Managing
Overwhelming
Emotions, Therapy Sydney
Therapy for emotional overwhelm and dysregulation with Chauncey Sjostedt, PACFA certified Gestalt Therapist in Surry Hills. Rather than suppressing or controlling emotions, I help you develop a more spacious relationship with your emotional experience, from the inside out.
PACFA Certified Practicing Member #29367 · Gestalt and Somatic · Surry Hills & Online
What overwhelming
emotions look like
Emotional overwhelm does not always look dramatic from the outside. Sometimes it is the sudden wave that arrives with no warning and takes over completely. Sometimes it is a quiet numbness that settles in and refuses to lift. Sometimes it oscillates between both. Whatever form it takes for you, the common thread is that your emotional experience feels unworkable: too much, too sudden, too inescapable, or simply gone.
Emotional Flooding, You Cannot Stop the Wave
Flooding is when emotions arrive with an intensity that overwhelms your capacity to think, respond or function. You might find yourself crying without being able to stop, saying things you regret, unable to be present in a conversation, or physically shaking. The emotional experience takes over the body entirely. This is a nervous system response, not a failure of willpower or character, and it can be worked with.
Flooding often has roots in trauma, in an anxious nervous system, or in experiences where strong emotions were not safe to express and were therefore contained until they found their own way out. Understanding what triggers the flooding and what is underneath it is part of the therapeutic work.
Shutting Down, Going Numb
Emotional shutdown is the other face of overwhelm. Rather than flooding, the nervous system goes offline. You feel flat, disconnected, unable to access feelings even when you know you should have them, or aware that something matters to you but unable to feel it. This is also a protective response: the nervous system protecting itself from more than it can process. Somatic and Polyvagal-informed approaches are particularly useful for gently working with shutdown states.
Swinging Between the Two
Many people experience both: periods of flooding followed by shutdown, or oscillation between intense reactivity and emotional blankness. This pattern can be particularly destabilising because there is no steady ground. Therapy helps you understand the rhythm of this oscillation and begin to develop a larger, more stable zone in which more of your experience can be held without tipping into either extreme.
How I help
Working with overwhelming emotions requires an approach that meets the body as well as the mind. Talking about emotions is rarely enough when the core difficulty is with feeling them, being with them, or making sense of them as they arrive. I draw on three interconnected approaches that work at different levels of your experience simultaneously.
Sessions are collaborative and unhurried. We do not rush toward catharsis or push past what your nervous system is ready to process. The pace is always determined by what feels safe and genuinely workable for you. Many people find that even in the early sessions, simply having a space in which their emotional experience is met with curiosity rather than alarm makes a meaningful difference.
Gestalt, Tracking Emotions as They Arise
Gestalt therapy works with what is actually happening in the present moment. Rather than analysing emotions from a distance, we slow down and notice them as they arise: what triggers them, how they feel in the body, what they are expressing, and what happens when we stay with them rather than pushing them away or being overwhelmed by them. This present-moment work creates the conditions for genuine change.
Somatic, Feeling It in the Body
Many people with emotional overwhelm have learned, often early in life, that their emotions were too much for those around them. The messages were subtle or not so subtle: calm down, you are overreacting, stop being so sensitive. Over time, this produces a complicated relationship with one's own emotional experience: either containing it so tightly it explodes, or shutting it down so completely it cannot be accessed at all.
Overwhelming emotions are experienced in the body: the racing heart, the tight throat, the hollow stomach, the physical sense of shutdown. Drawing on Somatic Experiencing, I work with where emotions live physically, helping you develop a more grounded and embodied relationship with your experience. This is not about forcing yourself to feel more. It is about building capacity gradually and safely. Learn more on the somatic therapy page.
Polyvagal Theory, Understanding Your Nervous System
Polyvagal Theory, developed by Stephen Porges, explains why emotional overwhelm can feel so physical and so out of our rational control. When the autonomic nervous system shifts into threat or shutdown states, no amount of thinking or willpower changes it. Understanding your nervous system responses, learning to recognise which state you are in and why, can be genuinely liberating. Learn more on the trauma-informed therapy page.
Building Capacity, Expanding Your Window of Tolerance
The window of tolerance is the zone in which you can think, feel and engage without being overwhelmed or shutting down. The goal is not to eliminate strong emotions but to expand this window so you can hold more of your experience without tipping into either extreme. This happens gradually, through practice and presence, not through willpower.
This is not about
controlling your emotions
The cultural message around difficult emotions is often about control: manage them, regulate them, keep them in check. Therapy for emotional overwhelm is not about developing better emotional management systems. It is about developing a more spacious, honest and ultimately less frightened relationship with your own emotional life.
Emotions are not problems. They are information. They are signals about what matters, what is wrong, what is needed. The difficulty is not that emotions are too loud. It is that they have not had a space in which they could be heard at a volume that was manageable. Therapy creates that space.
You do not need a diagnosis, a crisis or a formal referral to work on your emotional life in therapy. Many people who carry significant emotional dysregulation have never been diagnosed with anything. They simply know that something about their emotional experience is harder than it needs to be, and they want support in changing that.
Over time, when emotions are consistently met with curiosity rather than fear, they tend to become less overwhelming. Not because they become smaller but because you become larger, more able to be with the full range of your experience without being destabilised by it.
If anxiety or burnout are part of the picture for you, the anxiety, stress and burnout page explores those areas in more depth. Sessions are available in person in Surry Hills on Saturdays, or online on Wednesday afternoons (Glebe) and Saturday mornings (Surry Hills). No GP referral required. Full details on the appointments page.
Who this is for
This work is for people whose emotional responses feel unworkable, whether too intense, too absent, or too unpredictable. It suits people who feel at the mercy of their emotions rather than able to work with them, who regularly say or do things in an emotional state that they later regret, who find themselves shutting down when things get difficult, or who oscillate between extremes that leave them exhausted and confused about their own inner world.
It is also for people who have tried approaches focused on managing emotions and found them helpful but insufficient. Emotional regulation in a genuine sense is not about management. It is about understanding your emotional life deeply enough that you can be in relationship with it rather than at its mercy.
This work overlaps significantly with anxiety, burnout and trauma. If those are part of your picture, the dedicated pages for anxiety, stress and burnout and trauma-informed therapy explore those areas in more depth. Many people find that working with emotional overwhelm is part of the same thread as working with anxiety or trauma, and we address them together rather than in separate boxes.
Sessions are available in person in Surry Hills on Saturdays, or online on Wednesday afternoons (Glebe) and Saturday mornings (Surry Hills). Sessions are 50 minutes. No GP referral or Mental Health Care Plan required. Full details on the appointments page.
Common questions
Questions about emotional regulation therapy. More on the full FAQ page.
Book a session
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Emotional regulation therapy helps you develop a more spacious and workable relationship with your emotions. Rather than trying to suppress or control feelings, it works with understanding what emotions are communicating, where they live in the body, and how to be with them without being overwhelmed. Chauncey draws on Gestalt, Somatic Experiencing and Polyvagal Theory to work at the level of the nervous system as well as the mind.
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The window of tolerance describes the zone of nervous system arousal in which a person can function effectively and process experience. Within the window, you can think, feel and engage. Above it you are flooded or hyperaroused. Below it you are shut down or dissociated. The goal of therapy is not to eliminate strong emotions but to expand the window so you can hold more experience without tipping into either extreme.
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It can be, but not always. Emotional flooding can arise from trauma, from a nervous system that has never had much capacity for regulation, from a childhood where strong emotions were not modelled or supported, or from accumulated unprocessed experience. The origin matters less than understanding how it operates for you specifically and developing a more workable relationship with it.
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Yes. Emotional shutdown and numbness are the other side of the same coin as flooding. Both are protective responses of the nervous system. Therapy informed by Polyvagal Theory and somatic approaches can support you in gently expanding your capacity to feel and be present without being overwhelmed, whether your pattern is flooding, shutdown or oscillating between both.
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This varies. Many people notice meaningful shifts within a relatively small number of sessions, particularly in understanding their patterns and working with themselves more skilfully in the moment. Deeper and more lasting change in the nervous system tends to be more gradual. There is no fixed timeline and we work at the pace that is genuinely right for you.
Take the first step
towards feeling better
Book an emotional regulation therapy session in person in Surry Hills on Saturday mornings, or online via secure video on Wednesday afternoons (Glebe) and Saturday mornings (Surry Hills). Sessions are 50 minutes. No GP referral or Mental Health Care Plan required. A free introductory call is available before the first session. I respond to all enquiries within 48 hours. A free introductory call is available on request before the first session.