Identifying Emotions

Who understands their feelings all the time? I can’t even identify my emotions more than half the time. However, I’m told that being able to do so is a good thing. So I’m trying every day to “check in” with my emotions and get a sense of how I’m feeling. I’m not sure this activity is doing me any good, but my therapist, my sponsor, and other friends tell me otherwise.

Some of you might be reading this and thinking “What’s so hard about identifying and feeling emotions?” Maybe it’s something you’ve been able to do, even encouraged to do throughout your life starting when you were a child. Some may have been taught that it’s okay to have and feel and even express your emotions. I don’t understand that. I wasn’t raised in such a home. In my childhood I was told to keep my feelings to myself. As I was growing up, I learned to avoid feeling because they usually got me in trouble. And learning ways to avoid the feelings, meant not identifying them. It also meant developing techniques for avoiding the emotions that I did have.

That led me to sneaking liquor from my parents’ cabinet. I learned that when I drank alcohol, I could escape the emotions for a time – and avoiding them for even an hour was a relief to me. That led to other “coping” mechanisms such as keeping people at arm’s length and being stoic and just sticking to the facts. Those coping mechanisms, I’ve come to learn, are not healthy. They also don’t work very well because the feelings always come back and I have to come up with another way to avoid them.

So now, as a middle-aged adult, I have to learn to accept and recognize my feelings. I’ve been told this for at least 15 years and I’ve had varying success at recognizing the emotions and being able to label them. I’ve also learned that it’s quite possible to have several emotions at the same time.

This spring I’ve been putting in extra effort (but still not consistent effort) into allowing myself to acknowledge the emotions I am experiencing. I’m trying not to ignore the many aspects of emotions I might be feeling at given points throughout each day. I use a format for doing so that I learned at the hospital during my visit there in February and March this year. It’s really basic but very hard for me to do. If my therapist wasn’t holding me accountable, I might choose to not record the emotions and even revert to avoiding the emotions.

The basic format involves finishing three statements.

I feel ___________________________

I need __________________________

I want __________________________

The hard part is coming up with the name of an actual emotion. For instance, I’m not allowed to say “I feel tired,” because “tired” is a state of being, not an emotion. The therapists in the hospital would respond with “How does being tired make you feel?” Identifying the underlying emotions is a real struggle that sometimes has me trying to identify the emotions using some general words: sad, mad, glad, or afraid. Sometimes that’s the closest I can come to identifying how I’m actually feeling.

How well do you do at identifying your emotions? Maybe this technique would help you, too. I will keep trying to use it and hopefully come to peaceful terms with my emotions.