Misnaming Emotions

Emotions are finicky little things. While they may seem like intangible objects that you could surely go on about your life without interacting with, instead they can wreak havoc with very tangible effects if you ignore, suppress, or misname emotions.

I’ve talked before on this blog about how the goal with emotions is to feel them, to feel all of them with their full weight, and if you do this then you should ideally move forth onto other emotions. Whether the emotion is good or bad, none of them are meant to last forever.

A signal that something isn’t going correctly with your emotions is when they start to ligner. When you find you can’t feel any other emotions and you are stuck. Things that could cause this stuckness could be mental illness, ignoring of emotions, suppression of emotions, or misnaming of emotions.

Misnaming is tricky because it can even occur with very close emotions. There was an incident I went through within this past year and I thought for sure the emotion I was experiencing was sadness. So I named my sadness and I sat with it like I know I need to.

But I still felt the same.

So I started to get frustrated because I don’t love feeling sadness, and I had sat with it like I thought I needed to, and I was ready for it to let me feel something else. But it wasn’t.

I went through this limbo for a few days and then realized that what I was feeling wasn’t sadness, but grief. And boom. Just with that renaming I already started to feel myself progress through the weight and cloud that had been around me. Sure, it didn’t go away immediately because I had grief I had to sit with now. But, it was like my grief could finally relax a little bit because I had finally seen it and recognized it for what it was, instead of misnaming it.

And it’s tricky because to many, myself included, grief and sadness are rather similar so it can be overwhelming to think of getting stuck in an emotion because you are slightly off in your naming of it.

But, my goal here is not to overwhelm you. My goal is that if you find you are going through and naming emotions as you usually do, and one is lingering around much longer than it usually does, then I encourage you to explore that emotion further and see if you are misnaming it. My favorite resource to use for this is Brene Brown’s emotions chart from her book Atlas of the Heart.