Are You an Emotional Jellyfish? Overcome Emotional Reactivity with Somatic Therapy

Jellyfish are fascinating and beautiful creatures. 🪼🪼🪼🪼🪼

Until you get a little too close!

Today we meet the Emotional Jellyfish. Unlike most of the guardians on our list, this thin-skinned creature feels deeply and is easily swept away by overpowering emotions and relational experiences. It has porous boundaries and soaks up the energies and emotions of others around it. It floats high like a butterfly in social and emotional currents and then stings like a bee when things finally get too much.

The emotional jellyfish’s primary issue is that it does not have the boundaries, containment and structure needed to metabolize and ground its strong feelings and stand firm in the world. As a result, it gets stuck in repetitive emotional patterns and problematic relationships. In doing so, it loses the great benefits of having insider access to the emotional world.

The emotional jellyfish puts others first. It lacks a stable and secure sense of self and fails to assert itself consistently and appropriately. It over-relies on others as a source of safety until suddenly it isn’t anymore. Then it has to lash out destructively to clear the waters. This violent lashing out happens because the emotional jellyfish hasn’t protected it’s boundaries in a clear and consistent manner. When you don’t have a stable government enforcing boundaries, you end up with vigilante keeping an unstable peace by violent means.

As a feeling type, the emotional jellyfish is often underinvested in the capacity of thinking and developing a stable framework of understanding. The emotional jellyfish also tends to use thinking while in an activated or dysregulated state. This is precisely when thinking is least to be trusted.

Developing well-grounded and consistent thinking patterns can help the emotional jellyfish to put its emotional experiences into better perspective and shift repetitive patterns. When feeling is combined with thinking it becomes wisdom. The emotional jellyfish then moves from emotional reactivity to an appropriate level of responsiveness.

Image adapted from Marsha Linehan’s DBT. Note that you may also recognize some personality features from descriptions of anxious attachment and borderline personality disorder.

In the healing process:

The emotional jellyfish is a star of the therapy world, providing emotional access that often responds to treatment and is beneficial to others. Sessions are juicy, dramatic, and engaging. It invests in the therapeutic relationship to a fault, locating the power and value of the experience within the therapist and not recognizing its own value.

Unfortunately, what the emotional jellyfish needs is quite boring. Developing stable boundaries and good sensible thinking and learning to value the self and not be railroaded by others. Often the emotional jellyfish has a high level of anxiety and working through this fear can have beneficial effects on thinking and understanding.

With more containment, reflection, and thinking, the emotional jellyfish can develop a high degree of emotional intelligence and wisdom, and avoid getting swept away. As this happens, the emotional jellyfish grows a spine, muscles, and thicker skin. It also begins to crystalize structure into the world. This structure provides containment and allows emotional gifts to flourish more fully.

How to work with the emotional jellyfish:

• Process and resolve background anxiety so that the system can return to a relaxed and regulated state.

• In this regulated state, engage in reflective and strategic thinking and seek the counsel of people with these abilities.

• Practice holding consistent and stable boundaries and not letting bad situations build up.

• Develop deeper self esteem through embodiment practices. If we devalue or doubt ourselves, it means we are disconnected and dysregulated.

• Slow down emotional reactivity and allow ourself to cool down so that we can respond rather than react. Recognize when the emotional jellyfish has been triggered and learn to unblend and sense into the self energy of the wider system. After cooling down, speak for the emotional jellyfish from a place of resonant self energy. Boundary setting and speaking from your power replaces reactive stinging.