When Calming Down Becomes Emotional Avoidance

Maybe you've learned to take slow, deep breaths when something feels like too much. To name what's happening in your body. To come back to the present moment, to your five senses, to reduce the intensity of what you were feeling.

Maybe you've done that dozens of times. And the same reaction still shows up — in the same kind of moment, with the same kind of person, around the same kind of thing.

These techniques can genuinely help

This isn't about saying these techniques are useless. There are real moments when a bit more stability, a bit more support, makes a real difference — when you simply need to steady yourself before you can keep going.

But there's a question worth asking, one that doesn't come up very often:

Am I supporting myself so I can stay with what I'm feeling — or am I using this technique so I don't have to feel it at all?

What if regulating didn't always mean calming down?

We often picture "being regulated" as a slower heartbeat, a relaxed body, a sense of calm. But there's another way to think about it: becoming more regulated can also mean becoming more able to feel a strong emotion — anger, fear, grief — without immediately having to make it go away, react from it, or cut yourself off from it.

Seen this way, calming down and staying present with something difficult aren't opposites. What changes is what you're trying to do with the emotion: silence it as fast as possible, or stay with it long enough to understand what it might be telling you.

Some emotions were avoided long before you learned to calm them

Part of what gets put in place early in life is a way of avoiding certain emotions because they had no room at the time — anger that wasn't welcome, a need that was inconvenient, sadness that was better kept to yourself. This can be a form of emotional avoidance: a way of keeping some feelings at a distance, sometimes without even realizing it.

If the only response, as an adult, is still to calm things down as quickly as possible, you can end up repeating that same movement without meaning to: getting away from what you feel instead of meeting it. The technique changes — it's no longer "act like nothing happened," it's "breathe, ground yourself, get back to a steady state" — but the inner gesture can stay the same.

What the discomfort might be telling you

A boundary you set. Your heart racing. Fear or anger rising. The reflex might be, "I'm dysregulated, I need to calm down." But there's another question worth asking: "What's happening for me right now? What might this reaction be trying to help me see?"

This doesn't mean forcing yourself to feel more, or staying in distress that's more than you can hold. It's not about making the emotion disappear, and it's not about pushing yourself into it either. It's about giving it enough room to understand more clearly what is happening, before deciding what to do with it.

Why the same reaction can keep coming back

If an emotion keeps being avoided — even with really good techniques — what it carries stays unmet too. The need you never let yourself have. The anger you learned to quiet before it even took shape. The conflict you'd rather smooth over than actually face.

It's not a lack of discipline or the wrong technique. If the reflex is always to get back to a more comfortable state as fast as possible, you can end up missing what the emotion was trying to show you.

Another way to look at it

In my work, I don't start from the idea that a difficult emotion is a problem to fix or a state to get rid of. I start from what genuinely matters to you, and we look together at what gets in the way — including whatever, in an uncomfortable emotion, might actually be worth meeting instead of avoiding.

The body and what happens in it are part of that work. But the goal isn't to produce a specific calm state, or to bring you back to comfort as quickly as possible every time. It's more about staying curious about what's already there, even when it's not easy — and seeing, over time, whether that opens up more choice in how you respond, rather than a particular state to reach.

If this resonates with what you're going through, the free call is a simple first step to see whether the way I work could be a good fit for you.

Relational and Somatic Therapist
Online sessions · Montreal, Quebec
Email: contact@francoislacharite.com

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