“And How Do You Feel About That?” How to Identify and Validate Our Emotions
“And how do you feel about that?” This classic one-liner is seemingly uttered by most therapists portrayed in movies and TV shows. Take the 2003 film Freaky Friday in which Lindsay Lohan’s teenage character swaps bodies with Jamie Lee Curtis, her mother and a psychologist. When Lohan is forced to show up to Curtis’ office and see patients in her mother’s body, she comically parrots this question multiple times within the same appointment and across sessions. Despite the playful overuse of this question, its accurate answer often conveys very important information to the therapist and the patient. This is one reason I start nearly every course of therapy with education about emotions, including what they are, why we have them, and how to identify them, in order to teach patients how to answer this and related questions accurately rather than with a routine “fine.”
How to Identify Our Emotions
To learn to identify your emotions, it can be helpful to brush up on your emotional vocabulary for words that could be used to fill in the blank: “I feel ___.”. You can start with basic emotions like happy, sad, afraid, disgusted, angry and surprised. Once you are familiar with these words, you may want to learn more and could consult a Feelings Wheel which offers different dimensions or degrees of each emotion. For example, if you are feeling angry you could feel anywhere between frustrated to infuriated.
Next, you could challenge yourself to identify the three component parts of your emotion. All emotions involve thoughts, physical sensations (what we notice in our body), and behaviors (what we did or felt like doing). For example, if I was affected by the death of a loved one, I may feel sad, especially when having the thought, “The holidays will never be the same without them.” As I’m feeling sad and having this thought, I may notice a number of physical sensations - perhaps my eyes are wet, I have a lump in my throat, or I have a pit in my stomach. Behaviorally, I may be crying or laying down.
What are Emotions & Why Do We Have Them
Emotions are full body responses to internal (e.g., a thought, memory, dream) and external events that involve a cascade of biological changes and behaviors that allow us to react in a situation. Emotions can serve an adaptive function and are necessary for our survival to assist us with keeping ourselves safe and meeting our social and other needs. For example, if I were hiking in the woods and came across a bear (external event), I would immediately feel fear. Fear communicates to us that we might be in danger and involves the fight-or-flight response (or fight-flight-or-freeze response) which includes a cascade of internal changes, such as increased heart rate and blood flow to my extremities, so that I can fight the bear (preferably not) or flee from it for survival.
In addition to allowing us to react to an event and communicating important information to us, emotions also convey information to others and can affect their behavior. For example, when misbehaving as a child, you may have noticed your parent or guardian get angry and make an angry facial expression that influenced you to change your behavior. Or, if you are sad and tearful, this reaction may provoke friends and loved ones to check-in and offer support and comfort.
Emotional Validation Versus Invalidation
When revisiting the objective purpose of emotions from an evolutionary or functional perspective, it puzzles me that there is such emotional intolerance in our society. Most of us are taught to relate to our emotions in an unhealthy way. In fact, we are often exposed to messages about them being “bad” or “weak.” Comments like, “Suck it up,” “stop crying,” or “stop being a cry baby” communicate to us that emotions, particularly sadness or fear, are something to suppress and conceal from others. We naturally internalize this messaging and may subsequently invalidate our own emotions despite them being perfectly reasonable or understandable, saying things to ourselves like, “I shouldn’t feel this way,” “I just need to get over it,” or “I am weak.”
To illustrate the ineffectiveness of this judgmental approach to emotions, I often compare emotional to physical pain. Just like physical pain, emotions involve biological reactions that convey important information to us and can motivate us to address it. If I am cooking dinner and I accidentally grab a hot pan, I would feel physical pain, signaling to my mind and body that something is wrong and needs to be addressed, and immediately and reflexively drop the pan and yank my hand away to move it to safety. Thank goodness I feel physical pain because it communicates important information to me and allows me to react quickly, saving me from a serious burn or worse! Now imagine that I judged this feeling of physical pain in the way we often judge emotion, like saying “I shouldn’t feel this way!” about the pain as I am icing my hand to remove the sting from the burn or “That shouldn’t have hurt!.” Of course, I “should” have felt it and it did hurt and thank goodness because it allowed me to quickly react and take care of myself. Similarly, if I feel fear in response to seeing that bear in the woods, again, thank goodness I feel afraid because my safety likely depended upon it.
Now, it may be harder to understand and respond compassionately when our emotions do not fit the facts of the situation in front of us, such as when our bodies react too strongly than the situation might objectively require. For example, if I struggle with flight anxiety, I may feel intense fear before and during a flight or may avoid flying all together. The fear and its intensity may be out of proportion to the actual threat posed by flying. Operating from the perspective that all emotions make sense and originate from somewhere, I can still validate my experience by being curious and brainstorming all the reasons why the emotional response may be present by filling in the blank: “It makes sense that I feel this way because ___.” For example, “It makes sense that I feel this way because I experienced bad turbulence on the last flight. My body is afraid because it is trying to protect me from perceived danger.” Or, “it makes sense that I feel this way after viewing that documentary on plane crashes last week. My mind believes that flying is more dangerous than it is in actuality and my body is trying to protect me.” Emotional validation is acknowledging the kernel of truth in your emotional experience. It does not mean that the emotion at its intensity fits the facts or needs to direct our behavior. Alternatively, I can acknowledge that I am afraid, yet still board the plane and fly because I know it is objectively very safe. I can weigh my emotion, logic and reason, and values and goals to inform my decision.
Write about It
What messages did you receive about emotions as a child? As an adult?
How were emotions expressed in your family? What was modeled?
Read about It:
Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Connection by Brene Brown
Talk about It:
Reach out to a mental health professional today!
Do Something about It: Take Action.
Consider starting to simply notice when you might be experiencing emotions and/or judging or suppressing them.
Attempt to identify the emotion by saying, “I feel (emotion word) because ___.” Example emotion words include: happy, sad, afraid, disgusted, angry and surprised.
Then validate your experience by saying, “It makes sense that I feel that way because ___.” For example, “I feel disappointed because I didn’t get the job. It makes sense that I feel this way because I’ve been wanting a job change and I was excited about this opportunity.”
