Understanding the Past in the Present
Have you ever felt a wave of sadness hit you like a tidal wave, seemingly out of nowhere? Or found yourself disproportionately angry at a minor frustration? These emotional surges can feel confusing—especially when they don’t seem to match the current moment. But here’s something important to understand, especially when working through trauma: when emotions show up in intensity, it often means we’re brushing up against a memory from the past.
This isn’t always a conscious memory. In fact, most of the time, it’s not. Our bodies and nervous systems remember what our minds may not. The overwhelming grief that makes it hard to get out of bed might not be about today’s disappointment—it might be a somatic echo of what you felt as a child when no one noticed your pain. The panic that arises in response to a neutral expression on someone’s face might be the body remembering what it meant when your caregiver turned cold. These responses aren’t irrational. They’re familiar.
Emotions as Time Travelers
Think of intense emotions as time travelers. When we feel something strongly, we are often touching into an emotional state that was encoded at an earlier time—one that never got fully seen, processed, or soothed. These states live in the body and show up as if they belong to now, but they often belong to then.
For many trauma survivors, this is especially true. Childhoods marked by neglect, abuse, or emotional misattunement often don’t allow space for emotions to be acknowledged, let alone regulated. Those feelings don’t go away; they wait. And later in life, they find openings—in situations that carry a whiff of the old dynamics, or when we’re feeling vulnerable, or when the defenses we’ve built up start to soften.
Why This Matters in Therapy
As trauma therapists, we normalize this experience. We help our clients understand that the intensity of their feeling doesn’t make them “too sensitive” or “irrational.” It makes them human. And it points toward something that matters—something that may need tending to.
When a client shares that their sadness feels bigger than the situation calls for, we don’t try to talk them out of it. We get curious. We explore when else that feeling might have been present. We wonder, together, whether this might be a memory—not a narrative memory, necessarily, but an emotional or somatic one.
This is one of the core principles of trauma work: the past lives in the present until it is acknowledged.
How We Can Respond
When we start to recognize these intense emotional states as cues from the past, we can respond differently. Instead of trying to shut them down, we can meet them with compassion. Instead of assuming something is wrong with us, we can ask: What is this feeling trying to show me? Whose voice is this? Whose sadness am I holding?
From this place, we begin to offer ourselves what was missing back then—attunement, validation, safety.
Final Thoughts
If you find yourself—or your clients—swept up in emotion that doesn’t seem to “make sense,” consider the possibility that something old is surfacing. Intensity is rarely about the moment itself. It’s about everything that moment reminds us of.
Healing begins when we stop judging our emotions and start listening to them.
