You wake up at 3am with your heart racing. Your chest feels tight. Your mind is spinning with worries about work, relationships, money, health—everything and nothing all at once.

But here’s the thing: logically, everything is fine. Nothing catastrophic happened. No major crisis occurred. And yet, your body is screaming danger.

You’ve probably tried the usual advice: breathing exercises, positive affirmations, chamomile tea, cutting back on caffeine. Maybe you’ve even been told to ‘just relax’ or ‘stop overthinking.’ And if you’re anything like the hundreds of people I’ve worked with, you’ve probably felt frustrated by how little these approaches actually help.

That’s because most conventional wisdom about emotions gets one fundamental thing wrong: it treats uncomfortable feelings like problems to be solved, rather than information to be understood.

In this article, I’m going to share what I’ve learned as a somatic therapist and family constellation facilitator about why you feel the way you do—and more importantly, what actually helps.

Your Emotions Are Intelligent (Yes, Really)

Let’s start with a radical reframe: your emotions—including the uncomfortable ones—are not broken. They’re not evidence of weakness, oversensitivity, or defectiveness. They’re intelligent messengers carrying crucial information about your internal and external world.

Think about physical pain for a moment. If you touch a hot stove, you feel pain. That pain isn’t there to annoy you or ruin your day. It’s there to tell you: ‘Danger! Move your hand!’ The pain is protective. It’s intelligent. It’s keeping you safe.

Emotional discomfort works the same way.

That knot in your stomach before a big presentation? That’s your body saying, ‘This matters to you. Pay attention.’ The sadness that wells up when you think about a lost relationship? That’s your heart processing grief. The anger that flares when someone crosses your boundaries? That’s your system saying, ‘This isn’t okay with me.’

The problem isn’t that you’re feeling these things. The problem is that we’ve been taught to suppress, ignore, or ‘fix’ them without ever listening to what they’re trying to communicate.

This is the first shift in understanding emotions: from seeing them as problems to seeing them as data. And once you make this shift, everything changes.

What Your Nervous System Has to Do With It

Now let’s talk about why you might be having such strong emotional reactions—especially when they feel disproportionate to what’s actually happening in your life right now.

This is where somatic therapy comes in. ‘Somatic’ simply means ‘of the body,’ and somatic therapy is an approach that pays attention to what’s happening in your physical body, not just your thoughts.

Here’s the key insight: your body holds onto experiences. Your nervous system remembers things your conscious mind might have forgotten. And sometimes—actually, quite often—the uncomfortable emotions you’re feeling aren’t really about what’s happening right now. They’re about what happened then.

How Your Nervous System Stores Stress

Your nervous system has two main branches:

The sympathetic nervous system handles activation—your fight, flight, or freeze response. When you encounter something your system perceives as threatening, this branch kicks in. Your heart rate increases, breathing gets shallow, blood moves away from digestion and into your muscles, and stress hormones flood your system. This is brilliant design when you’re facing actual danger.

The parasympathetic nervous system handles rest, digestion, and recovery. This is your ‘safe and social’ state, where your body can heal, connect, and restore.

The problem is, in modern life, we activate the stress response constantly—traffic, work deadlines, relationship conflicts, financial pressure, even scrolling through distressing news. But we rarely get to complete the stress cycle.

In nature, when an animal escapes danger, it literally shakes it off. You’ve probably seen a dog shake after a stressful encounter. That’s the nervous system discharging activation, completing the stress response.

But humans? We’re told to ‘stay professional,’ ‘keep it together,’ ‘not make a scene.’ So we suppress the shake. We hold in the scream. We swallow the tears. And all that activation gets stored in the body as chronic tension, tightness, and unprocessed stress.

Over time, if you have enough incomplete stress cycles stored up, your nervous system starts running hot. You become hypervigilant—always scanning for danger. Your baseline level of activation is higher than it should be. Then even small things can tip you into overwhelm.

Why Small Things Trigger Big Reactions

Let me give you an example. Someone cuts you off in traffic, and suddenly you’re furious—white-knuckle, heart-racing, want-to-scream furious. But you know, logically, that this reaction is too big for the situation.

That’s because your nervous system isn’t just reacting to the car cutting you off. It’s reacting to every time you’ve felt unseen, dismissed, or disrespected. Your body is bringing up old activation—old stress responses that never fully completed.

This is why understanding emotions requires understanding the nervous system. You’re not being irrational or oversensitive. Your body is responding to a lifetime of accumulated, unprocessed stress—and it’s trying to protect you based on what it learned was dangerous in the past.

The good news? Once you understand this, you can start working with your nervous system instead of against it. You can start completing those old stress responses and teaching your body that it’s safe now.

The Anxiety That Isn’t Even Yours: Understanding Inherited Emotional Patterns

Now we’re going to go even deeper—into territory that might sound surprising at first, but that’s backed by both cutting-edge science and ancient wisdom.

Some of the anxiety, fear, or tension you’re carrying isn’t actually yours.

It’s inherited from your family system.

The Science of Inherited Trauma

Research in the field of epigenetics has revealed something remarkable: traumatic experiences can actually change our gene expression—and those changes can be passed down to our children and grandchildren.

Studies on Holocaust survivors, for instance, have shown that their descendants carry specific markers related to stress response, even if those descendants never experienced trauma themselves. Similar patterns have been found in the children and grandchildren of those who survived famine, war, displacement, and other collective traumas.

But it’s not just biological. It’s also emotional and systemic.

Children are incredibly perceptive. We absorb the emotional atmosphere of our families like sponges. If your mother was chronically anxious, you might have learned to be hypervigilant—always scanning for danger—even if nothing bad ever happened to you personally. If your father carried unspoken grief, you might find yourself feeling inexplicably sad without knowing why.

Family Constellations: Understanding Systemic Patterns

This is where family constellation work becomes invaluable. Family constellations is a therapeutic approach that looks at how patterns, traumas, and emotional states move through family systems across generations.

The key insight is this: families are systems, and systems have their own dynamics and loyalties. On a deep, unconscious level, we often try to ‘carry’ things for the people we love—even if doing so causes us suffering.

Let me share a real example. I worked with a client who had chronic anxiety around money. No matter how much she earned, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was going to lose everything. She checked her bank account multiple times a day and couldn’t enjoy anything she bought because of guilt and fear.

Logically, it made no sense. She had a stable career, savings, no debt. But her body told a different story.

In our family constellation work, what emerged was that her grandmother had lived through a famine. Her grandmother’s children—including this woman’s father—grew up in a household where scarcity was the lived reality. Where survival was precarious.

That fear of scarcity, that survival hypervigilance, had been passed down through the family system. Her father carried it as generalized anxiety and a need to control resources. And she inherited it as an inability to feel safe with money.

When she was able to see this—to recognize, ‘This fear isn’t about my bank account. This is my grandmother’s fear. This is my father’s fear’—something shifted. She could honor the real struggle her grandmother went through, acknowledge the survival instinct that kept her family alive, and then choose to put it down.

This is the power of understanding inherited patterns. It transforms ‘I’m broken and I don’t know why’ into ‘I’m carrying something for my family, and I can choose to release it.’ One leaves you powerless. The other gives you agency.

What Actually Helps: Working With Your Body, Not Just Your Mind

So if understanding emotions requires understanding your nervous system and family patterns, what do you actually do about it?

Here are the most effective approaches I’ve found in my work as a somatic therapist:

1. Learn to Listen to Your Body

The first step is developing body awareness—what’s called ‘interoception’ in the research. This means regularly checking in with your body and asking: What am I feeling right now? Where is it located? What does it need?

This isn’t about immediately fixing or changing what you find. It’s about creating a relationship with your body where you actually listen instead of override.

Try this: Pause right now. Notice where you’re holding tension. Your jaw? Your shoulders? Your belly? Just acknowledge it. Say hello to it. This simple practice, done regularly, begins to shift your relationship with your emotions from antagonistic to curious.

2. Complete Stress Cycles Through Movement

Remember how I mentioned that animals shake off stress? Your body wants to do the same thing. Stress responses get completed through physical movement.

This doesn’t mean you need to hit the gym (though exercise can help). It means giving your body permission to move the way it wants to move. Shake your hands. Roll your shoulders. Stretch. Dance. Go for a walk. Let sound out—sigh, hum, even scream into a pillow if you need to.

These aren’t random coping mechanisms. They’re how your nervous system discharges stored activation and returns to regulation.

3. Distinguish Between ‘Mine’ and ‘Not Mine’

When you notice uncomfortable emotions arising, pause and ask: Is this feeling mine? Is it about now, or about then? Could this be something I’m carrying for someone else in my family?

If you sense that what you’re feeling might be inherited, try this powerful family constellation practice: Visualize the person it might belong to (a parent, grandparent, ancestor). Acknowledge what they went through. Honor their struggle. Then, either in your mind or out loud, say: ‘I see what you carried. I honor your strength. And I’m going to leave this burden with you now. You are the big one. I am the small one. I’m going to live my own life.’

This simple ritual can create profound shifts. You’re not dishonoring your family—you’re honoring the natural order and claiming your right to live your own life.

4. Build Nervous System Regulation Into Your Daily Life

Healing doesn’t just happen in therapy or meditation. It happens in the small, consistent practices you build into your everyday life.

Some of the most effective nervous system regulation practices include:

• Grounding: Notice five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear. This brings you into the present moment and tells your nervous system you’re safe.

• Orienting: Look slowly around your environment, letting your gaze rest on things that feel neutral or pleasant. This activates your ventral vagal system (the social engagement part of your nervous system).

• Self-touch: Place your hands on your heart, belly, or anywhere that feels soothing. The warmth and pressure signal safety to your nervous system.

• Humming or singing: Sound vibration stimulates the vagus nerve and promotes regulation.

• Connection: Safe, attuned relationships are one of the most powerful regulators of the nervous system. Spend time with people who help you feel safe and seen.

5. Consider Working With a Somatic Therapist or Family Constellation Facilitator

While there’s a lot you can do on your own, sometimes the deeper layers require professional support. A skilled somatic therapist can help you safely access and release stored trauma in your body. A family constellation facilitator can help you see and shift the invisible dynamics in your family system.

This work isn’t about finding someone to ‘fix’ you. It’s about having a compassionate witness and guide as you navigate your own healing journey.

A Guided Practice to Get Started

If you’re ready to experience these concepts in practice, I’ve created a 35-minute guided meditation that takes you through the process of understanding your emotions, working with your nervous system, and releasing inherited patterns.

This isn’t your typical ‘just breathe and relax’ meditation. It’s therapeutic education combined with a somatic practice that helps you:

• Connect with your body and nervous system

• Identify what emotions are yours versus what’s inherited

• Complete stress cycles through movement and sound

• Release family patterns with compassion and clarity

• Build a healthier relationship with your emotions

You can access the full guided meditation here

It’s also available on Spotify, SoundCloud, and Insight Timer if you prefer those platforms.

The Journey of Understanding Your Emotions

Here’s what I want you to take away from this article:

Your emotions are not problems. They’re information. They’re intelligent messengers trying to tell you something important about your internal and external world.

Your nervous system is doing its best to protect you based on what it learned was dangerous in the past. When you understand this, you can start working with your body instead of against it.

Some of what you’re feeling might not even be yours. You might be carrying emotional patterns and nervous system activation inherited from your family. And once you become aware of this, you can choose to release it.

This isn’t a one-time fix. It’s a practice. A journey of developing a new relationship with your body, your emotions, and your family system. But it’s a journey worth taking—because on the other side is a life where you feel more at home in your own skin, more at peace with your emotions, and more free to be yourself.

You’re not broken. You’re not too sensitive. You’re not defective. You’re human. And your body is trying to tell you something.

Are you ready to listen?

About the Author

Abi is a somatic therapist and family constellation facilitator who helps people understand what’s happening in their bodies and family systems. IPHM-accredited in integrative somatic therapy and currently completing an MSc in Counselling and Psychotherapy, Abi offers trauma-informed, body-based healing sessions both in-person and online worldwide. Find more resources and book sessions at blissfulevolution.com, somatictherapyireland.com, and familyconstellationseurope.com.