When I ask a new client “How are you feeling?”
The answer is often immediate.
“Stressed.”
“Anxious.”
“Overwhelmed.”
Sometimes it’s frustration. Sometimes sadness. Sometimes just, “Not good.”
Earlier in my career, I accepted those answers and moved on. They seemed specific enough. Now I usually dig into that right off the bat. Not because they’re wrong, but because that’s just the headline.
Someone once came in convinced that anxiety had become his biggest problem. He described lying awake replaying conversations from work, worrying that he had disappointed people, second-guessing decisions that had already been made, and feeling exhausted by the constant mental noise.
Every time he tried to summarize it, he came back to the same conclusion.
“I’m anxious all the time.”
That certainly described part of what he was experiencing. But as we slowed the conversation down, something else began to emerge.
He wasn’t only anxious.
He also felt responsible.
Responsible for keeping everyone happy.
Responsible for preventing problems before they happened.
Responsible for making decisions that weren’t really his to make.
Responsible for outcomes he couldn’t possibly control.
Mixed in with that was disappointment that he couldn’t meet the expectations he had set for himself. There was guilt whenever he imagined letting someone down. There was uncertainty about whether he had made the right decision. There was grief over opportunities that had disappeared while he was busy taking care of everyone else.
From the outside, they produced the same restless nights and racing thoughts. From the inside, however, they weren’t the same experience at all.
That conversation comes back to me because I’ve had some version of it hundreds of times. Someone tells me they’re angry. Half an hour later we discover they’re actually hurt. Another person comes in convinced they’re anxious, only to realize that what they’re feeling is grief over something they never allowed themselves to acknowledge. What looked like one emotion turns out to be several, layered together until they’re almost impossible to distinguish.
I don’t think people struggle because they can’t name enough emotions. Many of us know plenty of emotional words. What seems much harder is recognizing that several emotions can exist at once, each pointing toward something different.
The problem isn’t that these feelings exist. It’s that they all show up together. Guilt can feel a lot like anxiety when it’s mixed with uncertainty. Grief can look like depression. Hurt can come out sounding like anger. Instead of experiencing several distinct emotions, we experience one overwhelming feeling that tells us something is wrong without being able to say exactly what.
It’s understandable that our first instinct is to want to make that feeling stop.
So we work harder.
We replay conversations in our heads.
We apologize again.
We ask other people for reassurance that we handled things correctly.
We distract ourselves.
Sometimes those efforts help.
Often they don’t—not because we’re trying the wrong solution, but because we haven’t yet understood what we’re actually feeling.
Over the years I’ve been struck by how often people correct themselves if you simply give them enough room to think.
Someone comes in convinced they’re angry. Twenty minutes later they’ll stop mid-sentence and say, “No…that’s not really it.” They sit quietly for a few seconds and then try again.
“I think I’m disappointed.”
Or they’ll come in convinced they’re anxious about a decision, only to realize they’re grieving the fact that whichever choice they make, they’re going to lose something they care about.
Nothing about their situation has changed. Nothing has been solved. But the internal dialogue has. Once the experience becomes more precise, people often understand themselves differently than they did when they first sat down.
I’ve become less interested over the years in the first feeling people tell me they’re having and much more interested in the second, third, and fourth feelings that emerge if we stay with the conversation a little longer. The first answer is almost always sincere.
It’s just rarely the whole answer.
Most people don’t leave that first conversation with fewer feelings. They leave realizing that what they thought was one emotion was actually several experiences that had become tangled together.
One of the things that has surprised me over the years is how often people feel a little lighter before anything in their lives has actually changed. Their relationships are the same. Their job is the same. The difficult decision is still waiting for them when they leave my office. What changed was that one overwhelming feeling finally became understandable. In my experience, that’s often where real progress begins.