The Difference Between Feeling and Falling Apart

On emotion, dysregulation, and what cold water teaches

On the Path: A letter for those reclaiming their voice, rewriting their story, and walking the path of purpose with presence, creativity, and heart.

before turning 20 i had been told many times, by teachers, friends and self proclaimed well wishers: you gotta grow a thicker skin.

I am sure it’s more than familiar to some of you.

The wase with which some of us weep is unbearable to those who have learnt to hold it all in.

As I have grown older, in this thing called human years, that is, I have often thought neither of those two are inherently wrong.

They are like two sides of a gazillion sided coin called: how I learnt to cope.

There is a distinction that takes a long time to grasp, when me tackle the nature of our emotion-full or emotion-less lives.

That’s the distinction between being emotional and being dysregulated.

We sometimes unknowingly seem to collapsed these two things into one.

Feeling deeply has become synonymous with being out of control.

Being weak.

Anger is seen as dangerous.

Grief makes people uncomfortable.

And so we learn, early and efficiently, to either try manage what we feel, feel like our overwhelming feelings should be small and contained.

As if we can be human, but just a little bit.

We can be human just to the degree that it is acceptable.

We can all understand how silly it would be to walk up to a 2 yo at the sweet aisle to say: That is really too much. And then to turn to the mother and say: You really should do better.

Operating in a human life filled with emotion.

It is what makes us alive.

It is what makes connection possible, what makes beauty land, what makes music unbearable in the best possible way.

Feeling is not the enemy.

Dysregulation is something else entirely.

Dysregulation is what happens when the feeling arrives and the nervous system, trained by years of experience, some of it painful, most of it early, decides this is not survivable.

And so it does what it was designed to do.

It shuts down. Or it attacks. Or it controls. Or it disappears into scrolling and wine and relentless productivity.

All of us have something we do not tolerate.

The intolerable is different for each of us, depending on how we were wired, what we learned to survive, which feelings were permitted in the house we grew up in.

But the mechanism is the same.

Lashing out. Controlling. Judging. Avoiding. Collapsing.

These are the coping strategies of a young child.

Effective once.

Expensive now.

This weekend the weather was warm enough. Nineteen degrees in the sun, with a cool wind moving through the shadows.

I waded into the Baltic Sea.

Cold water immersion is something I return to when I need to remember something my nervous system keeps forgetting.

The water was six degrees.

I went in slowly, breathing long and deliberately as the pins and needles began, pain signals firing, the body registering danger, everything in me pulling toward the shore.

And I stayed.

Not because I am especially brave.

But because I have done this enough times to know something that took a long time to learn:

Pain is not dangerous here. Pain is not going to annihilate me.

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Sometimes our adult lives are hard.

There are many important strings pulling at us at the same time, and surprise bombs go off regularly.

One of the hardest parts of parenting alone, while building a business and holding down a job and being the only adult in the room, is the continuous requirement to be the calming agent.

Football cards become declarations of war.

An accidental elbow becomes a fistfight.

Crocodile tears flood a kitchen at seven in the morning.

And I am asked, by circumstance, to remain as calm as possible.

I will be honest with you: possible is not always available.

But the cold water has taught me something that transfers.

When you rush in cold water, you feed the body’s immediate panic. You breathe wrong. You confirm to your nervous system that this is, in fact, unbearable.

But is it?

Is it unbearable to sit with a child mid-meltdown and not fix it immediately?

Is it unbearable to take a risk on a client who might say no?

Is it unbearable to expose a vulnerability to someone you love?

Perhaps. That feeling is real.

But the feeling being real does not make the story it’s telling entirely true.

Staying in the cold water teaches that. The body says leave. The decision says stay.

And slowly, the body learns that it can.

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What I have found, in the water and in the kitchen and in the difficult conversations, is that the way through is never rushing.

It is always meeting the feeling first.

Not analysing it. Analysis is often another form of avoidance, the thinking mind sprinting away from what the body is trying to say.

Just naming it.

This is big. This is fear. This is grief. This is too much right now.

Naming calms the system. It moves the experience from the part of the brain that is reacting to the part that can respond. It is a small act with an outsized effect.

And when the family unit, or the self, emerges from a difficult moment still in connection, with minimal damage, with something resembling grace?

That satisfaction is not small.

It is, I would argue, one of the most underrated feelings available to a human life.

Not the absence of difficulty.

The discovery that you can move through it.

What are you moving through right now in your life you never thought you could?

I would love to hear about it!

Love and love again,

K

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If this landed somewhere real for you, if you recognise the water, the kitchen, the pulling toward the shore:

This is the work I do with people in 1:1 sessions. Not fixing. Accompanying. If you’re ready to explore what that looks like, book a session here.

Or start with a free 15-minute conversation. No agenda, no pressure. Book here.

And if someone in your life needs to read this, please pass it on.