There is the feeling. And then there is the feeling about being someone who feels like this.
For someone who experiences emotional dysregulation, the first reaction can already be enormous. Hurt can feel crushing. Rejection can feel catastrophic. Anger can arrive at full volume. A relatively ordinary event can produce an internal response that seems wildly disproportionate to what happened.
I see this in ADHD coaching, where the emotional side of ADHD can get lost behind talk about focus and organisation. Not every big emotional reaction is about ADHD, of course. But if you've spent years being told you feel things too strongly, the feeling can become only half the problem.
But sometimes that isn't the most painful part. The most painful part comes next.
Oh God. I've done it again. Why do I react like this? Other people don't feel things this strongly. There is something fundamentally wrong with me.
Somewhere along the way, a description of an experience becomes a description of a person:
I experience very big emotional reactions becomes I am an emotionally overreactive person.
That distinction matters.
When a state becomes an identity
If something happens repeatedly enough, particularly over many years, we start constructing a story about ourselves from it. Maybe you've been told you're too sensitive, dramatic,difficult or intense, or that you make too much of things. Eventually, you may not need anyone else to say it. You say it yourself.
The next emotional reaction doesn't happen in isolation. It arrives carrying the weight of every previous one. Something hurts. The first reaction is: This really hurts. Then, almost immediately: Oh no. Look how much this hurts me. And beneath that: This is who I am.
The second reaction can become bigger than the first. The original emotion might have been sadness, embarrassment, disappointment, fear or anger. But now shame enters the picture. Shame isn't simply saying, I'm having a difficult emotional reaction. It's saying, I'm the kind of person who has difficult emotional reactions. That's a much harder thing to escape from.
“I overreact to my emotional overreactions”
I think that's a useful way of describing the cycle:
Trigger → big feeling → awareness of big feeling → judgement → shame or fear → even bigger feeling → withdrawal.
One particularly understandable response at the end of that chain is to hide. Not necessarily because the original event requires hiding, but because being seen while emotionally dysregulated feels exposing. You aren't only trying to get away from the situation. You may be trying to get away from yourself as you currently understand yourself.
When the feeling itself becomes threatening
If I've come to believe I'm someone who can't handle my emotions, the appearance of a strong emotion itself becomes threatening. Instead of I'm really upset, I get:
I'm really upset. Fuck. I'm really upset. This is happening again. I can't cope with things properly. Why am I like this? I need to get away.
Now there are two things to deal with: whatever happened, and the perceived significance of my reaction to what happened. The emotional response has become evidence in a case I've been building against myself.
Perhaps the work isn't only turning down the emotion
This is where I think approaches to emotional dysregulation can sometimes miss something important. Of course regulation skills matter. Recognising escalation, creating space, regulating physiologically and avoiding impulsive action can make an enormous difference. But there may be another piece of work: separating identity from experience.
Not I am someone who overreacts. But I am someone whose emotional system can react very strongly.
Those sentences sound similar, but they're worlds apart. The first is an identity. The second is information. And information gives us something to work with.
Perhaps eventually the sequence can become: something happened. My emotional system has gone very big. I recognise this. The size of the feeling doesn't tell me who I am. It doesn't necessarily tell me how serious the situation is either. I don't have to solve it while I'm inside it. And I don't have to hide because it happened.
The goal isn't necessarily to become somebody who never feels too much. It may partly be to stop making feeling too much mean so much about who you are. Sometimes the emotional reaction is painful. But the belief I am the sort of person who emotionally overreacts can turn a painful moment into shame.
And perhaps that is the overreaction to the overreaction.
What ADHD emotional regulation coaching can work with
In ADHD coaching, I don't start by telling someone to calm down. We look at their version of the pattern: what happened, what they felt, what they did next and what they decided it meant about them. The shame may have been there long before this particular moment. If so, a breathing technique on its own won't answer the belief that I'm the problem.
We can look for a place to interrupt the loop, perhaps by recognising the second reaction before it takes over, allowing time before responding, or finding a way to come back to someone after you've withdrawn. That doesn't mean the first feeling wasn't real, or that everything you do while upset is beyond accountability. It means you can understand what's happening without turning it into a verdict on who you are.
If this pattern feels familiar, you can read more about my approach to ADHD coaching for adults, or contact me for a confidential conversation.