Emotions are not thoughts they are physiology

One of the things I often see and hear, especially during perimenopause is, “I am feeling emotionally out of control” or “I am feeling things that I have never felt before there must be something wrong with me”. Whilst I have compassion for people feeling that they are on an emotional rollercoaster my first thought is often, what is wrong with feeling emotions? What did this person learn about emotions when they were growing up and were they allowed to have big emotions when they were a kid.

A lot of clients I have had what I call emotionally neglectful childhoods. Their parents did not foster their emotional life. They did not let them have big emotions when they were young. They were either punished physically or through isolation. So they learned that expressing emotion was not safe.

This is more common than you think.

I have sat across from people, brilliant people, some of the most self-aware clients I've worked with, who could narrate their own psychology like a well-rehearsed lecture. They have done the work. They knew exactly where the pattern came from. They could name the childhood dynamic, trace the attachment wound, explain the trigger with clinical precision. However, when the moment came, maybe being on the receiving end of criticism, silence, or a raised voice, their body did the same thing it had always done. The same collapse. The same flood of heat. The same bracing.

Understanding hadn't touched it. Not because they weren't insightful enough. Because insight was never going to be the thing that touched it. Emotions are not a thinking thing, they are physiological.

This is the quiet, exhausting secret of so much personal growth work: you can know everything about why you feel the way you do, and still feel it. You can try and push it away with your mind but it still lives there silently in the background running everything. Willpower doesn't reach it. Positive thinking doesn't reach it. Even deep, accurate self-understanding doesn't reach it; because none of these operate in the place where the emotion actually lives.

Here's why. The nervous system responds to threat and safety faster than the thinking mind can form a sentence about it. By the time you've had the thought, I'm getting defensive right now, your body has already braced, already flooded, already moved. The mind narrates. The body decides. There is no amount of narrating after the fact that reaches back in time to change the decision.

This is why you can understand everything and still feel exactly the same. The gap isn't a failure of insight. It's a category error, trying to think your way out of something that was never a thinking problem to begin with.

Which is why the work that actually shifts things doesn't start with a better story. It starts in the body itself. Experiencing slowing down enough to notice the bracing before it completes, building enough capacity in the nervous system that it doesn't have to slam the same door every time. In practice this can look undramatic: a hand noticing it's clenched, a breath that's allowed to finish, a session where nothing is explained but something, quietly, unclenches. When we slow down and let stuck stress responses be completed, when we touch into the physiological expression of an emotion we let it move and we build capacity to feel it. The defensive or protective action of the autonomic nervous system doesn’t shut it down or bypass it.

What is the natural physiology of emotions? Here are some examples.

Grief isn't just sadness. It's the weight in your chest that cognitive understanding never lifts. It is the body wanting to lie down to let that grief be expressed and that fear we all have that if we lie down we may never get back up again.

Anger isn't a mood. It's heat rising through your body, a tightening in the jaw, before your mind has even found the reason. The body moving into a protective posture. It is a boundary that has been violated and the body wanting to say no. It is the body preparing to push away danger.

Shame isn't a feeling. It's your body collapsing inward, your chest curling, your eyes dropping downward before you're even aware that it's happening.

Anxiety isn't just a worry. It's your nervous system rehearsing every possible ending, over and over, trying to manage risk and the potential scenarios that might happen, faster than thought can keep up.

None of these are thoughts. They are physiology, that distinction matters more than it sounds like it should.

The state of our nervous system drives our behaviour and that physiology that I mentioned is our bodies natural response that goes with it and helps it move through. So when you learn all your life to dampen it down or pack it away, when it randomly starts to come up because your body is exhausted and can't keep the lid on it anymore no wonder you feel overwhelmed. No wonder you feel exhausted with it. Imagine the amount of energy it takes to repress all that emotion and you have been doing it for 40 or 50 years.

Learning to self-attune, to sense and interpret our internal experience, what's sometimes called interoception, is an important skill. Our emotions carry information: what matters to us, what hurts, what we need and what we want to change. When we can hear that information clearly, we can make choices that actually serve us. When we can't, when we override or ignore it, we self-abandon. We stop listening to ourselves, which means we stop knowing what we actually need.

Your body wants you to listen.

It has been trying to tell you this for a long time, it is ready for a change and to do life differently. So instead of medication what if you learned to feel more safety in your body so that you could own and express your emotions in a way that didn’t feel too much. Like you were too much.

Healing through relationships

We often think of relationships as places of comfort, connection, and shared joy—and they are all of that.

But they’re also something deeper.

Relationships are living, breathing containers for healing. They are crucibles where our old wounds rise to the surface, not to torment us, but to be seen, held, and alchemised. We always attract our unfinished business. What this means is that we are attracted to partners who reflect to us our unhealed wounding.

A conscious relationship invites us into the heart of our own nervous system. It asks us to become fluent not just in our own responses—our shutdown, our reactivity, our need for space or closeness—but also in our partner’s unique nervous system language. This means noticing when they are in survival mode, not taking it personally, and offering co-regulation instead of criticism.

One of the greatest shifts in partnership is realising that love isn’t about giving what we want to give. It’s about learning what helps our partner feel safe, loved, and seen—and offering that. Sometimes, that means letting go of the fantasy that our partner will love us exactly the way we love them. It’s not about sameness; it’s about resonance.

But perhaps the most confronting truth is this: our relationships will trigger our deepest wounds.

They will unearth the parts of us that were abandoned, shamed, or neglected. The small child who felt invisible. The teenager who felt too much or not enough. The adult who’s afraid to need too deeply.

This is not a flaw in the relationship—it’s the sacred design.

To be in a mature, intimate relationship is to commit not just to the other, but to our own wholeness. It’s to say yes to healing the early imprints that shaped how we give and receive love. It’s to welcome the mirror that our partner holds up, even when it shows us the parts of ourselves we’ve spent years avoiding.

When we stay present in the hard moments—when we learn to pause, to soften, to stay in the body—we begin to integrate the unconscious, exiled parts of self. We stop abandoning ourselves, and as a result, we stop abandoning the relationship when things get hard.

In this way, relationship becomes alchemy. Not a bypass, not a fairy tale, but a soul forge—where two imperfect humans learn to love with depth, presence, and radical responsibility.

And from that place, we don’t just find intimacy.

We find home.

Healing our abandonment wounds

Many of us have abandonment wounds. They are deeply imprinted in the nervous system, often at a very young age. When our early emotional needs weren’t met—when we lacked attunement, presence, or consistent caregiving—an abandonment wound can take root deep within us.

There are many reasons this happens, sometimes it is a really stressed or depressed parent, a parent who is extremely unwell themselves, and unable to connect and attune to us. Sometimes it is circumstance. I have worked with many people who were premature babies who spent their first few weeks in a humidity crib, so didn’t get the touch from their parents in those first few weeks to soothe their tiny nervous system. Even though one of their parents were most likely there with them all the time, sitting by them, they were separated by a little wall.

This is how deeply wired we are for connection and co-regulation when we are tiny. Our nervous system learns through regulation from our parents and caregivers.

Abandonment wounds are not always obvious. Sometimes they show up not as a gaping wound, but as a subtle hum of anxiety in our relationships. A feeling of being "too much" or "not enough." A belief that love must be earned, not received freely.

To avoid the unbearable terror of disconnection, many of us learned to fawn. We became hyper-attuned to the emotional landscape of others. We learned to appease, to over-function, to say yes when we meant no. We self-abandoned in hopes of staying connected.

Fawning is a survival strategy. It’s what our nervous system chose when fight, flight, or freeze didn’t feel safe or available. While it helped us survive, it often keeps us from truly living—because it asks us to leave ourselves behind.

Healing the abandonment wound isn’t about blaming our caregivers—it’s about reclaiming the parts of us that learned love meant losing ourselves.

Attunement is largely body based; eye contact, mirroring through action and language and most importantly, we attune through touch. These are all essential in establishing secure attachment. When these components are missing our nervous system learns to perceive that we will be left on our own.

For female nervous systems, which are more finely tuned to social engagement because we have lots of estrogen, which creates oxytocin, wiring us for connection and bonding - this perceived abandonment can often be felt more intensely. So we fawn to establish connection.

When we fawn, when we please, appease, over-function, we abandon our own needs. We stop asking for what we want, because we know our needs won’t be met. We hyper-attune or hyper-socialise to stay connected and receive the sense of love, safety and belonging that we all need at a very foundational level just so we can function.

Healing self abandonment begins when we learn not to abandon our selves. When we learn to feel our big sensations and emotions and stay in our body, expanding capacity inside of us to be with what what life throws our way. When we learn to self-soothe and have our little strategies to come back to our zone of resilience. This establishes a sense of safety and trust within ourselves and then we learn to trust others.

It starts with learning how to stay with ourselves. To feel what we couldn’t feel then. To expand our capacity to be with emotion and sensation—including the terror that once overwhelmed our small bodies.

Very slowly, as we learn to stay, something beautiful happens; we begin to trust that we will no longer abandon ourselves and that safety, the safety of self-attunement, becomes the foundation for all our relationships.