When the World Feels Too Much: Learning When to Soothe and When to Scream

Some days it feels like the world is on fire and not just metaphorically. Between climate disasters, political chaos, oppression & discrimination, violence, and the endless noise of social media, it’s easy to feel like your nervous system is running on fumes. For those of us who’ve lived through religious trauma, that feeling of being emotionally flooded often hits even harder.

Because we didn’t just inherit the news cycle, we inherited a lifetime of conditioning that taught us how to not cope. We were told to pray about it, trust God, or “cast our anxieties on Him.” And when that didn’t work, we were told to have more faith.

Now, as adults out in the world trying to live intentionally and compassionately, we find ourselves scrolling through devastation after devastation and wondering:

Am I meant to care this much?
Am I overreacting?
Should I be doing more? Or less? Or both?

It’s confusing. It’s exhausting. And honestly, it’s not just you. It’s the world, your body, and the wiring religion left behind all colliding at once.

The World Is Heavy And You’re Not Broken for Feeling It

If you feel overwhelmed by the state of the world, you’re not weak or dramatic. You’re responding appropriately to things that are, in fact, overwhelming.

We weren’t designed to have this much access to suffering or to feel powerless while watching it unfold. Our nervous systems are ancient; they were built for the kind of danger you could run from, not the kind you can only scroll past.

For trauma survivors and especially religious trauma survivors this can feel really layered. Many of us were conditioned to suppress “negative” emotions like anger, grief, and fear. Feeling too much was labelled a lack of faith. We were told that our job was to keep smiling through the apocalypse, to “let go and let God,” and to not be “of the world.”

So it makes sense that feeling deeply now feels… confusing. When you’ve spent years learning how to spiritualise pain away, actually feeling pain can feel wrong.

But your empathy isn’t a flaw. Your heartbreak isn’t proof of your weakness. You’re supposed to care because caring means you’re still connected to your humanity.

The goal isn’t to stop feeling. It’s to learn how to hold what you feel without collapsing under it.

The Binary Trap: From Blind Faith to Total Cynicism

Religious trauma survivors tend to be excellent at binary thinking. It’s not our fault, we were trained for it. We were raised on “right vs wrong,” “saved vs unsaved,” “holy vs sinful.”

Everything had a clear category. Everything was certain.

And then.… it wasn’t.

After leaving or deconstructing high-control religion, many of us swing hard the other way. We go from unquestioning obedience to relentless questioning. From black-and-white to “burn it all down.” From “trust God” to “trust nothing.”

It’s understandable, because when you’ve been gaslit by an entire belief system, nuance feels unsafe. Certainty becomes the only thing that makes you feel steady.

But: the world isn’t black and white. It never was. Religion just told us it was because it’s much easier to control people who believe there’s always a single right answer.

Now, we’re re-learning how to sit in the grey. How to say, “I don’t know,” and not feel like our world is collapsing.

And that skill, that ability to hold complexity becomes essential when the world feels unbearable. Because when everything looks like “good vs evil” or “us vs them,” our nervous systems stay locked in survival mode.

When we can hold both - injustice and hope, despair and action, rage and rest is we stop fighting reality and start finding ground again.

Nuance doesn’t mean neutrality. It means staying awake and staying human.

You’re Meant to Feel - That’s the Point

There’s this weird expectation floating around that being “healed” means being perpetually calm, grounded, and unbothered. That we should all be floating through chaos with serene Buddha-like smiles and perfectly aligned chakras.

Yeah… no.

Being calm all the time isn’t the goal of healing. That’s emotional suppression with better branding.

Sometimes the most grounded, integrated, healthy response to what’s happening around us is rage. Or grief. Or utter despair. Sometimes being dysregulated isn’t a trauma response, it’s a human response to a traumatic world.

If you watch oppression, violence, or cruelty and don’t feel something, that’s not regulation. That’s disconnection.

We weren’t made to be numb.
We were made to care deeply.

So no, you don’t need to “love and light” your way through the world’s suffering. You don’t need to meditate yourself into apathy. You don’t need to spiritually bypass your own outrage.

Feel it.
Let it move through you.
Let it remind you that your empathy is still intact even if it hurts.

Discernment: Knowing When to Soothe and When to Scream

If we’re not trying to stay calm all the time, what are we trying to do?

The answer, I think, is discernment. Yes, I know the term itself may be loaded but stay with me.

Discernment (in this context) is the quiet art of learning when to soothe your nervous system and when to let it scream. It’s knowing when you’re spiralling into helplessness, and when you’re witnessing harm that deserves your voice.

It’s being able to pause long enough to ask:

• Am I overwhelmed because I’m witnessing real injustice or because I’ve been doomscrolling for three hours and haven’t eaten?

• Is my body crying out for comfort or for action?

• Am I avoiding feeling because it’s too much or because I’ve been taught that anger is bad?

Sometimes, discernment means closing your laptop, taking a deep breath, and grounding back into your body. Sometimes, it means calling your MP, signing a petition, going to a protest, or yelling (loudly and unapologetically) that what’s happening isn’t okay.

Discernment isn’t about balance, it’s about aliveness.

When we soothe ourselves, we protect our capacity to stay engaged.
When we scream, we protect our integrity.

Both matter.
Both are sacred.

Building a World (and a Nervous System) That Can Hold Both

The work of learning when to soothe and when to scream isn’t something we can do alone. It takes community.

Because sometimes you can’t tell which one you need until someone else reflects it back to you. Sometimes you need your partner or a friend to say, “Hey, I think your nervous system is fried, let’s log off and get outside.”
And sometimes you need someone to say, “No, you’re not overreacting, that is horrifying.”

Healing from religious trauma often happens in relationship, with people who can help us find the middle ground between apathy and burnout, between silence and shouting.

We need spaces that hold both our tenderness and our rage.
We need rituals that allow us to process what we can’t fix.
We need communities that remind us we don’t have to hold it all alone.

Because the truth is: the world is too much. And pretending otherwise doesn’t make it less so.

But the answer isn’t to numb out or shut down. It’s to keep choosing presence, compassion, and discernment - over and over again.

You don’t have to pick between falling apart and being fine.
You just have to keep coming back to yourself.

To your body.
To your breath.
To your community.
To the small things that remind you it’s still worth caring.

Because even when the world feels too much, even when you’re crying or raging over things you can’t change; the fact that you feel at all is proof that you’re still alive, still human, still trying.

And that’s enough.