Therapists and thier obsession with trying to bring up your feelings and emotions whe

This is what I dont get sometimes, and I will bring it up with my t on Tuesday. Here is the thing. I use to meet with her every 2 weeks, now she has bumped it up to every week recently, anyway, for the session hour, I sit there, btw I have a great connection with her. I sit there and we talk.

So I present one of my topics for the hour, that is when I can be organized, and when I am done, she gives her feedback, to me that is processed, to her its not. Also during the same conversation, she will ask, " what kind of feelings and emotions does that bring up for you? Let say I say angry or sad or whatever, then she will ask " why does it make you feel xyz? this is so damn confusing because I dont know why it makes me feel xy and z to begin with, I just thought I would throw and emotion out there and that would be it you know. Here is the analogy I want to give her:

The topic would be a turkey dinner on thanksgiving.
The sides would be all the emotions and feelings that come with the dinner.

If I am talking about the topic, I am giving her the turkey dinner, which always comes with the sides. why then ask "what is this bringing up for you?
Isnt it obvious? If the client is telling you a story from the past, a sad fearful and hurtful story, wouldnt you know all the generic emotions that come with it? of course the clients emotions and feelings wouldnt be happy joyful and leaping bounds.
What do you guys think?
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From what I can tell by reading therapy blogs and therapist professional literature, it is because they are taught that the emotions ARE the main course.

It's because something that happened (a fact, an action, an incident, the topic at hand) will cause an emotional reaction in you today, in that moment, as you tell the story. And healing comes from recognizing those emotions, becoming more self-aware, and feeling them in the presence of a caring other.

So the therapist is simultaneously trying to grow your self awareness, survey your emotional landscape , and provide an empathetic ear.

Once, I was going on and on about something that happened to me as an adolescent. I was throwing facts out left and right, showing how uncaring the adults were to me at the time.

And the therapist sort of interrupted gently, during a pause and said, "How do you feel about yourself at that age, when you talk about her?"

And I was like, "What the heck? I don't feel anything about myself?"

We came to discover that on an intellectual level, I knew that I did not cause those things to happen to me. But on an emotional level, I felt a lot of shame and self-blame. And later, we realized that blaming myself was a means of control. Because it was too painful to accept that I had no control over the bad things that happened to me. It was easier for me to blame myself, and feel a lot of shame and self-hatred, than accept that I really didn't have control and the world can be such a scary, out-of-control and mean place.

Does that make sense? And we got to all that by surveying the emotions that surround the facts.

And eventually, we talked about how I needed to learn to self-soothe all those past hurts. Because nobody else can do it for me. But you can't self-soothe if you hate yourself or blame yourself for what happened. So the end goal is to learn to love myself and practice self-compassion. I'm still not there, but closer.

No, I would not presume to know what anybody else felt in a particular situation. And I think that a T, having met with many many people and seen many different reactions and feelings connected to the same kinds of situation, would be even less likely to think that they know how somebody feels unless they express it - and maybe not even then. As a client, I would not stay with a therapist who assumed that I had a set of generic feelings in a particular situation - to me it would seem patronising. (This is a bit of an issue with me - I grew up being always the youngest, and was always told what I was really like, what I enjoyed, how I felt about things. I was never allowed to say how I felt about something, it was always ascribed to me. So for me it's particularly hard to actually access my own genuine feelings.)

I, too, think it's really hard when T asks me what kind of feelings I have in a particular situation, and why. It's impossible to answer, sometimes, but it's something that leads to very interesting places. Why do you feel that it ought to be enough for you to throw out the feeling to the T? Isn't the really interesting issue where the emotion comes from, why you feel it? Because that's really the key to understanding ourselves - isn't it?

It is possible that T lacks emotional insight and therefore needs to pose that question. But maybe T is assessing your emotional self-awareness.

I think it's as important, if not more so, for you to talk about the emotions and identify them yourself - not just for your T to know what they are. That process is important.

I also think it's not your T's job to jump to conclusions. You mention generic emotions - but they're not generic. Everyone has different feelings and associations and the same things can be experienced differently by different clients.

Edited to add: posted at the same time as Mastodon who said it rather better!

Thank you for your response, sometimes I have a very hard time with naming emotions and feelings, I can tell you what I am feeling atm of the story telling, but for the life of me I dont know how to delve deeper and say why and how and all those other questions thrown at me, its all funny to me atm.

Which won't ever change if your T guesses how you feel instead of asking...

You are on point, I too was not allowed to express or feel emotion, and I got through life kinda ok to this point, maybe its why it annoys me to high hell when my t asks me what kind of emotion and feelings it brings up for me, I am ok I guess with saying, anger or sadness or hurt, but when she asks why, that is when I get a major dumb face, like I dont understand that part, she also tells me, my affect is non congruent with my story and she needs me to connect with my feelings, that alone seems so jibberish to me.

There are no generic emotions. Sweepy's emotions are not Perna's emotions. You have a unique experience being Sweepy. I might have happy Thanksgiving emotions, look forward to Thanksgiving and seeing Uncle Bob and Aunt Anne again but your Uncle Bob might be a mean drunk without a nice thing to say to anyone (one of my brother-in-laws) who scares you.

Saying "I feel sad" is not the same as being sad. If you smile and say, "I feel sad" what does that mean? Part of my problem is not being in sync with myself; looking, feelings, expressing sadness when I say I am sad; not showing degrees of sadness appropriately (although anxiety and anger are more my problems than sadness). That is what can be learned in therapy; it wasn't safe to express anger to my stepmother but my T is not going to hit me, not going to get up in my face and scream at me, not going to jut her bottom jaw, putting its teeth in front of her top teeth and staring at me with "steely" negatively soul penetrating eyes.

Emotions have range and depth, are not one-size-fits-all situations. Being sad and disappointed when one does not get one's way/win a game is not the same as being sad when one's parent, sibling, or mate dies. As my T had to point out to me once, "a wet towel on the bed is not the same as a murder" (getting angry that one's spouse or children do not pick up after themselves) but learning about anger from my stepmother, I did not learn that; anger equalled "kill!" to me so I did not express anger the correct way, instead I was passive aggressive and my conversation was constantly littered with sarcastic, warlike/military words.

My T has worked with me on sort of working backwards to get to the emotions. He has me identify what thoughts were going through my mind first (which often is just as difficult as identifying feelings). Then he has me find the emotion that thought/those thoughts elicited. This works better for me than just being asked "what did you feel"? It's more of a guide to get in touch with feelings - a technique that I've learned to practice and use all the time.

Have you ever seen two people have very different reactions to the same event? A person's prior experiences and where they are in life right now influences how they react to an event.

It has been very interesting to me to see how the changes I've gone through in therapy effect how I feel about myself, my life, and the events in my past. Just as two different people react differently to the same event, I myself can feel differently about the same event at different times in my life - and even within the same therapy session!

In therapy we revisit the same events over and over sometimes. In one telling I may not have any emotion and be disconnected from the fact that my situation was not good. I could be viewing it all as 'normal' and not aware of any feelings. In another telling of that same story I may be feeling vulnerable and fully aware of how dangerous that was. In another telling I may be angry, resentful, or sad. I can now look back and remember how my answers to that question of "what are you feeling and what does that mean to you" changed at each stage of my therapy and see my growth and progress through therapy.

It is ok to not know what you feel, or to feel and not know why. In learning to look inside and ask yourself what you are feeling right now and how you relate to the event, you will begin to learn more about yourself and work through your topics in therapy.

Your topic may be a turkey dinner on thanksgiving, but you are not just talking about the turkey! Why did you bring up this particular story today? Did you skip lunch and you are fondly wishing for turkey? Did events on thanksgiving open up old wounds that made you feel (what?). Are you feeling angry and resentful over something? Are you wishing your family was a certain way? Thanksgiving is coming up very soon, are you worried that this year will be the same? That same story could be associated with some wildly different perspectives at different times in your life. Why did that thanksgiving story come up today instead of a different story? Where are you now?

You are not presenting to your therapist turkey on a menu. You are bringing to her your perspective of that event - including your emotions, judgements, and reactions. In one telling you may be resigned and sad, or in another ready to take action. She wants to know where *you* are in relation to that story.

Turtle

Wow perna thats really something to think about although its still difficult for me to grasp yet.

I think that T's don't want to make assumptions. It may seem obvious that a difficult childhood event would be traumatizing for many, but maybe for someone else it had other feelings -unexpected feelings- tied to the event.

It's always safer to ask you about your experience than to assume and generalize--everyone responds differently.

I think that there are as many responses to situations as there are T's. They can't read our minds. But I do agree that sometimes they are assessing our emotional self-awareness. I think when you are used to blocking or denying your feelings you describe memories in a very non-emotional way sometimes and they want you to get back to understanding and dealing with feelings. And when you do and they validate those feelings, I think it is extremely cathartic,