate, blood pressure) and lower well-being. The body feels the stress of unexpressed emotion even if the mind doesn’t acknowledge it.

Somatically, suppression creates a dampening of aliveness. The body constricts to hold in emotion—tight jaw, shallow breath, frozen posture. Over time, this can lead to chronic tension, fatigue, and disconnection from the felt sense, or interoception.

Emotional Flooding: When It’s Too Much, Too Fast

Emotional flooding is the opposite extreme—when emotion overwhelms the system. It can be triggered by conflict, trauma reminders, or relational stress. In couples therapy, John Gottman describes flooding as a state where a partner becomes physiologically overwhelmed and unable to respond constructively.

From a neurobiological perspective, flooding is marked by sympathetic nervous system activation—fight/flight—or even dorsal vagal shutdown—freeze or collapse. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis is activated, cortisol floods the system, and the brain goes into survival mode.

In attachment terms, flooding often results from unresolved attachment trauma, where present triggers awaken old relational wounds. A partner's anger might feel like parental abandonment, or a colleague’s criticism might echo childhood shame. The nervous system can’t distinguish past from present when it's flooded.

Somatically, flooding is not about being "too sensitive"—it’s about a nervous system struggling to metabolize intensity. Regulation here requires bottom-up interventions like grounding, somatic therapy, movement, breathwork, and attuned presence—not just cognitive reframing.

Integration: Toward Embodied Emotional Resilience

Healing emotional dysregulation isn’t about suppressing or avoiding emotion—it’s about building capacity to feel safely. Whether your system leans toward suppression or flooding, the work is the same: expanding the window of tolerance.

Somatic practices like body scanning, vagal toning, pendulation, titration, movement and touch can reconnect you to your embodied self and help create a felt sense of safety.
Somatic awareness helps us to name and connect with what's happening in our body and the emotions we are experiencing, helping us to embody our experiences.
Relational healing—whether through therapy or secure relationships—supports co-regulation and internal safety.

As trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk writes:

“The body keeps the score. If the memory of trauma is encoded in the viscera, in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching sensations... then talking about it is only part of the solution.”

True regulation means welcoming our emotional life back into the body, not as a problem to solve, but a rhythm like a wave to move with.

• Siegel, D. J. (1999). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are.

• Levine, P. A. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness.

• van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score.

• Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

• Schore, A. N. (2003). Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self.

• Fonagy, P., & Target, M. (2002). Early intervention and the development of self-regulation. Psychoanalytic Inquiry.

• Gottman, J. M., & Gottman, J. S. (1999). The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.