Emotional regulation counselling in Nelson, BC

Your emotional life feels unpredictable or overwhelming. Maybe your reactions feel bigger than the situation warrants—small things trigger intense responses. You might snap at people and then feel guilty about it, or find yourself ruminating for hours or days over something you wish you could just let go. You might feel ashamed of how much you feel, wondering at what point your emotional intensity or moodiness will wear out the goodwill of the people around you.

Perhaps you never saw good modelling for how to work with intense emotions—maybe the adults around you struggled with their own intense emotions, or emotions had to be suppressed to keep the peace. Nobody taught you these skills, and you're doing the best you can with what you learned. But you sense there's a different way.

What you're experiencing is often called emotional dysregulation, and body-centred therapy offers a way to build the capacity you're seeking.

What emotional regulation means

Emotional regulation isn't about controlling or suppressing emotions. It's about having the capacity to work with emotional intensity—to feel what you feel without being overwhelmed by it or shutting it down completely.

This capacity develops through early relationships. Research suggests that 50-60% of adults experienced situations in childhood where big emotions weren't safe or supported. Your nervous system learned to either dampen emotions or let them flood through without any containment. Emotional dysregulation is often the root of other struggles—anxiety, relationship patterns, burnout, depression.

You're not a failure at emotions. You haven't had the chance to build this capacity. And capacity can be built—through working with experiences in your body, not just your mind.

How body-centred therapy builds emotional capacity

Working with what's already happening in your body

Emotional patterns live in your nervous system, encoded through thousands of moments when you learned what was safe to feel and express. These responses operate faster than conscious thought—your body reacts before your mind registers what's happening.

Talk therapy can help you understand where patterns come from. But if you want to change how emotions actually move through you, you need to work directly with your nervous system as well.

Building capacity gradually

One of the paradoxes many people discover: moving toward emotions—actually making space to feel them—often brings relief rather than more overwhelm. When you've spent years avoiding or pushing feelings away, finally allowing them reduces the constant effort of keeping them at bay. This is part of what we practise together: the mindful self-awareness that lets you turn toward your experience rather than away from it.

Using Somatic Experiencing® principles, we work at the edge of your nervous system's habitual range, gradually expanding what feels possible. We track what's happening in your body—the tightness in your chest, the heat behind your eyes, the impulse to move or speak or shut down. Instead of pushing through or avoiding, we learn to stay present with these sensations and impulses. Your body discovers through direct experience that emotions can be felt AND expressed—through movement, through words, through action—without being dangerous or reckless. There's a difference between being overwhelmed by emotion and being moved by it.

Your nervous system likely learned dysregulation in relationship, and it can learn new patterns in relationship too. When we show up together with the intention of simply witnessing your experience without immediately trying to fix or change it, something shifts. Your system grasps on a visceral level that your emotional experience is not wrong or shameful, but necessary and makes perfect sense.

The combination of understanding where patterns come from AND working directly with your nervous system addresses both the story and the felt experience. You're not just learning about emotional regulation—you're building the actual capacity in your body.

What becomes possible

When you build emotional regulation capacity, emotions stop feeling like threats and start feeling like information. Unlike thoughts that you can question or argue with, emotions carry embodied wisdom that can't be dismissed through logic alone. They're messages from parts of you that perceive things your conscious mind might miss—warnings, longings, boundaries that need attention, grief that needs acknowledgment.

You develop more range—able to feel deeply without being overwhelmed, to access emotions that were shut down without collapsing into them. The shame lifts. You can stay present and connected to yourself in difficult conversations instead of shutting down or escalating. Relationships improve—not because you've eliminated your emotional intensity, but because you trust your capacity to work with it.

“Without our emotions, we can't make decisions; we can't decipher our dreams and visions; we can't set proper boundaries or behave skilfully in relationships.”

— Karla McLaren

This isn't about becoming emotionless or perfectly controlled. It's about building the flexibility to move through emotional states without getting stuck, to express what you feel in ways that feel authentic and appropriate. The emotions that once scared you become guides you can listen to.

Who this is for

This work is for you if:

• Your emotional patterns frustrate you or hold you back, and don't reflect who you truly are

• You've tried cognitive-only approaches to managing your emotions and are looking for something more

• You want to understand the roots of your reactions, not just manage symptoms

• You notice you're sensitive to emotional intensity—both your own and others'

• You're not looking for quick fixes or ways to just "get control"

• You're willing to work at a pace that rewires the nervous system and ready to work with both mind and body

• You're interested in discovering what your body has been holding beneath your conscious awareness