Four reasons you might feel confused by your own emotions.

Do your own emotions feel confusing to you? Do you feel unsure about why you’re feeling certain emotions or having certain responses to things?

Here are some possible reasons why you might be feeling confused by your own emotions:

You ignore or intellectualize your emotions - Ignoring or intellectualizing your emotions often looks like pushing your emotions down or reasoning your way out of them when they happen. This likely means that they feel unfamiliar or out-of-place when emotions come to the surface.

You minimize your needs to yourself and others - Emotions are often signals to us about our needs, desires, and values. If you don’t acknowledge your own needs, desires, and values that stem from your emotions or you hide them from others, your emotions will likely feel like they’re serving no purpose and are therefore confusing.

You haven't examined your beliefs and biases about emotion - Ooh, I said it. Our culture has SO much messaging about emotions, especially when it comes to gender. Some people are accused of having too many emotions and some people are told that they should be feeling them. Both of these cause confusion and dissociation from our true emotional experiences, as holding on to erroneous or harmful beliefs about emotions will likely make us interpret them in a negative light.

Past relationship patterns or trauma - Finally, our emotional worlds are heavily impacted by relationships throughout our lives and by trauma we may have experienced. Often these experiences teach us that we need to interact with our emotions in certain ways to stay safe or to get needs met in a relationship. Even if we’re out of those situations, those patterns may still be around as our brain has once thought they’ve helped us feel safety and isn’t sure how to do anything differently yet (yet is the operative word).

Does this sound like you? If so, you aren’t stuck like this forever.

My name is Erin and I'm a mental health therapist and EMDR therapist in Salt Lake City who sees adults who have experienced trauma or are stuck in perfectionist, self-neglecting patterns. I'd love to explore these patterns with you!

Schedule a free intro call with me and let’s talk about going on this journey together.