Staying with Difficult Emotions, Shame, and Long-Held Experience in Somatic Therapy
In somatic therapy, nervous system regulation has become something of a gold standard. We are taught that supporting the nervous system's stability is essential for safety, integration, and effective processing, but somewhere along the way, a subtle distortion can creep in. Regulation begins to replace, rather than support, the experience of feeling.
For practitioners, this raises an important question; When does regulation help, and when does it quietly become a way of avoiding what the client actually needs to feel?
This is not a simple either/or. It is a clinical edge that requires discernment, patience, and a willingness to tolerate discomfort, both in the client and in ourselves.
The purpose of regulation and it's limits
Regulation, at its best, creates the conditions that make emotional experience possible. Without some degree of nervous system stability, clients can become overwhelmed, dissociated, or flooded. In these states, staying with feeling is not only difficult, it can be re-traumatizing.
And yet, not all discomfort is dysregulation.
Clients will often encounter emotions that are inherently uncomfortable; grief that aches, anger that burns, shame that contracts, fear that grips, trembles, or freezes. These states are not problems to be fixed. They are experiences to be met, metabolised, and, over time, integrated.
If we move too quickly to regulate, soothe, reframe, distract, or shift attention, we may inadvertently communicate that these emotions are intolerable or bad. The intervention of regulating and resourcing itself can reinforce the very avoidance the client is struggling with.
When Regulation Becomes Avoidance
This dynamic is rarely explicit. It can look like good therapy.
A therapist notices a client becoming tearful and quickly invites grounding. A wave of anger is redirected into breath-work. A client approaches shame, and the therapist offers reassurance before the feeling has fully emerged.
None of these interventions are inherently wrong, they are sometimes appropriate. The question is one of timing and intention.
Are we regulating in order to support the client’s capacity to stay with the experience?
Or are we regulating to move them away from it?
Sometimes, if we are honest, the answer is the latter.
Therapists are not immune to discomfort. Sitting with another person’s pain, especially when it is intense, unresolved, or long-standing, can evoke our own anxiety, urgency, or helplessness. Therapists can also have an unconscious intention to help or fix the client, rather than to be with them in their truth and their suffering. Regulation strategies can become a way for us to feel more at ease, and this can subtly interrupt the client’s process.
The Reality of Long-Held Emotions
Another challenge practitioners encounter is the persistence of emotional discomfort. There can be an implicit expectation, reinforced by some therapeutic narratives, that if clients 'feel their feelings', those feelings will resolve relatively quickly.
But many clients carry emotions that have been held for years, sometimes decades.
Grief may not dissolve after a few sessions. Shame does not always release once it is named. Fear can remain present even as insight deepens.
And some emotions may stay and we learn to live with their recurrance in a peaceful way.
When emotions persist, both therapist and client can begin to question what is happening.
Clients may wonder: Why am I still feeling this? Am I doing something wrong?
Therapists may wonder: Shouldn’t this be shifting by now?
This is where shame may enter the room.
Shame at the Edge of Feeling
One of the most painful experiences for clients is the sense that they are failing at therapy itself. They may feel inadequate for not being able to 'stay with' their emotions, or for continuing to feel distress despite their efforts.
In some cases, they may even begin to believe they are 'addicted' to negative emotions... a belief that carries both judgment and hopelessness.
As therapists, how we respond here matters deeply.
If we lean too heavily on normalisation, 'this is just part of the process', we risk minimising the client’s lived experience, but if we frame the persistence of emotion as a problem to be solved, we may reinforce the idea that something is wrong with them.
The work is to hold both. Acknowledge the reality of their suffering, while also gently challenging the assumption that ongoing emotion equals failure.
Capacity, not compliance
A reframe is this: the goal is not to get clients to stay with their feelings at all costs. The goal is to support their capacity to do so.
Capacity is not static. It fluctuates moment to moment, shaped by physiology, history, context, and relational safety. A client who cannot stay with an emotion is not resistant or avoidant in a moral sense, they are meeting the limits of their current capacity.
From this perspective, regulation is not the opposite of feeling. It is one of the resources that can expand the window within which feeling becomes possible.
But, (and this is crucial), capacity is not built by consistently moving away from discomfort. It is built through titrated, supported contact with it.
Staying at the edge
So what does this look like in practice?
It often means working at the edge of the client’s experience, rather than pulling them back prematurely or pushing them too far.
It might look like:
- Noticing the impulse to intervene and pausing, allowing a few more moments of feeling
- Naming what is happening (“There’s something here that feels hard to stay with”) without immediately changing it
- Supporting the client to track their experience, rather than escape it
- Allowing discomfort to exist without rushing to resolve it
At times, it will also mean choosing to regulate, to orient, ground, or shift, when the client is genuinely overwhelmed. The skill lies in discerning the difference.
A Different Kind of Trust
Underlying this work is a particular kind of trust in the client’s process, trust in the body’s capacity to move toward integration, and trust that not all discomfort needs to be immediately alleviated.
For some practitioners, this can feel counterintuitive. It asks us to tolerate ambiguity, to let go of the need for quick resolution, and to sit with experiences that do not have neat or timely outcomes.
But it is often in this space, where nothing is being fixed, and nothing is being avoided, that something meaningful begins to shift.
Not always quickly. Not always visibly. But often, more deeply than if we had intervened too soon.
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