Frozen, Flowing, and Flooded: What it Means to "Process Trauma" or "Work Through Your Emotions"

(There's a reason therapy helps with this stuff)

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I’m a clinical psychologist, thus the “Dr.” in “Dr. Dan’s Writing.”

In my work with clients, I find that their current struggles have often been shaped by profoundly painful experiences from their past.

Sometimes these experiences are catastrophic, like being in a car crash or a warzone. Sometimes, they’re more subtle but still painful, like being bullied or having a parent who was never around.

Within the mental health field, we often categorize these experiences as Big-T traumas (life-threatening accidents, sexual assault, etc) and little-t traumas (divorce, prolonged financial insecurity, death of a pet, etc)¹.

However, when I’m working with clients, I use the language that feels most helpful to them. For some clients, labeling an experience as a trauma feels healing, but for other clients it doesn’t quite ring true. So I’ll use the wider label of “painful experience” to describe a past experience that still continues to affect a client profoundly in the present day, whether they consider it to be “traumatic” or not.

When I invite those clients to explore their painful experiences in therapy, I often get an answer like:

“What’s the point? I know what happened - maybe I’ve even told my friends about it. Why would it help to talk about it again with you?”

To answer their question, I use the model of frozen, flowing or flooded emotions. I think this model is super helpful for understanding how talking about a painful experience in therapy can help you work through it, and also as a tool for attuning to your own emotional experience. (Recognizing when you’re frozen or flooded - or at risk of becoming so - is a huge leap of emotional maturity.)

While I originally developed this metaphor for trauma work, it’s helpful for any kind difficult emotion. Some emotions might be difficult to feel even if they don’t necessarily spring from a specific painful experience, and this model can help understand how therapy can help in those situations.

As far as I’m aware, I’m the only one who uses this exact metaphor for working through trauma or painful experiences. But I believe most effective trauma therapists would recognize their own approach within my description, even if they might use different language to describe it.

In other words, I’m not trying to claim that I’ve developed a new innovative way of treating trauma (you should always be very skeptical of those sorts of claims.) Rather, this is an attempt to explain what any good therapist does when working with painful experiences, using language that’s more accessible.

The basic idea of the model is this:

1. Our emotions surrounding a painful experience often get stuck bouncing between being frozen and being flooded.

2. As long as our emotions bounce between those extremes, they cause various problems, and we can’t really move forward from them.

3. So the goal of therapy is to help you get your emotion flowing.

But what does all that mean? Well, let’s dive in.

Frozen emotions

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By frozen emotions, I don’t mean crying when you hear a bad cover of “Let It Go” at karaoke. Rather, frozen emotions are emotions that you’ve walled off within yourself². Even if you’re actively talking about a painful memory, frozen emotions stay safely iced over.

I suspect a client may be dealing with frozen emotions if we’re discussing a painful experience and the client:

• Is nonchalant, acting as though we are discussing the weather or telling a story about something that happened to someone else

• Tries to entertain me (using frequent humor or dramatic storytelling)

• Uses second or third person pronouns ³ to distance themselves from the narrative, such as saying “you” instead of “I” (eg, “It hurts when your dad dies” instead of saying “it hurt when my dad died”)

• Uses minimizing language to distance themselves from the narrative or from their emotions (eg, using “irritated” instead of “angry” or “a little sad” when they’re actually very sad)

• Becomes floaty and dissociative

We get frozen emotions when our feelings about an experience are so intense that it feels intolerable. Instead of feeling the overwhelming emotion, our psyche shuts it down and shunts it aside. When we’re reminded of the experience, we feel only numbness.

Sometimes emotions are frozen consciously - we intentionally try to avoid feeling something, or steer the conversation away from a topic we know we will trigger the emotion. Sometimes, it’s unconsciously. Often, it’s a mix of both.

Emotions might become frozen when detaching from the emotion helped us survive a painful experience. For instance, a child who experienced abuse might learn they experience less abuse if they act calm instead of crying. Or a spouse whose partner has died may feel they need to maintain a cheerful face for their children. Our psyches are loath to give up a tool that previously helped us survive, so freezing becomes the default.

Emotions might also become frozen when the emotion was far too overwhelming the first time we felt it. If an emotion flooded us, keeping it under ice can feel like the only safe option.

Of course, there’s a cost to this.

For one thing, you can’t pick and choose which emotions to numb out. If you start turning down the volume on negative emotions, then joyful emotions get quieter too.

For another, frozen emotions usually get morphed into another emotion. That loneliness you don’t let yourself feel turns into self-loathing. That grief you push aside turns into anger. (This is why therapy often ends up working with trauma even when the original presenting problem may have appeared totally unrelated.)

Plus, our psyche can only do so much to keep our emotions numb. It often needs help from outside sources - which is why people might turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms or an addiction in order to stay numb.

And…even the thickest ice will eventually crack. If you’re used to your emotions being frozen, when that glacier of emotion drops into the ocean, you end up flooded.

Flooded emotions

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Flooded emotions are emotions that are overwhelming and unbearable. When someone is experiencing a flooded emotion, it’s very difficult for them to think of anything other than wanting to escape how they’re feeling.

If the flooded emotion is related to a traumatic experience, the person might feel as though they are back in the moment of the trauma, and feel all of the unsafety and fear they did in that moment. Flooded emotions might lead to panic attacks, outbursts of anger, or seemingly irrational behavior - because the person is trying anything they can to escape the emotion.

Sometimes, people get flooded by emotions because they try for too long to keep them frozen, and eventually the dam breaks and floods out all at once. Other times, people develop flooded emotions because in the past, being overwhelmed by their emotions was the only way to make the people in their life pay attention to them. And sometimes, the emotion was so uniquely painful that the person just can’t figure out how to feel it without being flooded.

Some signs of a person being flooded by an emotion are:

• Shutting down and becoming noncommunicative

• Physically withdrawing (curling up, hugging themselves, looking away)

• Becoming aggressive, shouting, or violent.

• Engaging in self-harm behavior

• Becoming agitated and panicky

• Bursting into frantic tears

There’s a flywheel effect between emotional freezing and flooding. When we’ve been flooded by an emotion once, we often fear we’ll be flooded if we feel that emotion again. So we throw that emotion in the freezer and do our best to avoid feeling it - and every time the emotion breaks free and floods us, the harder we try to keep it frozen.

Unfortunately, just like any other form of avoidance⁴, the longer we avoid our feelings, the more overwhelming they become. So an emotion that we typically keep frozen is even more likely to flood us when the ice breaks.

But actually feeling our feelings - without being flooded by them - is where healing comes from. That’s what it means to have flowing emotions.

Flowing emotion

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Flowing emotions are healthy emotions. An emotion “flowing” is an emotion that you can feel without being overwhelmed. Since you’re not afraid of being flooded, there’s no need to freeze the emotion. It might not be pleasant to feel, but it’s not scary or dangerous, so you don’t need to avoid it.

When I work with a client in therapy, my goal is to get their emotion flowing - without letting it boil over and flood them. I want them to experience the emotion from the past experience in the context of their current moment. They can feel the fear from a traumatic experience, while also feeling the safety of being in a therapy office. They can feel the grief of a lost loved one, while also feeling the joy from the memories they carry. They can feel the helplessness of the child they were, while also feeling the strength of the adult they currently are.

In order to accomplish this, I’ll use various interventions to bring clients closer to the painful emotion if they’re frozen, and closer to their current calm and safety if they’re getting flooded. For instance, I might bring a client closer to emotion by steering the conversation towards how an experience affected them, or inviting them to pay attention to how their body is reacting to the memory. I might bring a client closer to calm and safety by leading them in a grounding exercise, or suggesting a break in the conversation.

The goal is to slowly help them feel more of the emotion, without ever reaching the point where it becomes overwhelming and intolerable. This is a delicate balance, and if it gets messed up the client can find themselves intensely flooded or deeply frozen. (That’s why you should talk this stuff out with a therapist rather than your buddy or ChatGPT.)

I can tell the client’s emotion has started flowing when:

• The client is able to feel a painful emotion, but then calm themselves down without substantial effort or outside support.

• The client is able to experience the pain of the memory, but remain an awareness of their current safety and distance from the past experience

• The client’s emotional intensity moves up or down fluidly - instead of jumping immediately from calm to overwhelm, or overwhelm to shut down.

• The client reports a sense of peace and relief after expressing the emotion

That last point is probably the biggest clue that you’re making progress towards your emotion flowing. You feel awful when you’re hit with a flooded emotion - and after the flooded emotion has iced over again. But when your emotion flows, you typically feel some relief and peace (especially if you were able to express the emotion in the presence of a caring person who can offer empathy.)

Or in the words of Judah and the Lion⁵,

When you feel it, when you feel it come up / Let it unravel

This is not the end / Maybe with our feelings, let's try feeling them

So my heart, don't you know / Healing starts when the unraveling unfolds

Learning how to feel a painful feeling without overwhelming it is a big part of what “processing trauma” or “working through feelings” means. Instead of being “stuck” in the way the experience felt when it first happened, you can update that feeling with all the good in your life that’s happened since then. Instead of needing to suppress an intolerable emotion (and suffer under the other emotions it morphs into), you can feel the emotion when it comes up, then get on with your day.

Of course, this isn’t the full story of what it means to heal from trauma - or any kind of painful experience. (There’s a limit to what you can fit inside a substack post.)

But I’m hopeful this will be useful in understanding what exactly is supposed to happen when you go to a therapist and try to “process your trauma” or “work through your feelings.”

And hey - if you recognized yourself in the sections on flooded or frozen emotions. This post might be a sign that it’s time to call up a good therapist⁶…and give your feelings the chance to flow.

1. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/trauma-and-hope/201703/different-types-trauma-small-t-versus-large-t

2. To be clear, it’s not a frozen emotion if you just legitimately don’t feel anything. For instance, a client might not feel particularly sad about the death of a distant relative that they weren’t close with. A frozen emotion is when you do feel something, you just can’t access that feeling.

3. There’s some research that suggests challenging clients to use first-person language in general tends to have a positive effect (https://salford-repository.worktribe.com/output/1408888/exploring-clients-responses-to-changing-pronoun-use-from-second-person-you-to-first-person-i-during-therapy-a-constructivist-qualitative-approach)

4. Remember the avoidance anchor from https://writing.danielwendler.com/p/the-problem-with-shia-labeouf?

5. Help Me To Feel Again

6. The Psychology Today therapy directory is a decent place to start, and it’s also okay to just Googling around for therapists in your area. Avoid platforms like BetterHelp or TalkSpace, and avoid therapists who claim to offer some super special approach that only they provide. It’s tough to determine if someone will be a good therapist for you just by browsing online, so find someone that seems okay and give them 2-4 sessions. If you don’t feel like there’s a rapport and you don’t feel like you’re making progress after that time, you can try someone new.