Making Sense of Emotions: Experiencing and Identifying Feelings

Life’s challenges can be overwhelming; everyone deserves a space to feel heard and supported. At Roamers Therapy, we provide trauma-informed, culturally sensitive, LGBTQIA+ affirming, and evidence-based environments to help you heal, grow, and navigate your mental well-being journey. As your psychotherapist, we are here to guide you every step of the way.

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In our daily lives, we encounter many events and situations, both expected and unexpected, that trigger various responses in us. These responses encompass physical, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral reactions. The reactions we give are often shaped by the emotions we feel. Therefore, emotions hold a critical place in our lives. Sometimes, we may struggle to manage our emotional responses to the events we encounter. This may be caused by various reasons, such as being unaware of emotions, unable to identify them, or having difficulty expressing them. This can lead to negative emotions like being overwhelmed, frustrated, confused, or anxious due to uncertainty about what we genuinely feel. In this therapy sketch, we will mention identifying and understanding our emotions and the difficulties we encounter during this process.

Why do we find it challenging to experience feelings?

There might be several reasons why experiencing feelings is difficult. For example, imagine you want to make plans with a friend, but they tell you they’re already busy with something else. You might feel sadness, anger, or even resentment at that moment. One of the reasons it can be challenging to experience emotions is the distinction between conscious and unconscious feelings. Conscious feelings are those that we are fully aware of; we can recognize, name, and understand them at the moment. For instance, if your friend cancels plans and you feel disappointed, that emotion is conscious—you know you’re disappointed.

However, you may even find it hard to pinpoint exactly what you’re feeling. You might not even be aware of your feelings at first, or you could sense a heaviness in your chest without being able to identify it. These are unconscious feelings. According to Sigmund Freud, unconscious feelings operate beyond the reach of the conscious mind/awareness and can influence our behavior. Freud explained that unconscious processes can guide one’s emotions and behaviors without them even realizing it. These might manifest as physical sensations, like tension in your chest or stomach, or behaviors we don’t fully understand. For example, if your friend cancels, instead of feeling disappointed, you can suddenly become irritable or restless without understanding why; this could be an unconscious emotion driving your behavior (Del Carril, 1979).

Even if you can pinpoint and name the emotion, you might still feel not sure about how to handle it. This uncertainty can add to the confusion and make it even harder to navigate your feelings. Here are some reasons why we find it challenging to experience feelings:

1. Being unaware of your emotions

Being unaware of your emotions can impact many areas of your life, affecting your ability to make decisions, build relationships, and find overall life satisfaction. When you’re unable to experience or understand your feelings fully, you may experience:

Difficulty making informed decisions: Emotions play a critical role in weighing options and understanding personal values; being unaware of emotions can deteriorate our decision-making process. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) might help you to identify unhelpful thought patterns and recognize how your emotions influence your decision-making process, ultimately helping you make more balanced and thoughtful choices (Beck, 2020).
Challenges in Forming Relationships: Being unaware of your emotions can make forming deep, meaningful relationships challenging because you cannot connect emotionally with others. Psychodynamic Therapy might help you uncover unconscious emotions rooted in early life. This early life experience can interfere with forming close relationships with your current relationships. Understanding your unconscious emotions can improve your connection with others (Del Carril, 1979).
Diminished capacity to enjoy life: Emotions are essential for experiencing pleasure, satisfaction, and a sense of purpose. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) might help you accept emotions without judgment, even when facing discomforting emotions such as sadness, disappointment, and anger (John & Hayes, 2001). This acceptance might help you increase emotional resilience, which improves overall life satisfaction.

2. Unable to Label or Express Emotions

You may find it hard to label and express your emotions. This challenge can be rooted in factors like upbringing, cultural norms, trauma, or simply a lack of emotional education. Some emotions, such as anger, fear, envy, competition, and shame, can be challenging to identify and acknowledge. When you cannot determine your feelings, you may experience:

Anxiety and Confusion: You can experience anxiety and confusion due to the inability to understand your emotional state. By exploring unconscious emotional processes with past patterns with Psychodynamic Therapy, you can make connections between past and present and better understand your emotional responses. This can reduce the frustration, anxiety, or confusion you might experience.
Feeling Overwhelmed by Emotions: You may feel overwhelmed by emotions that feel unmanageable or inexplicable. As mentioned above, ACT encourages accepting emotions as they come without trying to avoid or control them. By learning to handle difficult emotions, you can reduce feelings of overwhelm and gain a clearer understanding of what you’re experiencing. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) also has techniques such as emotional exposure to overcome negative emotions without avoiding them and balancing emotional urges to handle intense emotions effectively.
Difficulty Communicating Needs: When you are unable to label or express emotions, you can not communicate your needs because emotions also function as your body’s warning system to alert you about your needs. In short, when you struggle to express feelings, communication with others can suffer. Regardless of modality, therapy itself is a way to gain insight into what you need and help you communicate with loved ones about it.

3. Difficulty Linking Feelings and Experiences

You may feel that emotions arise out of nowhere. Just as learning to identify and label feelings can bring relief, connecting emotions to their triggers can also provide a sense of control. You might feel helpless and out of control when you struggle to link your feelings with your experiences. You may experience:

Interpersonal Difficulties: Difficulty communicating your needs and desires to others might lead to strained relationships. Dialectical behavioral therapy includes various training sessions about emotional regulation and interpersonal effectiveness skills that help you communicate your emotional needs. This might help you recognize your emotions and develop emotional resilience (DBT, 2024). These strategies can help you enhance your relationships with loved ones.
Challenges in recognizing patterns: Being unable to label or express emotions can block your understanding of your motivations and reactions. Both CBT and psychodynamic therapy can help you identify these patterns through different methods. CBT helps identify recurring thought and behavior patterns contributing to emotional difficulties (Beck, 2020). Recognizing and modifying these patterns can prevent negative cycles, which enhances emotional well-being. Psychodynamic therapy, especially object relations theory, might address your unresolved relationship patterns from early experiences. These early experiences shape how you perceive yourself and others, often leading to repeating dysfunctional patterns. Psychodynamic therapy techniques might help you address these dysfunctional patterns, including unconscious feelings that break these patterns (Caligor, Kernberg, and Clarkin, 2007)

It can be frightening to experience emotions without being able to recognize them, so labeling your feelings can provide a sense of control and allow you to reflect on what you feel, communicate with others, and better understand your reactions. Different therapy modalities, such as CBT, DBT, ACT, and Psychodynamic therapy, can help you understand your emotions thoroughly.

Linking feelings to experiences can help you communicate more effectively, get what you need from the world, and gain insight into how your reactions and behaviors affect others.

Strategies that Help You Understand and Identify Emotions

Understanding how you experience and identify your emotions is essential to enhance your well-being. By utilizing different strategies, you can develop greater awareness of your feelings. This journey may involve expanding emotional vocabulary, engaging in reflective practices, practicing role-play and visualization, keeping a journal to log emotions, practicing mindfulness, and seeking feedback and validation. Let’s explore these steps a little bit more in detail:

Expanding Emotional Vocabulary: Expanding your emotional vocabulary will help you better articulate your feelings by increasing your emotional vocabulary. This allows for deeper connections with yourself and others. DBT might help you to accurately label emotions through tools like emotion regulation, helping you better articulate your feelings and communicate effectively (DBT, 2024). You can also enhance your emotional awareness by learning to express your emotions more precisely by utilizing some strategies by yourself:

You can use emotion wheels to find specific words that describe your feelings.
You can learn new words regularly and practice identifying emotions.
You can practice naming emotions when they come up, both in writing and verbally.

Engaging in Reflective Practices: Engaging in reflective practices can help you understand the underlying causes of your emotions. These practices might be psychodynamic or CBT modalities, but they use different techniques. In psychodynamic Therapy, reflection is encouraged to uncover deeper emotional patterns; however, CBT involves cognitive restructuring to understand how thoughts affect emotions. You can also engage in reflective practices by utilizing some strategies by yourself:

You can ask yourself questions like “What am I feeling right now?” and “What triggered this emotion?”
You can use reflection prompts like “Describe a recent situation that made you feel a strong emotion.”
You can analyze your emotional responses to different situations and explore why you reacted that way.

Practicing Role-Playing and Visualization: Role-playing and visualization can help you explore emotions in a controlled setting. These techniques allow you to enter various scenarios and gain insight into how you might react to different situations. Both DBT and ACT use visualization techniques to explore emotional responses in a safe, controlled environment. To do that:

You can practice role-playing different scenarios with your therapist to explore how you might feel and react.
You can use guided imagery to revisit past experiences and mentally identify their associated emotions.

Keeping a Journal to Log Emotions: Journaling is one of the most effective ways to develop emotional awareness. CBT emphasizes journaling to identify emotional triggers and patterns. Journaling allows you to monitor changes over time and track how emotions are linked to thoughts and behaviors, providing clarity and insight. You can also engage in journaling by utilizing some strategies by yourself:

You can record your daily emotions, noting the context and triggers.
You can describe any physical sensations associated with your emotions.
You can review your journal entries occasionally to identify patterns and common triggers.

Practicing Mindfulness: Mindfulness helps you stay present and aware of your emotions as they come up. By utilizing mindfulness, you can create a greater sense of calm and clarity for your feelings. Mindfulness practices can be added to many modalities. Your therapist will guide you through these practices when they are needed. You can check our Mindfulness article to learn more techniques. You can also engage in mindfulness practices by utilizing some strategies by yourself:

You can practice mindful breathing to focus on the present moment and reduce stress.
You can perform body scans to detect physical sensations linked to your emotions.
You can incorporate mindfulness into your daily routines, like mindful eating or walking.

Seeking Feedback and Validation from Loved Ones: Seeking feedback and validation from trusted individuals can help you better understand your emotions. Sharing your feelings with loved ones creates a safe space to express yourself and receive valuable perspectives. DBT enables you to teach interpersonal effectiveness skills that encourage open emotional communication and validation, which might foster emotional understanding. By seeking feedback and validation, you will be able to know that you are not alone in your experience. To do that:

You can talk about your emotions with supportive friends or family members.
You can seek validation to understand how others perceive your emotional responses.
You can participate in support groups to share experiences and gain insight from others.

Take Aways

Understanding and identifying emotions can significantly enhance your emotional intelligence and overall well-being. Activities like journaling, role-playing, mindfulness, and reflection can help you develop a deeper awareness of your emotional states and improve your ability to articulate and manage your feelings. Combined with ongoing therapeutic support, these practices can lead to more excellent emotional health and a more fulfilling life. If you encounter issues when experiencing your emotions and think that this issue impacts your life negatively, a therapist can help you gain deeper insight into your feelings by engaging with empathetic listening, incorporating educational techniques, and using practical tools.

References:

Beck, J. S. (2020). Cognitive behavior therapy: Basics and beyond. Guilford Publications.
Del Carril, M. (1979). Freud on unconscious emotion. Diálogos, 33, 109-124.
Blackledge, J. T., & Hayes, S. C. (2001). Emotion regulation in acceptance and commitment therapy. Journal of clinical psychology, 57(2), 243-255.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy. “Dialectical Behavior Therapy: DBT Skills, Worksheets, Videos.” Dialectical Behavior Therapy, 14 Sept. 2024, dialecticalbehaviortherapy.com.
Caligor, E., Kernberg, O. F., & Clarkin, J. F. (2007). Handbook of dynamic psychotherapy for higher level personality pathology. American Psychiatric Pub.

While our physical offices are located in South Loop and Lakeview neighborhoods in Chicago, Illinois for in-person sessions, we also welcome and serve clients for online therapy from anywhere in Illinois and Washington, D.C. Clients from the Chicagoland area may choose in-office or online therapy and usually commute from surrounding areas such as River North, West Loop, Gold Coast, Old Town, Lincoln Park, Lake View, Rogers Park, Logan Square, Pilsen, Bridgeport, Little Village, Bronzeville, South Shore, Hyde Park, Back of the Yards, Wicker Park, Bucktown and many more.

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At Roamers Therapy, our psychotherapists are here to support you through anxiety, depression, trauma and relationship issues, race-ethnicity issues, LGBTQIA+ issues, ADHD, Autism, or any challenges you encounter. Our psychotherapists are trained in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, Psychodynamic Therapy, Acceptance, and Commitment Therapy, Person-Centered Therapy, and Gottman Therapy.

Whether you’re seeking guidance on a specific issue or need help navigating difficult emotions, we’re ready to assist you every step of the way.

Contact us today to learn more about our services and schedule a session with our mental health professionals to begin your healing journey. To get started with therapy, visit our booking page.

First, decide if you’ll be paying out-of-pocket or using insurance. If you’re a self-pay client, you can book directly through the “Book Now” page or fill out the “Self-Pay/Out-of-network Inquiry Form.” If you’re using insurance, fill out the “Insurance Verification Form” to receive details about your costs and availability. Please let us know your preferred therapist. If your preferred therapist isn’t available, you can join the waitlist by emailing us. Once your appointment is confirmed, you’ll receive intake documents to complete before your first session.

This page is also part of the Roamers Therapy Glossary; a collection of mental-health related definitions that are written by our therapists.

While our offices are currently located at the South Loop neighborhood of Downtown Chicago, Illinois, we also welcome and serve clients for online therapy from anywhere in Illinois and Washington, D.C. Clients from the Chicagoland area may choose in-office or online therapy and usually commute from surrounding areas such as River North, West Loop, Gold Coast, Old Town, Lincoln Park, Lake View, Rogers Park, Logan Square, Pilsen, Bridgeport, Little Village, Bronzeville, South Shore, Hyde Park, Back of the Yards, Wicker Park, Bucktown and many more. You can visit our contact page to access detailed information on our office location.