I don't know how to describe what I'm feeling

Somebody asked me how I was doing and I said good. He asked how I really felt and I said not too bad. He asked whether I ever felt anything else, and I joked and said sometimes I feel like shit. We talked about that a while and he asked if there was anything more. I said no.

That was my range. I had two words for my entire emotional life and I thought that made me stable.

He offered me a different word. I had been calling myself emotionally stable, and he suggested emotionally numb, and that did something within me, because I felt the truth within it.

Then he gave me the piano. Emotions are keys on a piano, he said, and your good is one key and your not too bad is another one, so your experience of life is a single note going ding, ding, ding. And if you could play all of them, you could play Mozart instead.

I did not want to play one note for the rest of my life. But what I was short of in that moment was the words.

Why can't I describe what I'm feeling?

Because describing is its own skill, and many of us never got taught it. The feeling arrives and there is nothing to put on it, so you use the two or three words you have, and all of them are about whether things are okay or not okay. That reports your circumstances. The question was about you.

A group member got asked in a session what his emotional challenges were, and his first move was to ask what the term meant. Nobody had given him the distinction between the challenges you think you have and the ones you feel towards them. And when he did answer, it came out as a list of circumstances:

It feels like you're by yourself is not a feeling, it's a description of a feeling. What is the emotionality? What arises within you when you're by yourself working?

Daniel Lawson

And that is the gap. He had plenty to say. Unmotivated, not productive enough, no connection with people, disconnected. Then he got to it: "there's no emotions. It's like, purposeless. It doesn't feel like living." And in the next breath, "I mean, I'm satisfied. Comfortable. I feel comfortable."

A man saying his life does not feel like living, and then reassuring himself it is fine. The reassurance is the only other word he has.

Is "I don't know" a real answer?

Yes, and it is usually an accurate one. One participant answered emotional questions with "I don't know how to answer these kind of questions. Really, I don't know," and later went further: "I don't really know what feeling you're talking about. I don't have that. It's not programmed in me."

His account is that the words were never installed in him. And there is no story underneath it either. No absent father, no divorce, no event he can point at. He may simply never have been asked.

The pages that come up when you search this go clinical fast, and they are written for someone falling apart. A lot of the men I sit with are the opposite of falling apart. Competent, respected, running businesses, and carrying an emotional vocabulary of about three words, because nothing in their life so far has required a fourth one.

The feeling is already in you with no word on it

The same participant said this a little later, when his state shifted in the middle of a call: "It's kind of a hard one. I don't, like, I'm feeling things, yeah, for sure. But I don't know what it is."

Both things are true in one sentence. Something is happening in him and he has nothing to put on it. Which is why the numbness is the first thing to work on rather than the end of the enquiry.

At the moment, what is holding you back is the feeling of numbness. If you're feeling numb and you're disconnected from your emotions, it's really hard to tap into the pain of what's being suppressed.

Daniel Lawson

If you cannot reach what you feel, you cannot reach the cost of anything either, and a pattern with no felt cost on it survives years of review. One man had been reviewing the same decision for two years, asking why he even did that and getting nothing back, and it never changed, because the diagnosis needed a feeling he could not reach.

So what do we do instead?

Stop asking for the word. Ask for the shape.

One physical question at a time, with no emotion words in any of them. Where in your body is it. Heavy or light. Moving or still. Stringers or snowflakes. Soft or hard. Fast or slow. What colour is it.

Seven questions, and the man who had spent forty minutes saying he does not feel things answered all seven. More in his stomach. Light. Moving. Snowflakes. Soft. Slow. Just white. Then he said, "Can't notice much really, much more than that," and I said, well, you're already noticing a lot, and he went, "Oh. Yeah. I guess so."

Four minutes, after forty.

It works because the body will answer a question your vocabulary cannot. Heavy or light has two answers and no way to get it wrong. The word can come months later, or never, and you will still be able to tell somebody what is going on in you.

Mine arrived the same way round. When compassion finally came through for me it was lumps in my throat, tears down my cheeks, butterflies in my stomach, and I started letting myself feel them and inviting them in. The physical thing came first and the understanding came a long way behind.

Isn't this just learning more emotion words?

The list is where a lot of us go first. You read the textbooks, learn the strategies, and then say you are doing the inner work by analysing it, and I see a lot of that in my industry.

You can get very good at the emotional vocabulary and still answer good, because you cannot think your way through this one. The first experience available to someone with no words is a physical sensation that needs none.

What we are going for is simple enough to measure: you can say what you feel, in the moment, without producing a list of descriptions.

Common questions

What if nothing comes when I check my body?

Then make the question smaller. Which part of you is it in, and is that heavy or light. A lot of people get further on heavy or light than on any emotion word, because there are two answers and neither one can be wrong. If still nothing comes, say that. Nothing is a position and it is workable.

Isn't that what a feelings wheel is for?

A wheel assumes you can already match a word to a state, and that is the skill that is missing. It works well once you are in. Starting there, you pick the word that sounds most likely and you are guessing again. The sensations are yours and they are not a guess.

I can read other people's feelings fine. Why not my own?

Because reading a situation and feeling it are two different jobs, and many capable people are very good at the first one. You have spent years reading the mood in a house or a meeting and adjusting to it, and that is a separate skill from having words for your state.

How long does this take?

Shorter than you would think to get the first answer, and longer than you would like to get fluent. The vocabulary builds over months of asking, and it builds faster when you say the answers to another person than when you keep them to yourself.

What do I say when my partner asks how I feel?

Say what you have got. "I don't know what this is, but there's something heavy in my chest and it's been there since this morning" is a better answer than fine, and it is true. It also tells them you are in it with them, which is usually what they were asking about.

If this is you

The second question is the one you cannot ask yourself. I said good and I meant it. What changed everything was the man across from me asking again, and then offering me a word I would never have reached for on my own. Emotionally numb was his word, and I only knew it was right because I felt it when he said it.

That is what another person does. They ask the second question while you are still in the state, and they hand you a word to try on, and you find out in your body whether it fits.

The Reconnected Man and The Reconnected Woman are the group where we have these conversations together, and where you get to describe what you want in full colour rather than in two words.