You have feelings that you aren’t aware of

You can learn to notice them

If you're like many of my clients, you may have some difficulty in identifying your feelings. This can manifest in therapy as having a hard time describing feelings or substituting those feelings with behaviours or thoughts.

Once, when asking a client how she felt after an argument with her partner, she answered that "I just stayed quiet and stared at him". This is an example of someone describing not a feeling, but a behaviour. An action. Another common occurrence is the substitution of a feeling for a thought. "I feel betrayed", "I feel like he's going to hurt me", "I feel that you're going to judge me". In all these examples what is being described is not a feeling, but rather the thought that is attached to that feeling.

Now you may say Chris, this is splitting hairs, we all know what the client means when they say this. Why does this matter at all?

It matters because our awareness of our internal lives is intrinsic to both our ability to function and regulate ourselves, and our ability to navigate the world around us. Blindness to such fundamental information is not a small impediment. It can leave you struggling to properly navigate your life. Often unable to see and understand fully the interactions between yourself and your environment.

Here we can learn something from the Cognitive Behavioural (CBT) Model known as the cognitive triangle. This model describes our internal landscape as an interplay between our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. These three elements of the psyche interact with each other bi-directionally, meaning that your thoughts can influence your emotions and vice versa, and both are influenced by your behaviours and your behaviours are influenced by your thoughts and emotions.

So what happens when someone is blind to their emotions? On the extreme end of the spectrum is a condition we call alexithymia. People suffering from this state walk around constantly aware of their thoughts and their behaviours, but experience their feelings in a muted, grey, and disconnected sort of way, similarly to how food tastes muted and bland when we have a cold.

However, someone with Alexithymia does have feelings. If we put them in an fMRI, the emotional centres of the brain haven't atrophied or decayed. So what has changed?

If this is you, then what has changed is your awareness. Your ability to consciously experience your feelings. You still have rage, fear, happiness, peace, excitement, and the rest of the emotions. But these sit in the background, away from the spotlight of conscious attention.

If it sounds implausible to you that you can be feeling something without being aware of it, do the following experiment with me.

As you read the following words, notice the feeling in the bottom of your right foot.

Now if you are like most people, you have just become acutely aware of the sensations you are experiencing in this part of the body. The temperature, comfort level, itchiness, and maybe even pain of the foot itself, as well as the texture, temperature, and hardness of whatever surface your foot is touching.

Did this feeling come into creation when you turned your attention to your foot?

Of course not. The nerves in the foot were already firing their information to the sensory regions of your brain. The sensation was already there. All that was lacking was your awareness of it.

Imagine now this same experience, but magnified from a part of the body to instead cover almost all emotional awareness. This is emotional numbness. And it is a serious issue. Our feelings are the basis for almost all we do.

In his incredible book 'Descartes' Error' Antonio Damasio explains that emotions and rationality are not as opposed as we often are lead to believe. Rather it is emotion upon which rationality is based.

The book explains that when patients suffer damage to the emotional regions of the brain such as through stroke or traumatic brain injury, and simultaneously somehow avoid damage to areas that we traditionally view as governing rational functioning, something really interesting happens. They completely lose the ability to function rationally in society. Their ability to hold a job, maintain relationships, make plans, and execute tasks are all completely debilitated. This is despite having no impairments to their logical functioning, memory systems, knowledge, social awareness, imagination, or any other facility that we commonly think of as relating to the cold Spock-like realm of rational functioning.

This is because rationality is a tool to achieve what we want. But rationality does not tell us what we want. Rationality does not give us the goal. Rationality does not tell us what is important. Rationality does not make things meaningful. This is the realm of emotion.

One can use rationality to figure out how to feed a people or how to bomb them. Rationality is the route we take on the satnav, but it is the emotions that type the destination into the system.

What happens when we are blind to our emotional states? I've had fathers come to me for help because they hit their wife or kid and don't know why. I've had clients tell me about traumatic events with tears streaming down their face as they explain to me that they don't understand why they are crying.

A lack of awareness of our emotional state is a lack of awareness of why we do what we do. The reason behind it, the meaningful part. Without that awareness, life can be disorienting, confusing, and dull.

Our feelings therefore are not superfluous fluff on top of the functional bits of our psyche. They are essential data that you need to navigate your life properly. Living without our emotions is akin to driving with half the dashboard covered up. Those sensors and gauges show important information, and without it it's extremely hard to know why things are going wrong.

What can you do about it if you struggle to perceive and understand this dimension of experience?

I have previously published a short essay on the confusion between something being simple and it being easy. You can read that at the link below if you are interested, as I won't repeat the entire thesis in this essay. But I want to warn that what I am about to describe is simple, but should not be confused as being easy.

The simple answer is that you need to notice your emotions in the same way I drew your attention to your foot earlier on. Chances are that nothing is going to come immediately to mind. You won't be able to feel anything initially. This is where having a trigger is helpful. In the same way I directed you to pay attention to your foot, you can direct your attention to an emotion by generating certain thoughts.

Fear (anxiety) is often the easiest to generate because thinking about something you don't want to do, or something that you don't want to happen is enough to elicit this response.

But you can start with any emotion, happiness by thinking of the good things in your life and what you're grateful for. Sadness by thinking of something you lost. Anger by thinking of a time when someone treated you unfairly.

Now that you have a stimulus or trigger that is likely to cause an emotional response, you can then try to notice how things in your body change as you experience this stimulus. You may feel a tightness in your chest, a swirling in your stomach, an ache in your heart, a pressure in your head. Those are your feelings. It can sometimes help to describe the feeling out loud or by journaling. This is the reason that therapists (including myself) constantly ask that infuriating "Where do you feel that?" question.

This should be done gently, slowly, and without overwhelming yourself with too much emotion too fast. It is more art than science and that is where an experienced therapist, especially one with some somatic or trauma based training can be an invaluable guide.

Over time, through repeated exposure to your feelings both inside and outside the therapy room you can become more sensitive and adept at noticing and describing how you feel.

This alone can be a profound transformation and is often enough to help you live your life more fully, even if you've felt stuck for years. And when integrated with proper therapy it can lead you to flourish and experience life in ways you could scarcely imagine.

You can't fix a dashboard you can't see. Learning to read your own gauges again is possible, and it's some of the most meaningful work I do with clients. If this sounds like your experience, I'd be glad to talk it through — you can reach out here to book a session.