Containment and Emotional Flooding: How to Stay With What Overwhelms You

Written by Roland Bal

When you're exposed to a situation or a period in your life that overwhelms you, you're unable to contain the emotions that accompany that experience. What happens then is that the emotion starts to overflow — and that overflowing can be seen as a form of dissociation.

The Layers of Dissociation

You're unable to stay in the body, and the energy moves up into the head — giving rise to excessive thoughts of guilt, blame, shame, self-righteousness, self-defeat, pride, and so on.

What happens when those thoughts and the accompanying overwhelming emotion stay in place is that they slowly dissociate further into addictive patterns of substance abuse or behavioral addictions — and, in some cases, into depression, numbness, and chronic pains.

These are layers of dissociation, stacked one on top of the other. Each layer is a way the system has found to manage what could not be contained underneath.

What Containment Actually Is

The way to start to reverse this process and begin your healing journey is to build up enough containment again to stay with what is — to be able to move through those overwhelming emotions and give completion to them.

Giving containment to what you still hold in your body is a process. It's a continuous going in and out: getting slightly overwhelmed, taking a step back, reassessing, renegotiating, and then again going back in to feel what needs to be worked on.

Containment is not a state you arrive at. It is a process — going in, getting close to what's overwhelming, stepping back, and going in again. Each pass widens what you can hold.

Working Backwards Through the Layers

Let's put that into a concrete example.

Say I had a dad who was abusive — I had to man up, don't cry, I was belittled. Out of feeling overwhelmed by that constant pressure, as a kid I wasn't able to push back. I wasn't able to speak out because that would have been met with abuse. So my survival strategy was to either escape through flight, or to fawn — please and appease my father.

At the core I have anger. As a coping strategy I have anxiety. Later on in my adult life, I might work too much, lose myself in being glued to the internet, and eventually I get depressed, I get burned out, I need medication, I get chronic pains. You see how there are levels of dissociation that happen over time.

Starting With the Top Layer

How would you start to work through this? You have to realise that the depression is a way of managing the underlying symptoms. The depression is the stuck energy — so you have to start there.

When you realise that depression is keeping the lid on all the other emotions, then you give attention to that — but without dwelling in the depression, without giving too much attention to the chronic pain or trying to overcome it. Stay. The moment you start to listen to depression as it is, being aware that there are different levels just beneath it, some of that energy of depression can start to move into awareness.

As your awareness starts to grow — or your level of containment starts to grow — you start to feel the underlying layers just beneath. Some of that anxiety might come back to you. Some of the memories that you've tried to keep down through excessive work or through losing yourself in a particular addiction start to come back.

You'll have to be careful there, because the moment you start to feel your anxiety again, that might overwhelm you and push you back into feeling depressed. So you want to go carefully back and forth between feeling numb, dissociated, depressed — and then back again into feeling some of that anxiety. As you do that back and forth, you start to build up more containment.

Containment vs. Release

Containment is a process of building more resilience by carefully going into the feelings, emotions, and sensations that are held in the body.

At some point, as you have a greater capacity to stay with the anxiety without having to lose yourself in addictive behaviours or depression, your window of tolerance — your resilience, your containment — starts to grow. The top layers start to become less important. There's less need to try to overcome them or wish them to be different. And with that, your excessive thoughts of guilt, blame, shame, self-reproach, self-righteousness, revenge, or self-defeat start to diminish, as you start to contain more of yourself.

Through containment, you're actually emotionally processing what is held in the body. And processing is not release. Very often there's the intention to want to release a particular emotion through shouting or crying or stomping your feet. But if there isn't enough understanding underneath, you can release what you want — and it doesn't give resilience. It doesn't give containment.

You might even become more emotionally unstable, because you get into a pattern of build-up and release, constantly — and that pattern can be addictive in itself.

The Window of Tolerance Grows

In the example above, anxiety might still be a superficial layer. As you dig deeper and build more containment, you might notice that at a deeper, core level there is the repressed anger you weren't able to express as a child — because that would have been met with further abuse, with repercussions.

So again you repeat this process, moving between the anxiety and the anger. The anxiety becomes a safer place than meeting the anger, because the anger might overwhelm you — you might think you will implode or explode if you start to access it, because it's been held inside for so long.

The work, then, is integration. Transformation. Reabsorbing the energy that is still invested in the dissociation, in the emotions — and bringing that back into awareness, allowing it to flow.