Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Dysregulated or Intense
In this episode, we flip that script by drawing a clear line between emotional intensity and nervous system dysregulation...and we show how to keep choice, language, and discernment online even when emotions are high.
We dig into how meaning-making...not the size of a feeling, determines whether your prefrontal cortex stays online. You’ll learn practical somatic tools for integrating strong states without suppressing them: breath pacing, grounding, orienting, and gentle movement that help the body complete what the mind understands.
We contrast self-leadership with survival responses like shutdown or overaccommodation, and we confront cultural biases that mislabel women’s emotional range as instability.
In Islam accountability rests on intention and action, not the mere presence of emotion.
Capacity of emotions is learnable skill
If this resonates, share it with someone who’s been told they’re “too much,” subscribe for more grounded tools on self-leadership, and leave a review with one insight you’re taking into your week.
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Welcome to Islamic Life Code School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful. Now your host, Dr. Donald Absler. Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you. Today's podcast topic is extremely important and it clarifies a very commonly misunderstood distinction. Intensity of an emotion is not the same as nervous system dysregulation. Okay, so with that topic I think I'm jumping right into it. And that's only because this is so so important. The idea of this podcast came from Atseri. She is a neurodivergent licensed trauma therapist. And I'm grateful for her and her work and others like her in this space who are continually working to benefit people through their education and their lived experiences. Many people, especially women, are mislabeled as emotional and therefore dysregulated simply because their emotions are big in reality. Regulation of your nervous system is not feeling constant calmness. Regulation means to access these emotions with choice, language and thinking, even when these emotions are intense. When this exact distinction is misunderstood, and mostly it is misunderstood, women are encouraged to suppress emotions instead of regulating their nervous systems, and this leads to long-term shame and harm. So the purpose of this podcast today is to help you understand that your intensity of emotion is not only nothing pathological, it also does not mean that you're dysregulated because of them. Disregulated means hijacked, reactive, when your prefrontal cortex is offline. While it is easy to be hijacked because of intense emotions, especially if you don't know how to carry them, it does not always mean that because of the intensity of your emotion, you are hijacked. When you have access to language, when you can describe what you're feeling, when you can name the sensation in your body and put into words what you're experiencing, that means that you're still anchored and self-led, self with a capital S, meaning your highest soulful intelligence, your inner wisdom is intact. Your prefrontal cortex is still online. And this can all happen even while you're experiencing an emotion that feels very uncomfortable. Your emotional volume on itself does not signal that you're hijacked. What signals hijacking is if you're reactive and you're acting as if you don't have access to choice. Your mind can still be online if you have capacity to hold the intensity of the emotion. The higher your capacity, the more likely that your thinking mind will still be engaged and your discernment will still be available to you, which means that your choice is still intact. So what builds this capacity? Capacity to hold intense emotions and still have access to your wise brain. The most important thing that builds capacity is this news, this piece of knowledge that intensity itself does not equal dysregulation. Just because you're uncomfortable in your body because of an intense emotion does not automatically mean that your prefrontal cortex has gone offline. Although it can sometimes mean that. But just as now you know that you can have access to choice, the possibility is that you will have access to choice through intensity. The biggest factor that turns that button to your prefrontal cortex on and off is your own meaning making about your interpretation of the intensity, and that's the intensity of the emotion you're feeling. If you think that there's something wrong because you're feeling something very strong and intense in your body, that meaning itself is a threat, and that creates dysregulation, which turns your higher mind off. So the first piece of information, and the best piece of information that automatically, dramatically builds your capacity is this discovery that intensity does not automatically mean reactivity. Your interpretation of the intensity does. You can interpret that intensity as a burden, as a nuisance, as a gift, as a side effect. You can interpret it as a byproduct of your highly efficient mind. Your interpretation builds or shrinks your capacity to hold that intensity. Fascinating, isn't it? I love the brain, Hamdalla. You can choose other practices, like tuning towards body based practices, somatic exercises during intense emotions. This is a conscious act for the completion and integration of the emotion, not as an attempt to calm yourself down or shut the emotion. You can build your capacity of intensity by allowing your body to process it. What the mind already understands, you allow your body to live through it. Somatic movements, breath exercises, grounding, sensory shifts to help your system finish what it started so that the emotion does not linger or it does not get stored as tension, or it does not leak outside of the current situation, it doesn't come out sideways into your other relationships. This is self leadership. This is you building your capacity. If you suppress, judge, or prematurely silence your intensity, the prefrontal cortex will shut off just because of the judgment of it. You know that you are not dysregulated as long as you have access to discernment and choice. When you're anchored, your thinking mind is still available. Your long term vision is intact, and you can decide what meaning you want to give to a situation and how you want to respond. Your feelings may be strong, but you are still being yourself, choosing your behavior rather than reacting. In contrast, when you're pulled out of this self leadership range, your whole perspective collapses. Your thinking mind goes offline and your body takes over through reflexive survival based strategies, defensiveness, shutdown, anger, overaccommodation. And being momentarily overrun like this does not mean that something is morally wrong with you. It just means that the system's doing exactly what it was built to do. It's prioritizing safety in that moment until your discernment can come back online. Intensity is like the volume of emotions. Intensity itself does not mean loss of self command. You can feel rage, joy, excitement, grief with tremendous force in your body, and still remain anchored in yourself. You can think while you feel. You can speak about what's happening to you in real time, what you're experiencing. You can name the sensations moving through your body, you can name the thoughts passing through your mind. Language is still available to you, your discernment is still intact, you have access to choice. All of this is specially available to you even if the experience is extremely uncomfortable and raw, and it is demanding on your nervous system. Something that requires your attention asks for you to allocate a lot of your thinking mind to it, does not automatically mean that you are in reactive mode. You can still operate from self-leadership. All of this is extremely important because women, especially with strong emotional range, are very often mislabeled as unstable, reactive, or chronically being too much. Very commonly, emotional volume gets confused with the loss of self command by others. When in reality, intensity is just a source of your clarity. That intensity gives you conviction, it gives you momentum. From your capability of having those deep feelings comes passion and that fuels a lot of action. Your emotions are not obstacles to your effectiveness. Your emotions fuel a purpose-driven work. When you practice this skill enough, your capacity is going to show up as focus, dedication, while other people might be misreading it as dysfunction. And that's perfectly fine. They're allowed to misread you. The problem is never your emotional depth. The problem is that the culture overall mistakes your aliveness and teaches you that your passion is somehow instability. And then you never get to recognize that your emotions are a source of your power. Intensity does not equal instability. You can be crying and be fully coherent and self-led. You can be very furious and still clearly explain why you're angry. You can be very loud, animated, openly expressive with your anger, with your joy, and be fully present. None of this signals a loss of self command, no matter how many people around you are telling you that it does, as long as you are still present with your choice. In Islam, we are told that you will be questioned about your actions and your intentions, not simply the presence of an emotion. Feeling intensely does not remove you from your responsibility or agency. What matters is what you choose to do with that feeling. So in Islam, moral accountability is grounded in actions. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala created the full range of human emotions and their rising and falling is a part of human design. Since feeling something intensely does not strip you of your agency automatically, which also means that it does not automatically place you in sin just because you're feeling anger. What carries this weight of questioning and accountability is what you choose to do with it once that emotion is present. If you feel rage, grief, fear, do you still have access to your discernment? Do you choose to respond? Then the emotion itself will not be questioned. Even when the emotion is overwhelming. Islam recognizes the difference between the internal state and the external act. The accountability is tied to intention and behavior, because intention is something you consciously choose even when it's something metaphysical, something in your mind, that is a thought. Now, like I said, other people will tell you that you are dysregulated and reactive and emotional, and that's okay. They are allowed to say that. They're allowed to have their opinion. As long as their opinion about your intensity does not translate into you believing them and then becoming dysregulated. That turns your choice off. Your prefrontal cortex can still stay online through your intensity and through their judgment of your intensity. Let's say you feel rage when somebody disrespects your father, and that intensity has never been normalized for you. What you've otherwise learned is to suppress it. You've learned that rage itself is dangerous, and that the moment when it shows up, you've already lost control. And rage in itself is something to be shameful about and something to think that it's sinful. So then you pretend that you don't feel rage, you pretend that this doesn't exist, you clamp it down, and these kinds of suppressed emotions show up as physical symptoms, and they take an intense toll on your emotional and mental well being. Again, Islam does not locate sin in emotion. The intensity of rage is not sinful. What places you at risk is losing choice if you are burdened by that rage. And even then accountability is tied to the action that you take from that rage. And this matters through the same lines that I've been describing to you that rage, especially in women, is treated as inherently sinful. When rage itself just signals violated boundaries and it lets you know if your integrity is being threatened. If you still have access to thought and language in that moment, if you can name why you're angry, feel the sensations in your body, and decide how you want to respond, you are not overrun. You are still anchored, you are grounded. Rage itself does not take away your choice, therefore it is not inherently sinful. But it is a powerful emotion that requires containment. There is no need to automatically condemn it. Similarly, you can feel terror, the incredible fear that you might feel if your child goes missing in a crowd, or when you hear a strange noise in the middle of the night, when your body reminds you of a past moment of danger. The intensity of that fear is not dysfunction. The terror is the nervous system's alarm that something is a possible threat. You can still be in choice through that intense emotion, through all of the adrenaline. Terror does not remove your moral agency. It simply, like all other intense emotions, demands support, so your choice can remain intact. Humiliation is one of the other very intense emotions and again very misunderstood. If you feel humiliation when you're publicly corrected, ridiculed, mocked, dismissed, the feelings of humiliation do not signal instability on your part. All they do is that they signal dignity being violated. The harm comes when this humiliation is repeatedly suppressed in the name of being easy or trying to be patient. Same thing with grief after a death of a parent or a loved one. The Prophet himself wept openly in grief, affirming that tears and sorrow are not sins. If you can still speak, remember Allah, follow his commands, allow yourself to be held by others, you have not lost choice, even when the emotion is deep and vast. So far I've only spoken to you about negative emotions. Now let me talk to you about the same range and depth of positive emotions, like overwhelming joy, that intensity, that excitement does not mean you've lost control. You can contain these emotions with meaning, safety, and connection. You can again be very animated, expressive, and still have your choice intact. Your suppressed joy will dull your vitality, will take away from your gratitude. You can rejoice and be extremely grateful and remain grounded at the same time. Excitement is another one of those very positive high energy emotions that gives you forward moving energy, intensity of love for a child, for a pet, for a cause, for a parent, for your spouse, for a friend. Your intense love does not mean that you lose choice. It means it gives you the signal for attachment and meaning in your life. It is the meaning you assign to these emotions is what will determine if you're able to carry it and use it to expand your life or if all of these emotions will constrict your life. A human emotional capacity is not genetically programmed. It's not even universal. It's something that you get to develop with time. What feels intense but manageable to one woman might look overwhelming or dysregulated to someone else, and it might not be manageable to another woman. The measure is not how loud the emotion appears or what anyone else's opinion about your emotion is. The measure is whether you have access to yourself. Feeling deeply does not mean that there's something wrong or that something's broken, regardless of what you might have been told up until now. What matters is that you still have access to your wise brain, your language, your discernment. Islam calls for ethical anchoring through all of these intense emotions. When you stop fearing these emotions, they become vital pieces of information. They stop being a threat. You don't need to feel smaller or feel flat emotions just to be spiritually sound. You need safety, meaning, you need permission to stay yourself, and this is a new kind of self leadership. This is how you lead yourself and the people around you. With that I pray to Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala, O Allah, help us recognize the wisdom in emotions that you've placed within us. Keep our hearts alive and our minds clear, especially when emotions arise. O Allah, protect us from acting without intention and grant us the strength to respond with choice and integrity. Make our emotions a source of insight and make our self leadership a means of drawing closer only to you. Amin Ya Rabul Amin. Please keep me in your drawas. I will talk to you guys next time.