139. Too Emotional After the Affair? Or Just Too Afraid to Feel?

Have you ever been told you're too emotional, or secretly believed it yourself?

If conflict overwhelms you, if you shut down or spiral in arguments, if you find yourself apologising just for feeling… this episode is for you.

I explore why emotional reactivity is often a learned survival strategy, rooted in fear, not dysfunction. From childhood patterns to nervous system responses, you'll gain insight into why certain emotions feel unbearable and how to build the capacity to stay with them without losing yourself.

This episode is not about shrinking your feelings. It’s about expanding your ability to hold them.

Key Takeaways:

• Emotional overwhelm in conflict is often rooted in early survival responses

• You're not “too much”, you were just never taught how to feel safe

• Conflict becomes intolerable when we fear what our emotions mean, not just what they are

• Nervous system regulation isn’t about staying calm; it’s about staying connected

• Real emotional power is built by staying with your feelings, not controlling the outcome

💬 Reflection Questions:

What part of you is afraid to feel? And what would it look like to support that part, instead of suppressing it?

Connect with Luke:

• Website: www.lifecoachluke.com

• Instagram: @mylifecoachluke

• Email: luke@lifecoachluke.com

Join the After the Affair community at www.facebook.com/groups/aftertheaffaircommunity

Episode Transcript:

The After The Affair podcast with me, Luke Shillings is here to help you process, decide, and move forward on purpose following infidelity. Together we'll explore what's required to rebuild trust not only in yourself. But also with others. Whether you stay or leave, I can help. And no matter what your story, there will be something here for you.

Let's go.

Hello and welcome to the After the Affair podcast. I'm your host, Luke Shillings, and you are listening to episode number 139 last week. I talked about the deeper story behind our craving for reassurance. How often the endless need to hear, I'm not leaving or you are enough, or it won't happen again, has less to do with our partner's behaviour and more to do with old survival strategies that we learned long before this relationship ever even began.

We explored how that reassurance, while comforting in the moment often doesn't stick because it's trying to fill a hole. It didn't create. And maybe that hit home for you, maybe you realised that the fear you are carrying isn't just about what your partner did, it's about what your nervous system believes could happen next.

This week, I want to build on that foundation. 'cause if you've ever found yourself stuck in a loop of emotional reactivity, whether that's shutting down. Exploding, clinging or just overthinking, there's a chance. It's not because you are quote unquote, too emotional. This is because no one ever taught you how to feel.

They never taught you how to feel safely. So today I want to dive into what actually sits beneath these emotional spirals. It's not immaturity, it's not dysfunction. It's not weakness. It's fear. Fear of being rejected, fear of being abandoned, fear of being misunderstood, or never understood at all. This episode is about reclaiming your ability to feel without falling apart because you are not too emotional.

You're just carrying feelings. You are never taught how to hold, and here's what's important to understand before we go any further. The problem isn't that you feel deeply. The problem is that your body was never shown what to do with those feelings. You were never taught how to ride the wave of emotion without bracing for impact.

You were never taught that intensity doesn't have to mean danger, and you were probably never given the space to feel everything without being told that you were too loud, too sensitive, too dramatic, or just too much. So it makes sense, doesn't it? It makes sense that now as an adult, especially in moments of conflict, betrayal or disconnection, you find yourself completely emotionally flooded.

Either that is with emotion or it's with shame for having emotion. So instead, you lash out or you go silent or you cry, and then immediately apologise for it. You might even watch yourself from the outside thinking, oh, why am I like this? Why can't I just be calm and I want to gently offer that? Maybe it's just not about you being bad at feelings.

Maybe you've just never been taught how to feel without fear. So let's start there. Let's unpack what it really means to be quote unquote, too emotional, and why that label says more about the environment you were raised in than it does about who you are as a person. 'cause when you start to see your emotional intensity, not as a flaw to fix, but as a signal to understand.

It changes things. So let's talk about what happens in those moments. The ones where something small triggers something big, your partner might say something that feels dismissive, their tone changes. They look away for just a second too long, or maybe they don't say anything at all, and the silence becomes deafening.

You feel it instantly. There's that tightening in your chest, the heat's rising to your face. Then there's a sinking, spiralling feeling in your stomach. And even if nothing explosive is happening on the outside, internally you're flooded. And here's what that moment looks like through the lens of survival.

One, a trigger hits something that signals potential disconnection or rejection. Two, your nervous system interprets this as a threat. Three, you move into a reactive response. You lash out. You try and gain control. You withdraw trying to stay safe, you overexplain, you try and fix it, or you shut down. Maybe you try and disappear.

Four. Then comes guilt. Why did I do that again? I always ruin things. If they're gonna leave, if I keep acting like this. And finally, five. You disconnect. You disconnect from them, and often from yourself. That's what is known as the fear loop. It's not about the situation, it's about what the situation represents to your nervous system, and that fear loop is powerful because it confirms the very story that you're trying to escape.

I'm too much. I dunno how to do this. I'm always ending up pushing people away. But the truth is, you're not reacting to this moment alone. You're reacting to every unresolved moment that has come before it. Every time your emotions were too big for the room that you were in. Every time vulnerability was met with criticism or indifference, every time you were told to calm down, told to grow up or to stop being so sensitive.

So now you don't just fear what's happening. You fear how you'll handle what's happening, and that's what makes emotional avoidance just so tempting. It feels like safety. You pull away to avoid saying the wrong thing. You're over function to keep everything from falling apart. You stay silent, not because you don't have anything to say, but because you're terrified that saying it will make it even worse.

Avoiding emotion doesn't protect you, it just postpones the explosion because feelings that aren't processed don't disappear. They just compress, they build. It's like a pressure vessel that just keeps building and building and eventually. They erupt often in moments that have absolutely nothing to do with the original wound.

So if you've ever found yourself thinking, why do I react this way? Why do I keep making things worse? Let me offer something. You're not reacting because you're broken. You're reacting because you're afraid. Afraid of being abandoned. Afraid of being misunderstood. Afraid of being punished for how you might feel.

But fear doesn't have to lead. Not anymore. When you become aware of this loop, you can actually start to begin to interrupt it. You can name what's happening. You can pause, you can breathe, you can come back into your body and choose a different response. And that's where the power starts. Not in never feeling fear, but in recognising it without obeying it.

I'll tell you what, let's zoom out a little, because the way that we show up in adult conflict isn't created in the heat of the argument. It's shaped by something much earlier, something many of us don't even realise we've been carrying. It's shaped by the emotional rules that we learned in our childhood.

I mean, were you allowed to feel. Could you be angry without being punished? Did anyone sit beside you and say, it's okay to feel what you feel? I'm not going anywhere, or did you learn to be easy, to be agreeable, to just keep the peace to hold back so others wouldn't get uncomfortable? Maybe emotions in your home were unpredictable.

Maybe you were tiptoeing around a parent's mood, never sure which version of them you'd get that day. Maybe you watched big emotional moments lead to withdrawal or punishment or shame, and so you adapted because that's what children do. They adapt. You learn that. Maybe my feelings are dangerous. Love is fragile and earned.

If I get upset, people leave. If I stay quiet, maybe things won't get worse. Fast forward into your adult relationships and now you are arguing with a partner or you are sitting in silence that feels suffocating, or you're flooded with emotion and you dunno what to do with it, and you tell yourself. I'm overreacting.

I need to calm down. I'm ruining things again, but pause. Is that really you in the moment or is it just a much younger version of you? A scared, un inhaled, emotionally unsupported version Doing the only thing that it ever learned because. This is what's so often misunderstood in conflict. You're not fighting your partner, you're fighting for safety, and you're doing it the only way your nervous system knows how.

That's why you might shut down during conflict, not because you don't care, but because silence once felt like the safest option. That's why sometimes you might find yourself exploding, not because you're irrational, but because no one ever taught you how to hold big emotion. Without letting it take over.

That's why you might clinging, apologise too much overexplain, because as a child, being good meant staying connected. But those are strategies, not faults, not character flaws, not proof in any way, shape or form that you are broken. They're just strategies that once kept you emotionally alive. And they served you, but now, now they're probably hurting the very connection that you're trying to protect.

And that's okay because you're not stuck with them. You can learn new strategies. You can create new safety. You just have to stop expecting yourself to be a calm, regulated adult in conflict without acknowledging the scared, unsupported child still trying to survive inside of you. So what's the work?

It's not becoming less emotional. That's for a start. It's instead becoming more present with your emotion. It's developing the capacity to stay with what rises instead of running from it or making it your partner's job to manage it. Here's what that could look like in practice: when you are feeling overwhelmed, you pause and name what's happening.

I feel scared, or I feel like I'm about to be rejected. Then you can maybe place your hand on your chest. You breathe. You remind yourself, this is a feeling. I don't need to run from it. You can give your nervous system a way to release that energy. Perhaps that's a walk or a journal entry, or sometimes just simply sitting still without judging what you're experiencing.

I know this sounds really simple, but they're just these basic acts of emotional re-parenting where you are the parent of you. You are telling your body, we're not in danger. We can stay with this, and we're okay. Because the goal isn't to become less reactive. It's to become less afraid of the feeling. So let's rewrite the narrative.

You don't need to shrink your feelings. You don't need to apologise for having needs. You don't need to keep proving that you are not too much. You need space. You need tools and you need the belief that your emotions are not a threat. They're a message, and yes, they might be a bit messy and loud at times.

They might come out sideways and not make a lot of sense, but the work isn't to silence them, is to build a life where they're allowed to exist and where you know how to meet them because you are not too emotional. You're just emotionally undersupported. That changes the moment you stop abandoning yourself in your feelings.

So I want to leave you with this. You were never too much, you were just too young to know how to hold what you were feeling, and no one showed you how. But now, now you are the one who gets to show up For that part of you, it's not gonna be perfect. It's not always gonna be in control, but it is with presence, with awareness, because real safety doesn't come from avoiding emotion.

It comes from knowing that you can handle it without shame, without fear, without running that. Is emotional power, my friends. That's healing and that's what you deserve. If this episode spoke to something deep inside of you, I'd love to hear from you. Message me on Instagram. You can access that at my life, coach Luke, share it with somebody who needs it or, or visit lifecoachluke.com and schedule a discovery call with me and we can maybe talk about what this might look like for you.

So until then, feel it all. Stay with it and know. That you are not too emotional, you're just finally feeling it. I'll speak to you soon. Take care.