What’s Wrong With You? Reasons Why You Don’t Know How You Feel

Feeling confused about one’s emotions is something that happens often. If you don’t know how you feel under certain circumstances, it’s not because you have a problem or because there’s something wrong. This phenomenon is much more common than people usually think, and you shouldn’t feel bad about it.

However, that doesn’t mean you can’t do something to remedy the situation. Knowing why you are sometimes blind to your own emotions will help you to understand what is happening to you and to act consciously. To do this, there are a series of steps you can take to better understand what you feel at each moment.

For starters, it’s important to clarify that many people don’t know what they feel because they don’t know how to interpret their body’s signals well. We usually relate emotion to feeling. However, all emotions start with a physiological sensation. This means that whether or not you know what is happening to you, you can be aware of an emotion by being aware of what you feel physically.

why don’t you know what you feel

There are different reasons why you don’t know what you feel or what is going on inside you. Sometimes this disconnection from your emotions can make you feel frustrated or upset about having a “feeling void” without being aware that this is, in itself, a way of feeling.

Next, we’ll look at a simple explanation of why we sometimes don’t know how we feel. Knowing this theory will help you to better identify emotions, manage them more efficiently, and experience them more consciously.

1- The emotion is in process

In the first moments when we start to feel an emotion, it’s not always easy to identify it. The physical reaction (our body’s first response) can be confused or it can be unidentified as a consequence of an emotional state.

Sometimes the reaction is so unexpected that we don’t understand what happens. There are even times when being aware that we are experiencing an emotion is almost more important than identifying the emotion itself.

2- More than one emotion in a strange “fusion” of feelings

If sometimes you don’t know what you feel when there is only one emotion inside you, imagine how difficult it is to understand when two of them merge. Both can result in a mixture that is difficult to understand.

This competition of emotions can cause discomfort and confusion, as we do not know what is going on inside us. For example, when you feel pain and anger at the same time, the feelings can be so powerful that you feel paralyzed or helpless in the face of them.

3- There is no verbal way to express what you feel

Sometimes what you feel is a mixture of emotions that you can’t name, either because you don’t know it, or because there’s no way to name it, at least not in your language.

In this case, separating your feelings into the basic emotions that compose them, so that you can understand them better, can help.

4- It’s the first time you’ve experienced this emotion

It’s normal to feel confused when experiencing a feeling for the first time. It might even scare you. It can also lead to errors, confusing it with something else.

Fortunately, this heals with experience: the more times you experience a sensation, the easier it is to recognize it.

5- You are experiencing a total detachment from your feelings

Dissociation can occur for a variety of reasons, but the most common is that, in the past, you have repressed your feelings as a defense mechanism. This makes it much more difficult to understand what you feel on future occasions.

This usually starts as an attempt not to experience negative emotions, but eventually expands until we are unable to feel anything.

What to do to connect with what you feel

The first thing you need to do to connect with your emotions is to be aware that they are there and let them surface. While this isn’t always easy, sometimes it’s as simple as breathing and letting your emotions flow. When this is complicated, meditation or mindfulness can help.

Connecting with what we feel requires connecting with ourselves. But, of course, if you find that the situation has become too complicated, it’s okay to ask for help. Sometimes all we need to reconnect with our feelings is support from someone outside.