Yesterday morning, my daughter and I were running late to school. Again. The crosswalk light was blinking as we approached the busy intersection near our home in Los Angeles, and she started to dart across the street. “I don’t want to be late!” she yelled over her shoulder. My body reacted before my brain caught up. My heart lurched, my breath caught, and I screamed at her to stop. Not a calm, measured “please wait,” but a full-throated yell fueled by the terror of watching her run toward traffic.
She stopped. And then she yelled back at me. And then we stood there on the corner, both of us activated and angry, yelling at each other about my desire to keep her safe and her desire to make her own choices. When we finally made it across, she walked ten steps ahead of me the entire way to school, her backpack bouncing with each stomp.
I thought about a comment someone made to me years ago during a job interview. I was interviewing candidates for a care coordinator position at the practice, and one applicant told me she wanted to work for me because I seemed calm. Her current boss was always stressed, she said, and I just seemed so… steady. The comment made me laugh then, and it made me laugh again yesterday as I watched my daughter’s angry figure march away from me. Because here’s the thing: I often don’t feel calm at all. I’ve just gotten really good at looking calm on the outside.
As a therapist, I’ve spent years working on my own emotional regulation. I’ve been in therapy myself, I’ve read the books, I’ve learned how to care for my nervous system. I understand the science behind what’s happening in my body when I feel overwhelmed. And still, I yelled at my daughter at a crosswalk because I’ve been sleeping poorly for weeks, because the news cycle has been relentless and terrifying, because images of what’s happening in the country keep playing in my head when I’m trying to fall asleep. My nervous system has been running on fumes, and it showed up in that moment as me screaming at my kid and her screaming back.
I grew up in a family where outward expressions of difficult emotions were generally not welcome. As an Iranian American, I think some of this was cultural. Joy and loud raucous laughter were hallmarks of my culture, but crying, anger, and fear were not as welcome. My immigrant parents also worked tirelessly to financially support our family, but that left a dearth in emotional support. I learned to suppress my feelings, to feel them in isolation, and to keep them separate from the rest of my life. As a child, when my emotions felt big and overwhelming, I was sent to my room until my feelings had run their course.
So I learned early how to look calm even when I wasn’t. I learned to keep the turmoil internal, to present a collected exterior while everything inside felt chaotic. It’s a skill that has served me in many ways. It helped me succeed professionally and navigate difficult situations with composure. But it also meant that for a long time, I didn’t know how to actually be calm, only how to appear that way.
As an adult, I have established a new relationship with my emotions. I have learned to feel them, to hold them, and to honor them. To share them with my loved ones and to seek help processing them when I need it. But sometimes I am still overwhelmed. Sometimes I still feel out of control. Sometimes the internal dysregulation that I’ve gotten so good at hiding comes spilling out in a yell at a crosswalk. And when those moments hit, I hate how powerless I feel. But I have also learned to offer myself compassion and to use hard-earned skills to help my nervous system and regulate my feelings.
What Does It Mean to Feel “Out of Control,” and What Is Nervous System Dysregulation?
Have you ever opened a piece of mail and felt your heart start pounding before you even finished reading it? Maybe it’s a letter from the tax board, a notice from your child’s school, or an email from your boss with an unclear subject line. Your hands get cold, your stomach drops, and suddenly your mind is racing through worst-case scenarios. You know, rationally, that this is probably something you can handle. But your body doesn’t care what you know rationally. Your body has already decided this is a crisis.
This is what nervous system dysregulation feels like in the moment. During these times of so much uncertainty, feeling out of control is something we’ve all experienced at some point. That feeling is your nervous system shifting states, leaning into survival physiology strongly enough that your thoughts, emotions, and behavior start organizing themselves around getting through the moment rather than reflecting, choosing, and staying connected. The simplest way to understand dysregulation is as reduced flexibility.
When you’re regulated, you can mobilize when something needs your attention and then come back down when it passes. You get the letter, you feel a little flutter of worry, you set a reminder to look through your files when you have time later in the day, and you move on. When you’re dysregulated, your nervous system has less flexibility, so it’s harder to move out of the state you’re in. You might activate quickly, stay activated longer than you want to, or drop into shutdown, and it can take more time and support to come back to baseline. That letter sits in your mind for hours. You replay tasks, scan for what you might have done wrong, and check for any deadlines you may have missed.
A big part of why this happens is that emotional regulation depends on coordination between the body and the brain. The parts of your brain that support attention and emotional balance are constantly working with your body’s automatic systems, the ones that regulate heart rate, breathing, and arousal. Your brain is continuously taking in those signals and making a rapid assessment about whether you are safe or unsafe. That assessment shapes what emotions show up and how intense they feel. So if your heart is racing, your breath is shallow, and your muscles are braced, your brain tends to read that as threat even when, cognitively, you know you’re okay. You can feel emotionally unsafe in a perfectly safe room because your body is sending danger signals.
For some people, feeling out of control looks like hyperarousal: urgency, agitation, panic, irritation, racing thoughts, insomnia, and a body that feels activated and charged. For others, it looks like hypoarousal: numbness, fog, shutdown, dissociation, or derealization. Sometimes after prolonged periods of hyperarousal, the system shifts into hypoarousal. Your body runs out of the capacity to stay activated, so it starts to shut down instead.
Even though these states can appear opposite (one feels like too much energy, the other like no energy at all), they often reflect the same underlying issue, and sometimes they can happen simultaneously. In both cases, your system is struggling to stay in a flexible middle state where you can feel your feelings, think clearly, and respond rather than react.
How Does the Nervous System Work, and Why Does It Shape Your Emotions So Quickly?
I usually get cues from my body before I understand what’s happening emotionally. When I walk into a networking event or step into an unfamiliar setting for the first time, my chest tightens. My palms get sweaty. My breathing gets shallow. These physical sensations arrive before I’ve consciously thought, “I’m nervous.” My body knows first, and then my brain catches up and puts words to it.
One reason emotions can change so fast is that your nervous system is built to respond before conscious thought has time to catch up. It is continuously taking in cues from your environment and from inside your body, and it adjusts your level of arousal in real time. That shift is affected by automatic changes in heart rate, breath depth, muscle tension, digestion, and alertness, and once those settings change, your emotional experience changes with them. You may find yourself focusing more narrowly, feeling more urgency, or losing access to patience and perspective, and it can seem like your mood shifted out of nowhere when, in reality, your body has already moved into a different physiological state.
This process is called interoception, the brain’s ability to sense what is happening inside you. The brain is constantly tracking internal signals such as temperature, pain, itch, muscle tension, gut sensations, hunger, thirst, and breath-related sensations, and those signals contribute to how you feel emotionally. This is why a physical change, like a tight chest or the feeling of not being able to get a full breath, can change what a moment feels like before you have words for why. Your thoughts typically follow, working to explain the emotional state after it has already begun.
I remember going grocery shopping during the early days of the pandemic. I was terrified of getting sick. I wore a ski mask, gloves, the whole thing. At some point while I was navigating the aisles, I smelled something terrible: really bad body odor. It took me a moment to realize it was me. My body had been in a state of fear for weeks, and the grocery store trip was my tipping point. I was literally sweating through my clothes from the stress, but I hadn’t consciously registered how scared I was until my nose told me.
Over time, this kind of prolonged stress can become more pronounced. Research on allostasis explains how the body maintains stability by adapting to demands, which is protective in the short term, but costly when it happens too often or for too long. When stress responses are frequent, prolonged, or slow to shut off, the baseline can shift. This cumulative cost is called allostatic load, which is the wear and tear that builds when our stress systems continuously run overtime. With higher allostatic load, it takes less to tip into overwhelm or shutdown because your system has less capacity to recover.
I’ve noticed this so clearly since becoming a parent. I am constantly trying to keep my head above water, managing so many things at once, including the kids’ schedules, work deadlines, the household, the business, and my own needs, frequently somewhere at the bottom of the list. I think I’m doing fine, and then suddenly I’m really not. It takes so much less now to push me over the edge into dysregulation than it used to. A letter from the tax board would have been annoying fifteen years ago. Now it can send me spiraling. My system doesn’t have the same buffer it used to have because I’ve been running on a higher baseline of stress for years.
Why Can You Know You’re Safe, but Still Feel Unsafe in Your Body?
We were late a lot when I was growing up. I remember the feeling of going to the office to get a pass to class, and the way the school secretary would look at me, reminding me to leave the house earlier the next time. I remember walking into class after everyone was already settled, the teacher pausing mid-sentence, all those eyes turning toward me. The shame of it and the quiet scolding. The sense that I had done something wrong and let everyone down. I hated it, and I promised myself that when I had children, I would get them to school on time.
And yet here I am, barely making the second bell most mornings. Last year, we got a letter from the school outlining our frequent tardiness. Reading that letter, I felt that same old shame wash over me, like I was eight years old again, walking in late, disappointing everyone. I don’t want my kids to feel what I felt. I don’t want them to be scolded or embarrassed the way I was.
So when we’re running late, and my daughter wants to dash across a blinking crosswalk light, my nervous system doesn’t just respond to the immediate danger of traffic. It’s also responding to the threat of being late, which my body learned decades ago means shame and trouble. I know, rationally, that being a few minutes late to elementary school is not a crisis. I know the teacher won’t humiliate my daughter the way I felt humiliated. But my body doesn’t know that. My body is operating from old programming that says being late is dangerous.
This is what it means to know you’re safe but still feel unsafe in your body. While knowing you’re safe is a conclusion you can reach with your thinking mind, feeling safe is a state your nervous system has to learn and recognize in real time through new experiences and relationships. Knowing you’re safe, but feeling unsafe in the body happens when the nervous system is operating from prior learning that has not fully updated or processed in new situations.
Much of how we respond to threats comes from learned connections. When something frightening, humiliating, chaotic, or overwhelming happens, the nervous system links that experience to the cues present at the time: the setting, the relationship dynamics, and specific sensory details. Later, a cue that resembles that earlier moment can pull up a stress response quickly, even if you can clearly see that you are not in danger. Over time, those reactions can also spread outward. The nervous system can begin responding not only to the original cue, but to other cues that are similar, which is part of why triggers can feel broader than the initial event. Research on fear learning shows that these responses are not decisions but conditioned patterns that become easier to trigger once established.
For me, it’s not just about being late anymore. It’s about disappointing people, about not meeting expectations, about the fear that I’m failing my kids the way I felt failed as a child. The trigger has spread.
Many people expect that once they understand what happened or work through an experience, the old reaction should disappear. I understand why I have this response to lateness. I’ve worked on it in therapy. I know where it comes from. And still, when we’re running late, my body floods with panic. That’s because what actually happens in healing isn’t that the old pattern disappears, but that your nervous system learns a new pattern that competes with the old one, essentially telling your body that something that used to signal danger is now safe. That new learning can be stronger in some contexts than others, which is why a trigger can feel completely manageable in one setting and intense in another.
I’ve noticed this with relationships, too. With some people, it feels easier to have difficult conversations, to disappoint someone, to make a mistake. Those relationships feel more established, more secure. In other relationships, either because we’ve struggled before or because they’re not as solidified yet, taking too long to respond to an invite or having a joke land the wrong way can trigger that old fear of disappointing someone, of not being good enough, of being the problem. The same trigger: potential disapproval, but my system’s response depends on the context and the relationship.
Most important to note is that the original pattern does not completely go away, which is why old reactions can resurface when your capacity for stress is lowered through exhaustion, overwhelm, conflict, or transition. As we discussed earlier, when the body’s and mind’s systems are strained, there is less flexibility and less access to the newer, calmer pathway. This is why it is said that healing is nonlinear: these patterns tend to reappear in cycles, and progress looks more like shorter recoveries, fewer spirals, and a wider range of situations where you can stay present, rather than a permanent disappearance of triggers.
We do the work, we improve, we learn new patterns. And then we take a step backwards or sideways, and we do the same work again, and we keep learning. It’s not that we undo our progress, but that we are a work in progress. The goal isn’t to never get triggered, it’s to recognize it faster, to have more tools to work with it, and to be gentler with ourselves when it happens.
What Can Contribute to Nervous System Dysregulation Over Time?
Our nervous systems start learning what feels safe and what feels threatening from the moment we are born. Research on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) shows that ongoing early stress, like abuse, neglect, chaos at home, or witnessing violence, actually changes how the stress response system develops. Children who experience more of these stressors show lasting effects on how their bodies handle stress, how they manage emotions, and how they think through problems. Brain imaging studies have found that the amygdala, the part of your brain that detects threats, becomes more reactive in people who experienced childhood trauma, which means they’re more likely to read unclear situations as dangerous. In other words, stress experienced early on in life teaches the system to expect danger rather than safety.
Not all adverse experiences look like overt trauma. Sometimes it’s more subtle. Growing up in a household where certain emotions weren’t welcome, where you learned that expressing vulnerability meant being isolated or dismissed. A child who is repeatedly sent away when they’re upset learns that their emotions are problems to be managed alone, not experiences to be shared and supported through. That pattern doesn’t just disappear in adulthood. The nervous system remembers what it learned about when it’s safe to feel and when it’s not.
The kind of reactivity isn’t universal, though. Trauma creates different patterns depending on what you’ve been through. Research suggests that a single traumatic event tends to make your stress response more reactive, meaning the system gets activated more quickly and to smaller cues than it did before. But repeated or ongoing trauma typically has the opposite effect, creating a system that shuts down or goes numb instead. The nervous system adapts to the type of threat it most often faces. For some people, that means staying on high alert. For others, it means disconnecting or withdrawing. Either way, they are both survival strategies that make it more difficult to stay flexible and responsive in everyday life.
In addition to early experiences, adulthood usually brings stressors that are largely outside of our control, which can make them harder to process or resolve. Chronic illness creates ongoing physical stress that the body has to manage constantly, even when there’s no external threat. Your nervous system never gets a break because the threat is internal and persistent.
Caregiving, whether for children, aging parents, or loved ones with disabilities, means going through extended periods of stress without a whole lot of recovery time, where your needs consistently come second. There’s no clear endpoint to caregiving stress. It’s ongoing, and it compounds.
Financial insecurity keeps the stress response engaged because the threat is real and ongoing, not something you can simply calm down from. When you don’t know if you can make rent, when a letter from a creditor or tax board arrives, when you’re constantly doing the math on whether you can afford necessities, that kind of stress doesn’t resolve with a deep breath. It sits in your body until the actual circumstances change.
And systemic oppression, whether through racism, discrimination, or marginalization, adds a layer of unpredictability and threat that exists outside individual control, creating vigilance that can’t be easily turned off. When you move through the world knowing you might be perceived as a threat because of your race, ethnicity, religion, gender identity, or sexual orientation, that awareness lives in your body whether you’re thinking about it consciously or not.
These are the kind of conditions that require the nervous system to stay activated without relief, which compounds vulnerability over time. You’re not dealing with a single stressor you can resolve and move past – you’re dealing with ongoing conditions that keep your system running overtime.
And lastly, sleep affects everything. When you’re lying awake scrolling the news, when images from current events play in your head, when anxiety keeps you from falling asleep or wakes you up at 3am. The impact on your nervous system is profound. Even a few nights of poor sleep can reduce the calming signals from your vagus nerve, the main pathway that helps your body relax, and ramp up your stress response instead. When sleep problems become chronic, your nervous system loses its ability to regulate stress effectively, and your brain can’t clear out waste products the way it’s supposed to, which makes it harder to think clearly and manage your emotions.
Sleep deprivation doesn’t just make you tired; it fundamentally changes how your nervous system processes the world. You become more irritable, more reactive, quicker to snap. Things that wouldn’t normally bother you feel overwhelming. Your system doesn’t have the buffer it needs, so everything feels harder, more urgent, more threatening.
What Are the Signs of Emotional Dysregulation, and How Does It Show Up Internally vs. Externally?
We’ve already talked about how dysregulation shows up in the body through hyperarousal and hypoarousal, but those are physiological states. The question of how dysregulation appears in day-to-day life is about patterns of behavior and internal experiences that signal your nervous system is struggling to maintain flexibility.
Research distinguishes between two broad categories of symptoms: internalizing and externalizing. Internalizing behaviors are when distress turns inward. This looks like withdrawal, avoidance, anxiety, depression, or shutting down. People who internalize tend to go quiet when overwhelmed, pull back from relationships, or experience emotional numbing. They might spend hours ruminating or worrying, but show little outward signs of distress. From the outside, they might appear fine, even calm. But internally, they’re struggling just as much as someone whose distress is more visible.
This is important to understand because its easier for internalizing dysregulation to go unnoticed and unvalidated. When you’re not “causing problems” for others, when you’re not yelling or acting out, people assume you’re okay. You might even get praised for being so calm and collected. But staying quiet and withdrawn when you’re falling apart inside is still dysregulation. It’s just harder to see.
Somatic symptoms are more likely to show up in people who internalize, which makes sense given that the distress has no outward expression. Headaches, stomachaches, chronic tension, unexplained pain, digestive issues, or chronic fatigue can all be signs that your body is carrying what isn’t being expressed emotionally. I see this a lot at my practice. Clients come in for physical symptoms that don’t have a clear medical cause, and as we work together, we discover that their body has been holding stress and emotion that they haven’t had space or permission to express in other ways.
Externalizing behaviors, on the other hand, are when distress moves outward. This includes aggression, impulsivity, rule-breaking, delinquency, substance use, being argumentative, or acting out. Externalizers are more likely to yell, slam doors, say things they regret, or make impulsive decisions without thinking through consequences. This type of dysregulation is more visible, more disruptive to others, and typically gets more attention and response.
And while both patterns demonstrate challenges in managing how intensely emotions are felt and expressed, research shows that internalizing behaviors are more strongly associated with anxiety and depression, while externalizing behaviors predict aggression and conduct problems.
And here’s what’s crucial to understand: most people aren’t purely one or the other. You can show both patterns depending on context, and in fact, many people do. You might internalize at work, staying silent and pushing down frustration, maintaining that professional exterior even when you’re struggling. You show up on time, you meet your deadlines, you don’t let anyone see that you’re barely holding it together. But then you get home, where it feels safer to let the pressure out, and suddenly you’re snapping at your partner or kids over small things. The frustration that’s been building all day spills over in the one place where you feel you can finally let your guard down.
Or it can go the other way. You might externalize at work, getting short with colleagues, being irritable in meetings, having less patience for mistakes, because work feels like a place where you have to fight for respect or recognition. But at home, where the stakes feel higher, where you’re terrified of damaging the relationships that matter most, you shut down instead. You withdraw, you go quiet, you handle everything alone rather than risk conflict with the people you love.
The context matters. The relationship matters. Your history with a person or setting shapes which pattern emerges. And understanding your own pattern, or patterns, can help you recognize when you’re dysregulated and what you might need in that moment.
Either way, research shows the physiological impact is real. Heart rate variability (HRV), which is effectively a measure of how adaptable your nervous system is, gets reduced during dysregulation regardless of how it’s expressed. HRV measures the variation in time between heartbeats. When your system is flexible and regulated, there’s healthy variation. When you’re stuck in fight, flight, or freeze, that variation decreases. Your heart beats in a more rigid pattern because your nervous system has less capacity to adapt. Whether you’re internalizing or externalizing, your body is in the same state of reduced flexibility.
We’re talking about this because recognizing your own pattern can help you find regulation strategies that work for you. Someone who externalizes might need tools that help them slow down and create space before reacting, while someone who internalizes might need support moving the distress outward, whether that’s through physical movement, creative expression, or learning to speak up and share what they’re feeling with safe people.
What Actually Helps You Emotionally Regulate? Nervous System-Soothing Tools for In-the-Moment Dysregulation AND Practices That Strengthen Regulation Over Time
The reason regulation strategies work isn’t because they distract you from distress or help you think differently about a situation. They work because they directly shift your nervous system’s state. This is what polyvagal theory explains. The vagus nerve, which runs from your brainstem through your face, throat, heart, and digestive system, acts as a brake on your stress response. When vagal tone is high, your system can regulate itself more effectively. When it’s low, you’re more vulnerable to getting stuck in activation or shutdown. The techniques that help in the moment are the ones that stimulate the vagus nerve and signal safety to your body.
In-the-Moment Tools
Cold water to the face is one of the fastest strategies for resetting the nervous system. Research shows that applying cold water for 5 to 35 seconds triggers the diving reflex, a parasympathetic response that slows your heart rate and shifts you out of fight or flight within seconds. It’s not a long-term solution, but it works when you need your system to shift quickly.
Breathing exercises, particularly ones with long exhales, work through a similar mechanism. Slow diaphragmatic breathing activates vagal pathways and increases parasympathetic activity, which is why a 30 day practice of slow paced breathing has been shown to increase overnight cardiac vagal activity. The exhale is what matters most because it directly stimulates the vagus nerve. When I’m lying in bed unable to sleep because my mind won’t stop, I focus on making my exhale twice as long as my inhale. Four counts in, eight counts out. It doesn’t solve whatever I’m worried about, but it helps my body calm down enough that I can actually rest.
Humming, singing, or gargling might seem odd, but these actions activate the vagus nerve through vibrations in the throat. One study on singing found that it functions as “guided breathing” and activates the vagal pump that relaxes the singer. Even laughter has been shown to improve heart rate variability after just seven sessions of laughter yoga over three weeks. These might not be the tools you reach for in a crisis, but they’re surprisingly effective for shifting your state when you have the space to use them.
Longer-Term Practices
Longer term regulation relies on learning to work with your nervous system rather than against it. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is built around this idea. DBT includes four skill modules: mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness, and research shows that each module independently improves emotion regulation. What’s particularly useful about DBT is that it teaches you how to tolerate distress without making it worse. Distress tolerance skills like putting ice water on your face, running up stairs, or using half smiling (a technique based on research showing that facial expression influences emotion) help block the impulse to act on destructive urges when arousal is high. The goal of DBT is learning to tolerate the arousal while acting to reduce it, which is the dialectic DBT is named for.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is another powerful approach, particularly for trauma-related dysregulation. EMDR uses bilateral stimulation, typically eye movements, along with focused attention on traumatic memories to help the brain reprocess those experiences. The theory is that trauma memories get stuck in an unprocessed state, and the bilateral stimulation helps the brain integrate them in a way that reduces their emotional charge. Research shows that EMDR is effective for PTSD and trauma symptoms, and it works by helping your nervous system update its threat detection system. When a memory is reprocessed, your body learns that the threat is in the past, not the present, which reduces the intensity of triggers over time.
What both DBT and EMDR share is that they help you build capacity to stay present with difficult emotions and experiences rather than getting overwhelmed or shutting down. They teach your nervous system that you can handle distress, that you have tools, that you’re not alone in it.
Regulation Happens in Relationship
But one of the most consistent findings across research is that regulation happens in relationship with others. Attachment theory explains that when caregivers respond consistently and sensitively, children develop secure attachment, which establishes the foundation for adaptive emotion regulation. Insecure attachment, on the other hand, predicts both internalizing and externalizing symptoms because the nervous system never learned how to use connection as a resource.
And this holds just as true in adulthood. We don’t regulate in isolation. We regulate in connection with other people whose nervous systems help anchor ours. This is called co-regulation, and it’s one of the most powerful tools we have. When you’re dysregulated and someone you trust stays calm and present with you, their regulated nervous system literally helps regulate yours. Their steady breathing, their calm tone, their physical presence sends safety signals to your body that you might not be able to generate on your own in that moment.
This is why therapy works, and not just because of the specific techniques or interventions. The therapeutic relationship itself becomes a secure base where you can practice new ways of relating and regulating. Research shows that securely attached therapists are better able to form positive therapeutic alliances and cope with distressed clients, which suggests that the therapist’s own regulation matters too. In therapy, you’re not just learning skills. You’re experiencing what it feels like to be held in your distress by someone who doesn’t get overwhelmed by it, who doesn’t need you to be different than you are, who can stay present while you fall apart and help you find your way back.
And this extends beyond therapy. Regulation happens in friendships where you can be honest about struggling. It happens in partnerships where your person knows how to help ground you when you’re spiraling. It happens in support groups and communities where other people get it because they’ve been there too. The people who can stay regulated in the face of your dysregulation, who can offer presence without trying to fix you, who can validate your experience while also helping you find your way back to yourself, these are the relationships that heal.
What ties all of this together is that regulation isn’t about control. It’s about flexibility. The techniques that work are the ones that help your nervous system move between states rather than getting stuck in one. And that capacity builds slowly, through practice, through safe relationships, and through learning to recognize when your system needs support before it leads to overwhelm or shutdown.
Having read this article, you might recognize yourself in some of these patterns. Maybe you see how your nervous system has been shaped by your experiences, or how dysregulation shows up in your daily life. Maybe you’re realizing that the tools you’ve been using aren’t enough anymore, or that you need more support than you can give yourself right now.
That’s okay. Actually, that’s more than okay. Recognizing when you need help is itself a form of wisdom and self-awareness. Emotional regulation is hard work, and it’s not something you have to figure out alone. Therapy offers a space where you can slow down, understand your patterns, learn new tools, and, most importantly, experience the kind of co-regulation that helps your nervous system learn what safety feels like.
If you’re struggling with emotional dysregulation, whether that looks like anxiety, depression, explosive reactions, shutting down, or anything in between, we’re here. At Take Root Therapy, we offer trauma informed therapy that understands how your nervous system works and what it needs to heal. We know that regulation doesn’t happen through willpower or positive thinking. It happens through relationship, through practice, and through compassion for yourself and your story. Please reach out if you’d like to schedule a free phone consultation to see whether therapy might help. Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is admit you can’t do it alone. And you don’t have to.