Name it

“How did that make you feel?”

This is a question you’ll hear me ask often in session.

For some people this presents no problem and they can readily name the feeling, rate how strong it is, explain how it has changed over time and outline what has brought it on. For others this is a difficult question because they have little or no experience in identifying their emotions. There can be many reasons for this. It could be, for example, that they have been raised in a family that didn’t talked about or acknowledged feelings.

But whatever the reason for the inability to identify emotions the first stage of therapy then always becomes about leaning to recognise and name feelings. That often resembles teaching someone a foreign language starting with the basic: “Is it mad, glad, sad or bad?”

Being able to label emotions is central to psychological well-being for several reasons:

1)     You have to be able to identify what is wrong in order to change it. As the American psychiatrist Daniel Siegel says “you’ve got to name it to tame it.”

2)     Being able to name your emotions gives you a way to communicate what is happening for you to other people (for example your therapist). When someone tells me they feel bad I keep prodding until I understand what is going on more specifically because it is significant whether it is (bad)sad or (bad)rejected or (bad)guilty or (bad)depressed or (bad)defective.

3)     Research has shown that labelling emotions has a calming effect on the brain (specifically the amygdala which is the fear centre of the brain)

If you are a parent one of the best things you can do to help your child’s psychological functioning (apart from providing a safe, loving, reinforcing environment of course) is to teach them to recognise feelings. You do that by talking about your own feelings (i.e., modelling) and by inquiring about theirs.  As the children grow older it is helpful to show them that we can sometimes experience conflicting or even opposite emotion at the same time. This is confusing for many (including many adults) but easier to deal with once you realise that that is not unusual and doesn’t signal that you are odd or different in some way (which many people initially think).

Ah, the messy, wonderful emotional life of us human beings…