When Silence Breaks Open

Part 2: From emotional survival to the awakening of voice

This is the second post in my series “Mapping the Emotional Landscape,” exploring how emotional overexcitability developed across five distinct phases of my life. In Phase 1, I shared how emotional intensity felt too dangerous to feel fully—seventeen years of fragmentation and survival. Now we turn to Phase 2, when that protective silence finally began to break open.

Photo by Nora Jane Long on Unsplash

If Phase 1 was about enduring, Phase 2 was about emerging. The years from 2007 to 2013 marked a fundamental shift in my relationship with emotional intensity—from something that happened to me to something I could finally engage with. More than the end of overwhelm, this was the beginning of agency.

The transition wasn’t coincidental in its timing. In 2006, I became a parent—an experience that cracked me open in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. Suddenly, I had someone depending on my emotional availability, someone whose well-being required that I learn to be present with feelings rather than fleeing from them. Parenthood made emotional avoidance impossible and emotional growth necessary.

“In the shower, I was thinking about the postpartum depression part of my story. How hard that was—incredibly hard. And how shocking it was to experience being that mentally ill after several years of relative stability. I honestly thought about walking away… and disappearing. Just becoming homeless and giving up everything. The overwhelming emotions—the desire to hurt myself, throw and smash things. The mood swings.” (November 22, 2007)

This was the breaking of the silence. The beginning of Phase 2.

Finding My Voice Through Story

The most striking difference between Phase 1 and Phase 2 shows up in how I wrote about emotions. Where Phase 1 offered fragments and distress signals, Phase 2 reveals someone actively working to understand and articulate emotional experience.

Writing became my primary tool for emotional archaeology. I developed what I can only describe as a somatic relationship with story—my body would tell me when something needed to be written:

“Such an emotional story came to me while I was in the shower. It was when I worked at JCH and Bill asked me if I was ok. Man that was rough. I wrote it up and posted it on LiveJournal. Any time a story makes me cry, I know it’s time to write it up.” (February 25, 2010)

This was excavation work. I was digging up buried experiences and giving them form, learning that putting words to emotional reality could transform it:

“I am so drained emotionally… I just wrote about Grammie, which made me cry so hard. Whew... Because I never finished the first draft. It was too painful and too emotional to move past Grampie’s death. To tackle all the difficult things that came later.” (April 5, 2010)

The most difficult stories often yielded the most relief. I was learning that emotional processing had its own rhythms and requirements.

Learning to Grieve

Phase 2 was marked by significant losses that forced me to develop new capacities for processing grief. When my father died in 2009, I documented the unfolding of mourning with a precision that would have been impossible in Phase 1:

“My father died yesterday. I am still in shock. It’s hard to believe he’s really gone… Today I was really out of it. I’m hoping to take the week off. Maybe work a little. I just need to grieve and let it sink in. It’s been a really long time coming. It feels weird to only have one parent left. And now my mom is free. Free to live her life in peace. I know that each day this coming week or two I’ll probably go through many more emotions.” (October 25, 2009)

The next day, I could feel the emotional reality shifting:

“Tonight I was looking over old journals and it occurred to me that in the [imaginal world], my father has been dead for 26 years. In real life, it’s just two days. But now he’s gone in both worlds. It’s weird. I was less in shock today and more emotional.” (October 26, 2009)

Weeks later, I was learning to accept professional guidance from my therapist about the healing process:

“Tonight I saw Mark to talk to him about how I’m doing and what to do about work. He doesn’t think I should go in this week. He’ll give me a note to return on Monday if that’s what we decide to do when I see him on Saturday. We talked about complicated grief and the way the emotions I’m feeling have both surprised and overwhelmed me. I cried for the first time in a session with him. I hate to do that, but there was no stopping it. He said it’s not good to hold tears back, that it just interferes with healing.” (November 17, 2009)

These entries show someone learning to anticipate emotional needs, to make space for grief, and to track the subtle changes in feeling across time. The progression from trying to return to work immediately to accepting that grief required time and space demonstrates a crucial shift. I was developing emotional literacy—not only the ability to feel, but the capacity to observe and articulate what I was feeling, and to accept professional guidance about emotional healing.

The Laboratory of Relationship

Phase 2 was when I discovered that emotions are fundamentally relational. The breakthrough came through examining my relationship with Dr. B, a psychiatrist who became something like a father figure during my early twenties:

“I was just up in our room looking at journals again. I clearly liked Dr. B telling me what to do. He sure did enough of it... I have to write about what it felt like when I saw him. It was a very distinct feeling. It was like, all was right with the world in that moment. I smiled involuntarily. It’s really tough to put into words. I liked him from the beginning, but the more I saw him, the more I liked him. He was funny and perceptive. I started to feel really safe talking to him. And his office was the safest place I knew. I had been so stunted emotionally that once I felt safe with him, I became a kid with him. A teenager.” (February 26, 2010)

But that safety came with complications. The very feelings that drew me to Dr. B also triggered patterns I couldn’t yet control:

“I definitely think the next thing to write about Dr. B is how much I liked him and how much it seemed like I didn’t [like him] to observers. It was really frustrating and inside, I felt shame for being an asshole to someone I liked and respected so much. It was like being a kid and throwing a rock at someone you like. I was not mature enough to handle my emotions. Was it manipulation? Or was it getting my needs met? I still struggled with anger, and I felt safe enough to get angry with him. It turned out to be the beginning of a very healing relationship for me.” (February 17, 2010)

This is what Dąbrowski called ambitendency—the simultaneous pull toward and push away from what we most need. I was drawn to Dr. B’s presence and care, yet my immature emotional capacities made me lash out at the very person I most valued. The closer I felt to him, the more volatile my behavior became. This wasn’t manipulation in any conscious sense; it was the paradox of someone who desperately needed connection but lacked the developmental structures to receive it safely. The relationship could hold this tension, and in that holding, something began to heal.

This became my first real laboratory for emotional development because it could hold complexity. With Dr. B, I learned what it felt like to be truly seen, even in my most difficult moments:

“For now, I think I’ll keep moving forward with the journals and making notes about things that strike me. When people got to me—really made a connection with me—it was so hard to talk to them seriously. It was such a pattern. I wanted so much to really talk, but I couldn’t. It took so long to let down my guard with people. Here I’m speaking of Mr. Harrison, the Holms, Pat, Chris, Dave, Dr. N, Dr. B. There were plenty of people and shrinks that never had a chance to get through to me. The times when I actually got emotional with these people were watershed moments. Real trust.” (February 4, 2010)

What strikes me now is how I understood, even then, that emotional growth required the right conditions. It was not enough to just feel—I needed safe containers, trusted witnesses, relationships that could hold the intensity without breaking. The paradox was that feeling safe enough to express difficult emotions, even destructively, became part of the healing process itself.

Professional Integration: Choosing to Engage

During this phase, I made a conscious decision to move toward emotional complexity rather than away from it. I chose to study child welfare in graduate school and work in child protection—essentially building a career around the very dynamics that had once nearly destroyed me.

I was learning to transform my wounded knowledge into professional expertise, my personal experience into a source of insight that could serve others.

The work was often overwhelming:

“I have so much shit to do at work—that’s definitely one of my problems with being there. It’s overwhelming to me during this emotional/stressful time. I find my emotions to be very labile. I’m all over the place.” (November 4, 2009)

But I was developing the capacity to hold emotional complexity professionally, to be present with others’ pain without being destroyed by it.

The Exhaustion of Growth

One of the most honest aspects of Phase 2 is how thoroughly it documents the labor involved in emotional development. This wasn’t a gentle unfolding—it was intensive, exhausting work:

“I have an appointment with Mark tonight and I’m already burned out emotionally. I cried for about a half hour while showering, thinking of interviews. Two with me and one with Richard. It was tough. And it wasn’t bad stuff, but sometimes good stuff makes you cry, too.” (March 17, 2010)

These weren’t literal interviews—they were scenes unfolding in my imaginal world, where I was processing relationships and experiences through narrative. The emotional reality of that inner work was as demanding as any external processing. I was learning that imaginational overexcitability creates vivid mental experiences while generating real emotional labor that requires real recovery.

I began to understand that emotional processing had its own rhythms and requirements, regardless of whether it happened in response to external events or internal narrative. I needed recovery time after particularly intense imaginative work. This was a crucial lesson that I hadn’t learned in Phase 1: emotional work is real work. It requires energy, attention, and recovery.

The capacity to feel deeply is a gift, but it’s also a responsibility—to myself and to others who depend on my emotional availability.

From Victim to Witness

The fundamental shift of Phase 2 was from being at the mercy of my emotions to becoming their witness and interpreter. I wasn’t yet their master—that kind of sovereignty would come later—but I was no longer their victim.

“I really grew up during my time with Dr. B. First, it was him, when I was incredibly immature… He spent a year filling in like a parent, giving me exactly what I needed. And then he was there for me, as a back up really, when I was growing up the hard way. I knew I could call on him, and that felt good, but I didn’t. I made it through on my own, and it ended up changing my life. He gave me enough tools emotionally to handle myself. And I took it from there.” (March 19, 2010)

I learned that emotions could be studied, understood, and worked with. They had patterns and purposes. They carried information. Most importantly, they could be shared with others without destroying either of us.

During this phase, I also began to notice shifts in how my mind processed difficult experiences. The rich imaginative world that had once served as escape was gradually transforming into something else—a capacity for creative integration, for finding new ways to metabolize and transform painful material. I was learning that the same mental processes that had once protected me through dissociation could evolve into tools for healing and meaning-making.

The Emergence of Purpose

By the end of Phase 2, something new was emerging: a sense that my emotional intensity might have purpose beyond personal survival:

“I got a little emotional today thinking about the story of the book. That I had such a promising future as a kid. Everyone always expected me to do great things. Then I have my first manic episode at 18 and write the book. I start to deteriorate at 19-20, and it’s like hell for almost 7 years. Even then, it takes me a long time to stabilize, but I do. And the potential at school is fulfilled. It takes time, but I get to where I am now. It’s hard to remember what it was like for everyone to be like, you’re brilliant and you can do anything, to going in and out of mental hospitals. Eventually giving up on myself. But then pulling it together. Getting stability with Jason. It’s amazing, but it was hard. I’ve had a tough life, but a good life, too.” (April 12, 2010)

This entry reveals how thoroughly I had internalized a pathologizing narrative about my own experience. A clinician had convinced me that my first book—written during what I now understand was a period of intense creative flow—was the product of a manic episode. I carried this reframing for years, well into Phase 3, allowing it to reshape my understanding of one of the most significant achievements of my young adulthood. Only much later would I recognize that what I had experienced was not mania but multiple overexcitabilities in full bloom.

Even while accepting this misinterpretation of my own experience, I was learning to trust that my emotional reality had value, that it contained knowledge worth sharing, experiences worth understanding. The silence had broken open, and I was finding my voice as someone who had survived emotional intensity and transformed it into insight, relationship, and eventually, service to others who were still learning to speak their own truths.

What Phase 2 Taught Me

Phase 2 established the foundational truth that would guide all my subsequent development: emotions are relational, and healing happens in relationship. The safety I found with Dr. B, the trust I learned to extend to others, the capacity to be witnessed in my vulnerability—these became the building blocks for everything that followed.

This phase also taught me that emotional overexcitability operates as more than feeling intensely; it involves feeling more accurately. My emotions were carrying information about my experiences, my relationships, and my environment that I needed to learn to read. The exhaustion I felt was evidence of the real work happening—the work of integration, of transformation, of becoming.

Most importantly, Phase 2 showed me that my intensity could serve others. Whether through my professional work, my writing, or my willingness to be vulnerable in relationship, I was learning that what had once felt like a curse could become a gift.

In the next post, I’ll explore Phase 3: the years when emotional intensity revealed itself as a form of intelligence—when feeling deeply became a way of knowing, and my emotions began carrying information not only about my own healing, but about the universal nature of human connection and growth.

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