On reactivity, and why it's trying to protect you
Ugh, you know the moment.
Someone says something, or says it in a certain tone, and before you've had a single thought, you're flooded.
Your heart is thumping.
Your voice reaches higher.
The words and tone come out sharper than you meant them,
or you go the other way-
cold,
gone,
in a way that startles even you.
Then comes the aftermath-
The replaying,
The shame, and then more replaying.
You wonder why you can't just respond like a regular person, and you promise yourself next time will be different.
Then next time comes, and you feel stuck.
If this is you, you've probably spent years trying to make it stop. I'd like to offer another way to look at it. What if your reactivity is a message that hasn't been read yet?
What if the work isn't to feel less, but to learn to be with what you feel in a new way?
It's older than this moment
Reactivity rarely comes out of nowhere. It usually has a history, one that got laid down in the body long before you had words for it. Sometimes it wasn't even yours to begin with- it was handed down to you. Perhaps it took the form of a parent whose moods you had to track like the weather. Maybe a home where feelings got swept aside, or punished. Maybe you had to get loud to be heard at all. Or, maybe being heard felt dangerous. Sadly, sometimes it didn't matter how loud you got, because nobody was paying enough attention.
The body keeps that history. It doesn't much care that you're a grown adult in a safe enough relationship, bickering about who left the dishes in the sink, or that your friend didn't mean to offend you by leaving the emoji off her text. It picks up the old signal (unseen, unheard, about to be left, about to be controlled) and does what it learned to do: move fast and go big, or get out. Freud described this as repeating what we can't yet remember. You aren't only reacting to your partner and the dishes or your friend. You are reacting to every time before.
The loop
There is a sadness to all of this that is hard to catch amongst the defenses. Underneath all that intensity is usually a very tender wish to be heard and understood. The big feeling is a bid for connection, an urgent attempt to say something that matters. However, the size and force of it tend to bring about the opposite. People pull away, or they meet your intensity with their own, and now there are two nervous systems squaring off instead of two people trying to understand each other. You end up lonelier than when you started, and the old message lands again: your feelings are too much. You are too much. So the shame doubles.
That's the loop. The reactivity grows out of not feeling heard or understood, and then it makes being heard even harder, so the old wound gets confirmed one more time. This is the kind of cycle I care most about helping people break.
Slowing down is not shutting down
When I talk about slowing down, I don't mean shutting it down or white-knuckling your way through it. That's likely suppression, and suppression doesn't work, meaning the feelings don't leave. They leak out sideways or blow up later. Sometimes they turn inward as depression and self-blame, and often as addiction, too.
Slowing down means learning to feel the wave building before it breaks, and finding even a sliver of space between the trigger and what you do next. Just enough room to notice: oh. I'm flooded, and my body thinks this is an emergency. But this feeling is old. You'll feel what you feel regardless. What's up to you, in that sliver of space, is what you do with it.
The feeling is information. It's telling you something matters. Maybe a boundary got crossed, or something from the past got touched. It deserves respect. In my work with clients, we practice honoring the feeling without letting it take the wheel. That might look like saying "I need a minute" and then actually taking the minute, letting the feeling move through your body before you rush to turn it into words or action. Then asking yourself:
What do I actually need right now? What am I really trying to say?
Analysts sometimes call this metabolizing. Bion wrote about how, early on, a caregiver takes in a baby's raw distress and gives it back in a form the baby can bear. A lot of people struggling to regulate reactivity as adults never got enough of that. The hopeful part is that it can still be learned later, in relationship, and over time you learn to do some of it for yourself. The feeling comes in, and instead of spitting it right back out, you let it digest until it becomes something you can understand and say.
Speaking from the feeling instead of the reaction
Speaking from your feelings is different from speaking from your reactivity.
Reactivity sounds like: You always do this. What is wrong with you?
You.
You.
YOU.
It's loud because it's scared, and it attacks because it feels attacked. What it wants more than anything is to be heard, and it goes about it in the way least likely to work.
Speaking from the feeling sounds more like: When you used that tone, I felt dismissed, and it took me right back to being a kid no one took seriously. Or: I'm having a big reaction and I don't totally understand it yet, but I need you to know something is happening for me.
This is more exposed. You don't get the armor that anger provides. It asks the other person to care about what's happening inside you, not just brace against what's coming at them. It's slower and softer, and much more likely to get you what you were reaching for in the first place. With the right person, anyway.
The emergency is old
I've sometimes described reactivity to clients as a caged animal, frantic and thrashing, fighting for its life, and it tends to land. In those moments, your nervous system really does believe it's fighting to survive, and the stakes feel enormous even when the situation is small. However, you're not in a cage anymore. You are not a helpless child, scared and alone.
The feelings are real. The emergency is old.
Learning to slow down and speak from somewhere steadier doesn't mean caring less or losing your fire. It means giving yourself a real chance to be heard, and stepping out of the loop that has kept you feeling alone and misunderstood. Your big feelings have been trying to protect you all along. The work is letting them inform you without handing them the keys. They've waited a long time for someone to listen. It might as well start with you.
