Regulating Emotions: Naming
- nikitamoody
- Oct 17, 2023
- 3 min read
Check out the overview of understanding emotions and why acceptance is important first.
“When we name something, it becomes real, it becomes something we can talk about, interpret, analyse.” – Pragya Agarwal
What are you feeling? How do you feel? What feeling is coming up right now?
These are questions that therapists ask all the time. We are in the world of trying to support people to verbalise their inner experiences and we know that this can be helpful. But, answers to these questions do not always come easily.
Why can naming emotions be helpful?
Naming our emotion gives us an opportunity to step back and make a choice about what to do with the emotion. Giving a name to an emotion makes it feel more tangible and real, it connects us to the emotion more. A name also enables us to communicate with others about them.
Labelling an emotion can also help us feel more in control of our emotional experiences. For example, naming something as ‘anxiety’ provides clarity about what actions we can take to soothe ourselves which might be different to feeling ‘anger’.
Why is naming emotions harder for some people?
Being able to identify our feelings assumes that:
We have the words in our vocabulary to describe an emotion We can recognise the physical sensations in our bodies indicating an emotion We can distinguish between similar emotions Our emotions are not buried so deep that we cannot access them!
Neurodivergence, trauma and eating disorders are some examples of experiences which can (not always) make some or all of the above assumptions incorrect.
If your therapist ever asks how you feel and the true answer is that you haven’t got a clue, that’s okay! You can say that you don’t know and your therapist should not judge you for that. Emotions are complex and naming a feeling is not always as straightforward as pointing to a word on a colourful emotion wheel.
The limits of language
We rely on words to communicate, to connect to ourselves and others. But the truth is that the language we have available to us will always have limits. Emotion words are subjective in their nature so my feeling of ‘anxiety’ will not be identical to yours. My feeling of ‘anxiety’ could actually be ‘excitement’ for you.
In therapy, we’re trying to gain a clear understanding of you so we will continue to be curious when you use a feeling word – what does that feel like for you?
What thoughts come up? Where do you feel it in your body? Does it have a shape or colour?
These questions might seem a bit abstract but the purpose is to ensure that we are on the same page when using specific emotion words in this context.
What about context?
An additional challenge around naming emotions is that they exist in a context. When you name how you felt in a specific situation, that word may be different elsewhere. For example, I might often use ‘frustrated’ when talking about work but ‘angry’ when talking about family issues. Both feelings are pretty similar but conditioning has resulted in me judging anger as an unacceptable emotion for the workplace so it is moved to frustration.
Social context will also come into play here. As a matter of survival in white supremacist society, racialised folks have been expected to downplay and monitor their emotional expressions throughout history. This will inevitably have an impact on how able people feel to accurately and honestly name their emotions.
What words do we actually have?
Further to all of the above challenges, we are also limited by the languages we speak. Not all languages have words for all nuanced emotional experiences which is why we often make use of metaphors or string lots of words together. The feelings we have words for are again, determined by context and an evaluation of what is deemed worthy of having language attributed to it.
Dr Tim Lomas has a growing list of ‘untranslatable’ words relating to wellbeing which provides insight into the breadth of nuanced emotional experiences felt by humans.
Tiffany Watt Smith delivers a great Ted Talk on the history of emotions including the change in meanings of words across societies and time.
In summary, naming emotions is not as simple as we might assume. If it is challenging for you, that’s okay! Practice can help but be patient with and kind to yourself as you learn more about your emotional experiences.
Further reading:
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