I'm in no way familiar with Soundforge. However, if I'm understanding your issue correctly, would it not be possible to just reduce amplification before anything else?
compression/limiting would reduce those peaks locally - but can affect dynamics. im not super well versed in compression and avoid it where possible
normalizing to lower volume of all data can be done... but unneccesarily affects all data
i ended up starting from scratch andnormalizing a few dB before equing
next time i will keep levels at -6dB or below if i plan on EQing later