How can I get better at expressing my emotions

An inability to communicate emotion isn't always due to unwillingness, sometimes you can't even identify what you feel.

Hello.

This week, a question on a topic that many people find surprising, the emotional inarticulacy of grown-ups.

As a therapist, I’ve come to recognise that it isn’t unusual for people not only to have difficulty in expressing their emotions, but to find it almost impossible to even know what their emotions are.

You might recognise when you feel happy or angry, but what if I asked you to be more nuanced about what you feel? Could you still clearly identify what’s going on in? Try it now, and see what word springs to mind.

During a ‘check-in’ at the start of a group therapy session, we might ask participants to use one word to describe the way they’re feeling. Two words are banned, and these are the ones that most of us reach for when asked by a friend how we are.

‘I’m fine’

‘I’m OK’

Both statements tell us nothing, and this might be a reflection that you have no interest in disclosing your feelings, or it might be that you have no idea what they actually are.

The other aspect of emotional illiteracy that haunts many of us is the belief that there are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ emotions.

Emotions cannot be good or bad, they just ‘are’. Sure, emotions can be uncomfortable, but as soon as we place a higher value on one emotion versus another we risk inadvertently making those we treasure more elusive and those we reject more persistent.

During a stay as a patient in a psychiatric unit, prior to my psychotherapy training, we were given an array of art materials and asked to create a representation of how we wanted our lives to look when we eventually got better.

I took the pastels and a big piece of paper with no idea what I was going to draw.

What emerged, only minutes later, was a picture with great swathes of different colours, some bright and some dark, arcing across the page like an immense rainbow. I immediately knew what it meant.

Asked to describe what we’d drawn, I explained that ‘recovery’ , to me, meant an acceptance that life would be full of different shades (emotions) that I would probably feel differently about enduring, but that there would always be another one to come along and replace one that felt particularly difficult, if I could just hang on.

Oddly, I found that honouring all of my emotions, regardless of how uncomfortable they were, enabled me to experience them all with a richness I had never previously felt.

Without understanding how we feel, we’re little more than a shadow.

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Question: How can I get better at expressing my emotions?

There was one small part of what you wrote that jumped out at me as it does when anyone says something similar. It's this bit,

‘I don't like being sad.’

Those five words say much more than they appear to and are at the root of overcoming this difficulty in acknowledging, identifying, and communicating your emotions.

It would be odd to enjoy feeling sad, but sadness is a crucial and inevitable emotion.

Without sadness, what would be the point of happiness? How would we feel it, and what meaning would it have?

Life is full of sadness in one form or another. A broken relationship, the death of a loved one, an unexpected disappointment, a low period related to something identifiable, or one that appears to have fallen upon us from nowhere.

The inability to express the whole spectrum of emotions is probably one of the greatest sadnesses we can ever experience.

It is your sadness at recognising you find it hard to express yourself that brought you here in the first place. In that sense, sadness has done you a favour and seeks to help you move forward to somewhere better.

Where did you learn to be afraid of sadness and to push it away? Who taught you that some emotions are worth less than others?

Maybe uncomfortable emotions were not ‘allowed’ as you grew up.

Possibly emotions and the display of them was of lower currency than logic and rational thought in your family.

It could be that you suffered particular sadness as a child and decided to try and avoid it as you grew older.

The work of therapy often involves learning how to become more emotionally literate, how to feel confident in expressing emotion, and discovering that relationships and self-worth are strengthened through our ability to share feelings with the people we love rather than weakening them.

An inability to live alongside sadness prevents you from experiencing and exploring all sorts of other emotions too.

We all live our lives between a line of sadness and one of happiness, and if you squash that space so that sadness doesn't feel so bad you also have to push down the line of happiness and deprive yourself of unbridled joy. In ‘narrow-banding’ emotion, you are left with a thin gruel that is much less than you deserve.

You write in your question about feeling overwhelmed in your life and worrying about friends as well as yourself, but keeping your emotions inside to avoid burdening others.

When you feel overwhelmed but find it hard to express your emotion, it becomes easier to look after others. I imagine that you are more invested in supporting your friends than you are in allowing them to support you. If so, try letting them in a little. It won’t burden them to hear of your struggles, it will do the reverse because the people who love you want to demonstrate their love.

One of the most misunderstood realities of love is that we feel it most keenly through displaying it. When you do something loving that comes from your heart, it feels great.

You describe in your question the unwavering support that is offered by your partner but how you still struggle to show your emotions

This is, in part at least, why you chose your partner. Something in you recognised that you needed to be with someone who would open up the space for you so that you had the opportunity to step into it and talk about your feelings.

So, perhaps it’s time to try it.

You don't have to worry about the words you use. Just explain to your partner that you want to get better at expressing how you're feeling and start small.

‘I'm feeling sad about something and I'm trying to ignore it and press it away but I want to get better at talking about it.’ That alone would be progress.

You will find that the more you attempt to describe how you feel, the easier it will be, and the more familiar you will become not only with your core emotions but the more nuanced aspects of them too.

Every day, take a few moments and ask yourself what word you would use to describe how you are feeling in this exact moment.

When you have chosen your word try and dig deeper and explore more about why you feel that, and what other emotions are you noticing. Write it all down so you can see how your emotions shift from day to day.

When you start to feel more conversant with the language of emotion, you might share the conversation with the people you trust, perhaps starting with your partner.

You wrote about how you find it easier to ignore emotions and think about something else but how it feels increasingly unsustainable, and this realisation opens an important window for you to engage with emotion and recognise you can never be diminished by what you feel, only strengthened.

There is a Buddhist teaching called ‘The two arrows’ that says, when we experience pain or suffering we are hit by two arrows.

The first arrow represents the inevitability of sadness, disappointment, loss. It is the arrow of ‘the human condition’ that none of us can escape.

The second arrow represents our response to the first and the way in which we always have the power to make matters worse. It is our resistance, denial, or anxiety. Our unwillingness to accept and endure what we consider to be intolerable.

By acknowledging, validating and accepting the inevitable pain of the first arrow, we can avoid the second. Learning to become familiar with the landscape of our emotions, and more comfortable sharing them openly with those close to us, we build resilience that helps us to have faith in our ability to encounter and experience our lives, however they play out.