[Elkino]

Hi,

Lately I have been thinking about the fact that I always feel either good, OK or bad. But its extremely hard to tell which emotion it is I am feeling.

So when my T asks how I feel... I give one of those options and when my T asks what i am feeling I am speechless. I'm never able to define the emotions. Or it takes me a lot of effort to start thinking about what happened, what triggered the feeling, etc and then maybe I come up with a plausible answer. But sometimes I suck and my T points out I might be wrong. It confuses me a lot.

Should defining your emotions be a rational process? I didn't think so...

Does anyone else experience this? Is it a learning process, trying to define your emotions? How did it go for you? Is there hope?

Yes. Since starting therapy I've been feeling a lot of emotion, often or maybe always as a physical feeling, and it is hard to define.

[ThisWayOut]

I can very much relate. I wrote about it somewhere recently, but can't remember where. Intellectually, I know what emotions most people would be feeling in certain situations, but when it comes to my actual emotional experiencing, I can't easily distinguish between the different emotions. I have a basic concept of sad or happy or frustrated or flat, but the rest eludes me.
I tried to work on it with a T one time, but that particular day I was more in touch with the intellectual stuff rather than the emotional stuff so I did better than I would have on a more emotional day. She didn't understand that I couldn't really connect what I was feeling to what all these words and labels were.
Sometimes T's will suggest what I am describing is something but it doesn't resonate with my experience. Sometimes I correct their interpretation, other times I don't have the energy or don't feel it important in the moment...
I don't really know how to progress with it, so I hope you get some suggestions that I could try too.

[Elkino]

Originally Posted by ThisWayOut

I can very much relate. I wrote about it somewhere recently, but can't remember where. Intellectually, I know what emotions most people would be feeling in certain situations, but when it comes to my actual emotional experiencing, I can't easily distinguish between the different emotions. I have a basic concept of sad or happy or frustrated or flat, but the rest eludes me.
I tried to work on it with a T one time, but that particular day I was more in touch with the intellectual stuff rather than the emotional stuff so I did better than I would have on a more emotional day. She didn't understand that I couldn't really connect what I was feeling to what all these words and labels were.
Sometimes T's will suggest what I am describing is something but it doesn't resonate with my experience. Sometimes I correct their interpretation, other times I don't have the energy or don't feel it important in the moment...
I don't really know how to progress with it, so I hope you get some suggestions that I could try too.

That's exactly what I experience too. Intellectually you can kinda figure out what the emotion could be, but it's not as if something inside of you screams one single word.
I do actually see the danger of this issue. Because other people can make suggestions or assumptions and it's easier for you to make them your own, right?
I don't like having this problem.

I still struggle a bit to identify feelings. But as I describe the polarised emotions T says, that's how you had to be with your father and when talking about the other emotion, t says and that's how you had to relate with your mother. That made sense and helped me integrate the emotions into something I could understand.

[stopdog]

To me it is sort of like trying to distinguish between ochre, light brown, and dark yellow. If good, bad, and okay are working- why would I need more than that? What good does it do me? It seems like an exercise in acting like a therausus.

[SoupDragon]

Yep. My states are either great, bad or numb.

[Elkino]

Originally Posted by stopdog

To me it is sort of like trying to distinguish between ochre, light brown, and dark yellow. If good, bad, and okay are working- why would I need more than that? What good does it do me? It seems like an exercise in acting like a therausus.

I guess the use is not in naming them but in finding a way to make that 'state' you're in better. If you know what you feel you might get an idea about where that comes from and how to eliminate ir... Or reinforce it of course, depending on whether its a positive or negative feeling.

At least that's why I want to figure this thing out.

Originally Posted by Elkino

I guess the use is not in naming them but in finding a way to make that 'state' you're in better. If you know what you feel you might get an idea about where that comes from and how to eliminate ir... Or reinforce it of course, depending on whether its a positive or negative feeling.

At least that's why I want to figure this thing out.

I think that one purpose for understanding emotion is to be able to communicate your feelings to another person. I recently told my T about a conversation I had with my father, and T kind of suggested to me the emotion I was feeling at the time which I couldn't identify myself. If I could have identified it I might have been able to say something to my father instead of going mute.

[archipelago]

When I first started therapy I had no idea even what an emotion was really. I was a total intellectual fat brain without a heart or so it seemed. But I knew I was in pain and that is about all I could feel. Most of the time that pain would grasp at my throat and I wouldn't be able to speak even if I had words in my head.

I literally had to learn how to talk in therapy. I was also painfully shy and withdrawn. My parents were very authoritarian and demanded that we never speak unless spoken to so I lived a huge part of my life in silence. This was also experienced as just raw pain.

The point for me having learned to speak is that I feel more and have a greater range of emotion and expression. That just feels more complete and human to me. I don't think it is necessary. And a lot of times even in therapy some things are better left unspoken. In some senses some things are more moving and powerful if not made so explicit.