Mindfulness?

This is from Matthieu Ricard:
' How do we go about making peace with our own emotions? First, we have to focus our mind on the raw power of inner suffering. Instead of avoiding it or burying it away in some dark corner of our mind, we should make it the object of our meditation, without ruminating over the events that caused the pain or reviewing every freeze-frame from the movie of our life...........When a painful emotion strikes us, the most urgent thing is to look at it head-on and to identify the immediate thoughts that triggered and are fanning it. Then by fixing our inner gaze on the emotion itself, we can gradually dissolve it like snow in sunshine..... once the strength of the emotion has been sapped, the causes that triggered it will seem less tragic and we will have won ourselves the chance to break free from the vicious circle of negative thoughts. '
Now it may well be that one way to combat the Swirl is, amongst other ways, to use mindfulness. And it might be the case that mindfulness practiced regularly might prevent being sucked into a Swirl. But my hunch is that once the individual is 'in' a Swirl then mindfulness just won't work. It won't work because there is no way, I think, in which mindfulness can get any traction.
What Ricard is presuming in the quote is that in the wake of suffering there is a possibility of focus on that state. But in a Swirl that is highly unlikely to eventuate because there is no energy for the mental state of focusing. Focus surely depends on there being a split, a boundary between the mental state, in this context, and its object. But in the Swirl there is no boundary. The mind is, so to speak, subsumed into the complex of emotional suffering, and thus there is no reflective space.