Your ability to assist someone in emotional distress depends mostly on how well you understand your own emotional challenges and can manage your own reactivity. This is not a preliminary step to be completed before the real work begins. It is the work—ongoing, never finished, essential.

Becoming aware of our own reactivity, managing it, understanding where it comes from, what it means, and what to do about it—these are aspects of self-awareness, which is a lifelong odyssey for everyone. There is no point at which you have achieved sufficient self-awareness. There is only the practice, renewed each day.

To assist others, start with yourself.

Where Feelings Come From

Feelings do not emerge from nowhere. They arise from the layers of experience that shape each person—developmental history, trauma responses, mental health adaptations, and the substances or behaviors that maintain the pattern. Understanding these layers helps make sense of emotional reactions that otherwise seem inexplicable or excessive.

The person who rages at minor provocations may be responding to something much older than the present moment. The person who shuts down when connection becomes possible may be protecting themselves from anticipated abandonment. The colleague whose anxiety seems disproportionate may be running a scanning program installed decades ago. When you understand feelings as emerging from layers, the reactions you witness in others—and in yourself—become less mysterious.

When Feelings Require Attention

Certain patterns signal that feelings need more attention:

  • Absence or unawareness of feelings. When someone reports feeling nothing, or cannot identify what they feel, this often indicates disconnection from emotional experience—a protective adaptation that has costs.
  • Persistent or cyclic uncomfortable feelings. Depression that doesn’t lift, anxiety that never settles, anger that keeps returning—these patterns suggest something unresolved that keeps asserting itself.
  • Situational feelings that are hard to control. Emotional reactions that seem disproportionate to their triggers often point to older material being activated by current circumstances.
  • Feelings that embody long-standing harm or loss. Grief that never completed, betrayals never processed, violations never acknowledged—these persist until they receive adequate attention.

Difficult feelings—guilt, shame, grief, anger, despair—are not problems to be eliminated but experiences to be understood and integrated. Resolving them does not mean they go away. It means your relationship with them shifts from adversarial to companionable. You can carry sorrow without being crushed by it. You can feel fear without being controlled by it.

Self-Awareness Challenges

Understanding emotions in the abstract is one thing. Managing your own activation in real time, while trying to help someone else, is another.

Recognizing Activation

We get activated emotionally by many different things, sometimes in unexpected ways. Something in the layers of our personal history resonates with what we’re witnessing, and suddenly we’re not just present with another person’s pain—we’re caught in our own.

Activation is often unconscious. A client’s story about neglect may activate your own unresolved developmental material. A colleague’s rage may trigger your childhood terror of angry adults. These connections happen below conscious awareness, driving responses before we know what’s happening. We advise when we should listen. We withdraw when we should stay. We react to our own material while the person in front of us wonders what happened.

We tend to feel that our activation happens because of what others do. They made me angry. They triggered me. They pushed my buttons. The reality is that our activation happens entirely inside us—and is our responsibility to notice and address. No one can make you feel anything. They can do things that your system reacts to, but the reaction is yours. Recognizing this is empowering: if your activation belongs to you, then you can do something about it.

The Practice of Self-Observation

Your ability to be continually aware of your own emotional activation is the most important factor in determining the outcomes of emotional conversations with others. Not techniques, not training, not theoretical knowledge—self-observation.

The skill of turning attention inward—how am I feeling, what am I thinking, what’s happening for me—requires much practice. Most of us are trained to focus outward, on tasks and problems and other people. Directing attention to our own inner state feels unfamiliar, even self-indulgent. But self-observation is not self-absorption. It is the foundation of effective helping. When you know what you’re feeling, you can choose how to respond. When you don’t know, your feelings choose for you.

As Jung wrote: One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The work is not to eliminate activation but to witness it. Self-observation is curiosity without judgment—you notice what arises without deciding it’s good or bad. When you can see your own reactivity clearly, it loses some of its power to drive your behavior. The clearer you see yourself, the clearer you can see others.

Get Yourself Out of the Way

The most effective listeners and helpers take responsibility for their own emotions and try to keep them out of the way—or bring them forward appropriately—in conversations with others.

With practice, you can suspend your own activation and judgment and deal with it at a later time. This does not mean suppression, which is pushing feelings down and pretending they don’t exist. It means choosing when and how to engage your own material.

You acknowledge the activation: I notice I’m getting reactive here. You set it aside: I’ll come back to this later. You return attention to the other person: Right now, I’m here with you.

Clear the channel first, process later.

Risks of Harm

When we become emotionally activated beyond our ability to manage or contain, we run the risk of harming others—even when we are trying to help them. Our reactivity takes over. We say things we don’t mean, or mean things we shouldn’t say. We act from our own wounds rather than responding to their needs.

We also harm ourselves when we do not deal with strong emotions in our lives. Suppressed activation doesn’t disappear; it accumulates, affecting health, relationships, and capacity for presence.

Finding pathways to address and resolve the challenges of our emotional life is one of the most important things we can do—not just for others, but for ourselves.

Unexamined reactivity is the source of most relational harm.

The Ongoing Work

Self-awareness is not a destination. It is an ongoing practice, renewed in each encounter, deepened over years of attention. The questions never stop: What am I carrying into this moment? What is being activated in me? What do I need to set aside to be fully present?

The answers change. New material surfaces. Patterns that seemed resolved return in different forms. This is not failure; it is the nature of the work.

To assist others, keep returning to yourself. Not narcissistically, but practically—because your capacity to help depends on your capacity to see clearly. And you cannot see others clearly when your own material is clouding the view.

This is the work that underlies all other work. Everything else rests on this foundation.

Continue to Helping Others Through Emotional Distress for practical strategies to use in situations of emotional intensity.