It’s less about the intensity of your emotions and more about how you deal with them.
Let’s say you got really angry in public. It’s fine to get angry, sometimes there are good reasons for that. But there are multiple ways to deal with that anger. An unhealthy way would be to run amok and harm innocent people in order to vent. A healthy way would be to calm down, reflect on what makes you angry, and then either make an effort to improve your situation or remove yourself from it.
You can’t help feeling a certain way, but you can choose how you react to your emotions. Try to pick the option that is the least destructive to yourself and those around you. If emotional regulation is hard for you, you can learn coping skills from a therapist.
Techniques to manage the intensity of emotions sit between the parts you're describing.
I agree that Inbetween the feeling rising up and our reaction there's a choice to be made. Highly intense feelings overwhelm and reduce our choices in the moment.
Understanding what's underneath or behind our feelings is one excellent way to do this which sadly doesn't work for everything, especially the most intense feelings
This is why I recommend dialectical behavioral therapy. It teaches mindfulness and radical acceptance to reframe your relationship with your emotions in a more healthy light, and also solid techniques for emotion regulation and distress tolerance. It helped me soooo much.
Edit to add: there is a lot of free DBT material on the internet that you can pursue without a therapist, if there are none available to you at the moment.
It’s less about the intensity of your emotions and more about how you deal with them.
Let’s say you got really angry in public. It’s fine to get angry, sometimes there are good reasons for that. But there are multiple ways to deal with that anger. An unhealthy way would be to run amok and harm innocent people in order to vent. A healthy way would be to calm down, reflect on what makes you angry, and then either make an effort to improve your situation or remove yourself from it.
You can’t help feeling a certain way, but you can choose how you react to your emotions. Try to pick the option that is the least destructive to yourself and those around you. If emotional regulation is hard for you, you can learn coping skills from a therapist.
Techniques to manage the intensity of emotions sit between the parts you're describing.
I agree that Inbetween the feeling rising up and our reaction there's a choice to be made. Highly intense feelings overwhelm and reduce our choices in the moment.
Understanding what's underneath or behind our feelings is one excellent way to do this which sadly doesn't work for everything, especially the most intense feelings
This is why I recommend dialectical behavioral therapy. It teaches mindfulness and radical acceptance to reframe your relationship with your emotions in a more healthy light, and also solid techniques for emotion regulation and distress tolerance. It helped me soooo much.
Edit to add: there is a lot of free DBT material on the internet that you can pursue without a therapist, if there are none available to you at the moment.