What do I do with a feeling this big?

Why does a feeling get this big?

Because it was interrupted before it finished, and an unfinished feeling keeps its full size while it waits. Size is not evidence that something has gone wrong with you. It is evidence of how much is attached to whatever has just opened it.

So a remark at work takes your whole evening, and you spend that evening going back over the remark hunting for the part that would justify the size. You will not find it there. The remark was a door. What came through it had been standing behind that door for years. This is why your reaction looks out of all proportion to the person watching it and exactly in proportion to you.

What does pushing it down actually cost?

Holding a feeling down keeps it exactly where it is, and the holding is paid for in the hours around it. The cost is undramatic, which is why it goes unnoticed. It arrives as an evening that took more out of you than the evening warranted, as irritation at something small, as a body that will not settle at night. Shutting one feeling down shuts the others with it, and that is where the flatness clients describe comes from: the warmth leaves by the same valve as the grief.

Students who suppress their feelings more report less support from new friends, less closeness and lower social satisfaction¹. Suppression there was measured rather than assigned, so the study shows the company suppression keeps rather than proving it causes the loneliness. The direction matters less than the recognition: the habit that keeps you composed is the same habit holding people at a distance you never asked for.

The clients who are best at this learned it early, in a house where the feeling was unwelcome. John Bowlby described how a child whose distress brings no comfort stops signalling the distress, and the not signalling becomes as automatic as breathing. That is worth saying plainly. The skill was not a failure of yours, it was the best solution available at the time, and the load in that house did not sit equally on everyone in it. What is left is a skill still running long after the house it was built for.

What is my body doing while this happens?

The feeling is in your body before it reaches your thinking, and your body is where it is findable. Clients who cannot say what they feel can nearly always say where they feel it. That is enough to start with.

• It has a location. Chest, throat, stomach, jaw. The place is specific, and it stays put once you have found it.
• It has a shape. Tight, heavy, hot, hollow, fizzing. Describing the shape turns a state into something you are able to speak to.
• It has a direction. Push away, come closer, hold still, get out. The movement it wants names the need underneath it.

Emotion-Focused Therapy for couples, developed by Leslie Greenberg, treats a feeling as information about a need rather than as a fault to be corrected, and that reading holds just as well for a feeling you are having on your own. Asked that way, the question stops being how do I get rid of this and becomes what am I short of.

Why does naming a feeling make it smaller?

Because putting it into words changes what your body does with it, and it works whether or not you believe it will. This is the part clients find hardest to accept, right up to the first time they do it in front of me and feel the drop.

Putting a feeling into words lowers the brain’s alarm response to it², and it does so without feeling like self-management. Asked to predict the effect beforehand, people expect naming a feeling to make them feel worse, and it helps them anyway³. How closely the word fits appears to matter: people afraid of spiders who used more fear words while facing one showed larger drops in their fear responses⁴. That was a small study of one specific fear, so read it as a reason to be exact rather than as a general law.

This is why I feel bad does very little and I feel ashamed does a great deal. Bad is a category. Ashamed is an address, and an address is somewhere you are able to go.

How do I process emotions when one is already running?

You stay with it long enough to locate it, name it precisely and say what it wants, before you decide what to do about it. The order matters. A decision taken while the feeling still has no name is almost always a decision about getting away from the feeling.

• Stop and find it. Before any naming, locate where in your body it sits and how much room it is taking up.
• Name it in one word. Not stressed, not fine, not weird. Hurt, afraid, ashamed, furious, lonely, grieving.
• Say what it is about. One full sentence, aloud or written out: I feel this, about that. Not a summary of it.
• Let it run its length. A named feeling rises, peaks and drops, and the drop arrives by itself where the rise has not been interrupted.
• Name the need underneath. Say what is missing, even where there is no way of getting it today.

As a suggestion rather than a clinical threshold, 10 minutes with one feeling and nothing else running is enough, and the first 2 minutes are the worst of it. Expect this as well: at the moment these steps would do the most good, turning towards the feeling is the last thing you will want. The wish to be rid of it peaks exactly where staying would pay. That is not a sign you are doing it wrong.

These steps work on a feeling that belongs to now. They will not reach one that returns every week at the same size, one that has sat on you for months without shifting, or the state where you reach for a feeling and find nothing there at all. In those cases what the feeling is attached to is older than whatever set it off, and it stays genuinely unclear until it is looked at with another person present. Where the blankness has been there for years, go slowly. In my experience hunting harder for the missing feeling deepens the blankness rather than lifting it.

Questions people ask

Will therapy help if I cannot feel anything in the first place?

Yes, because the work starts with the holding rather than with a hunt for the missing feeling. Finding out how the shutting down happens is itself the opening, and that is an ordinary and unhurried part of the work.

What actually happens in a session when a feeling comes up?

I slow you down at the point the feeling arrives and stay with you while it finds its words. Nothing is forced, and you decide how far into it you go on any particular day.

Will I have to talk about my childhood to do this?

Not as a requirement, though a feeling that returns at full size week after week is attached to something earlier than whatever triggers it. The work starts with what is live now and goes back only where the present keeps pointing there.

How do I choose a therapist for emotional work like this?

Look for someone who works with feeling as it happens in the room rather than only discussing it afterwards, and who tells you plainly how they work. A free 30-minute call is a reasonable way to hear whether the way someone talks about feeling makes sense to you.

Is it a problem if I cry in a session, or if I never do?

Neither is a problem, and neither measures whether the work is landing. Some clients cry in the first 10 minutes and some never do, and in my experience that says more about how each learned to show feeling than about how the work is going.

If big feelings overwhelm you, I use emotion-focused psychotherapy to help you stay with them long enough for them to settle.

Sources

1. Srivastava, Tamir, McGonigal, John and Gross, The Social Costs of Emotional Suppression, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2009
2. Lieberman, Eisenberger, Crockett, Tom, Pfeifer and Way, Putting Feelings Into Words, Psychological Science, 2007
3. Torre and Lieberman, Putting Feelings Into Words: Affect Labeling as Implicit Emotion Regulation, Emotion Review, 2018
4. Kircanski, Lieberman and Craske, Feelings Into Words: Contributions of Language to Exposure Therapy, Psychological Science, 2012

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.