How to Feel
How do you know you're feeling something? How do you know you're sad, mad, anxious, or happy?
These are the questions I ask my patients during our first sessions. After all, this is therapy, and I’ll be asking you about your feelings a lot. So, it's important that we’re on the same page when it comes to what those feelings actually mean. I’d say 99.99% of my patients have no idea how to answer these questions. They (and I, before I did my own therapy work) don’t know how to recognize or understand how they feel emotions.
Don’t panic. You didn’t miss a class, and there’s nothing wrong with you. We were never really taught how to process emotions. The only thing our school systems provided, maybe, was a worksheet on emotion words we colored in kindergarten or a children's book about a kid having a "no good, very bad day." But beyond that, we didn’t get much guidance on how to truly feel our feelings. Our parents were supposed to teach us at home, but many of us grew up with emotionally neglectful or immature parents who couldn’t manage their own emotions, let alone teach us how to process ours. Very few of us had a solid model to show us what emotions are, how to feel them, and what to do with them. So, as emotional adults, most of us feel overwhelmed because our emotions seem too intense to handle. We either explode, or we numb ourselves out to the point where we pretend we don't have emotions at all.
Humans are emotional, social beings. If you don’t know what you’re feeling, you’re missing vital data about how you’re experiencing the world. And when that data is missing, you're making important decisions without it. Think about it: we make decisions based on two things—our thoughts and our feelings. If you’re not noticing, acknowledging, and analyzing your feelings, you're missing 50% of the data. That’s half! Do you really want to be making decisions about your life and your future with 50% of the data missing?
So let’s start learning how to gather the emotional data. How do you know when you're feeling something? What’s going on? What do you notice when you’re mad, sad, or happy?
Emotions are called "feelings" because we feel them in the body. Feelings are somatic. The first thing I ask my patients to do is get out of their heads and into their bodies to notice what’s happening there. Emotions always have physical symptoms. Each person feels them differently, but certain patterns tend to emerge. For example, many people describe anger and anxiety as heat, especially in their hands, pressure in the chest, or an increased heart rate. Sadness, on the other hand, often feels cold and heavy, like their limbs weigh too much to move. These physical sensations can be things like tears streaming down your face, your heart racing, or the sensation of your stomach flipping like you're on a roller coaster. They can also be things your brain creates, like pressure in your shoulders or chest. There’s no right or wrong—it’s just what you notice in your body.
This is where you begin. Pay attention to what's going on in your body—it can reveal a lot of information. Notice the sensations, and then try to label the emotion attached to them. We stop ourselves from naturally noticing our emotions inside our bodies because a lot of our feelings are uncomfortable or even too painful to sit with for any period of time. I am asking you to do something hard and uncomfortable. But the more you know what is going on internally and how you are interacting with the external world, the more data you have to make the best and healthiest decision for you and your future.
It all starts with simply NOTICING how you feel and being able to label it with an emotion.
