By Annie Wright, LMFT · Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist (#95719)Clinically reviewed May 2026Here’s Why What You’ve Likely Learned About Feelings Is Dead Wrong.
Most of us were never taught how to actually feel our emotions — we were taught to manage, suppress, or perform them. In this post, we explore why all emotions carry real signal value, what happens in the body and brain when feelings are chronically suppressed, and how driven women can begin building a richer, more honest relationship with their own inner lives.
- The Morning Sunita Couldn’t Feel the Floor
- What Emotional Literacy Actually Is
- The Neuroscience of Suppressed Feelings
- How Emotional Shutdown Shows Up in Driven Women
- The Cost of Learning to Perform Instead of Feel
- Both/And: The Both/And of Emotional Processing
- The Systemic Lens: Why Culture Rewards Emotional Suppression — Until It Doesn’t
- How to Begin: Unlearning What You Were Taught About Feelings
- Frequently Asked Questions
The Morning Sunita Couldn’t Feel the Floor
Sunita is a 38-year-old marketing director at a consumer tech company. She’s been in the role for four years, and by every external measure, she’s exceptional at it. She knows her numbers. She reads the room. She delivers on time, every time. Last Tuesday morning, she sat in her car outside her office building and gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white. A client had sent a scathing email — the kind that lands wrong even when you know it’s political, even when you know it isn’t personal. Her chest was tight. Her breathing was shallow. Something was rising in her.
She pushed it down. Took a breath. Plastered on a smile. Walked in.
By lunch, she couldn’t remember what she was feeling that morning. And that, in itself, was the story.
Across the city, Chloe — 41, an architect, someone who can calculate load tolerances in her head but struggles to name what she’s feeling — snapped at her partner over a misplaced coffee mug. She’d spent the week navigating brutal client negotiations and impossible deadlines, stuffing her exhaustion and frustration into a tighter and tighter container. When she got home, the container broke. The reaction was disproportionate because what she was actually feeling had nothing to do with the coffee mug.
Both Sunita and Chloe are experiencing the same thing: the profound cost of emotional suppression. And both of them learned to suppress their feelings in places that made them feel like it was the only option. This post is about where that learning came from, what it’s costing, and what the path back looks like.
What Emotional Literacy Actually Is
Before we can talk about what goes wrong with feelings, it helps to define what a functional relationship with them actually looks like.
Emotional literacy is the capacity to accurately identify, name, and understand what one is feeling in any given moment, and to use that information functionally in decision-making and relationships. Marc Brackett, PhD, founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and author of Permission to Feel, defines emotional literacy as encompassing five core skills: recognizing emotions in oneself and others, understanding where they come from, labeling them with precision, expressing them appropriately, and regulating them effectively — his RULER framework.
In plain terms: It’s the ability to know what you’re actually feeling — not what you think you should feel, not what’s socially acceptable — and to work with that information rather than against it. For most driven women, it’s a skill that was never taught and has to be actively learned in adulthood.
Emotional suppression is the deliberate or automatic inhibition of emotional experience and expression. Distinguished from healthy regulation — which involves working with feelings — suppression involves working against them: overriding the signal before it can be processed. Research by James Gross, PhD, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory, identifies suppression as an expressive suppression subtype of emotion regulation, with significant downstream costs including increased cardiovascular arousal, impaired memory, and reduced emotional well-being.
In plain terms: It’s not the same as staying calm. Suppression is the active work of making sure a feeling doesn’t show — or doesn’t fully register. The body keeps score anyway. It always does.
The Neuroscience of Suppressed Feelings
What happens in the brain and body when feelings are chronically suppressed is increasingly well-documented, and it’s not subtle. (PMID: 35645742)
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of The Body Keeps the Score, has spent decades documenting the ways in which unexpressed emotional experience doesn’t disappear — it gets stored somatically, in the body’s tissue, its posture, its nervous system activation patterns. (PMID: 9384857) When the emotion can’t complete its natural arc — can’t move through the body and be discharged — it tends to go underground, where it continues to exert influence without the benefit of conscious awareness or choice.
Alexithymia — from the Greek meaning “no words for feelings” — is a condition characterized by difficulty identifying and describing one’s own emotional states. Clinically, it involves a reduced capacity for introspection, a tendency toward concrete rather than emotionally nuanced thinking, and a limited fantasy life. Research estimates that approximately 10% of the general population experiences alexithymia, with significantly higher rates among people who have experienced developmental trauma.
In plain terms: Some women don’t just struggle to express their feelings — they genuinely struggle to know what they’re feeling. This isn’t emotional weakness. It’s often the legacy of an environment where feelings had to be shut down so thoroughly that the circuitry for recognizing them went offline.
Susan David, PhD, organizational psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of Emotional Agility, argues compellingly that emotions are data, not directives. (PMID: 16311898) They carry functional signal value — information about what matters, what’s threatened, what’s needed. When we suppress the messenger, we’re not eliminating the information. We’re just making ourselves unable to read it. The decisions we then make — without access to our emotional data — are objectively less informed.
The research on physiological costs is equally stark. (PMID: 11929435) James Gross, PhD, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory, whose work on expressive suppression is foundational in the field, found that suppressing emotional expression leads to increased sympathetic nervous system arousal — the body works harder to perform an emotional state that contradicts what it’s actually experiencing. Over time, this creates a chronic state of physiological effort that is profoundly depleting.
“When we deny our emotion, it owns us. When we own our emotion, we can rebuild and find our way through the pain.”
Brené Brown, PhD, LCSW, research professor, University of Houston, author of The Gifts of Imperfection
How Emotional Shutdown Shows Up in Driven Women
In my work with clients, emotional suppression in driven women rarely looks like what people expect. It doesn’t usually look like stoicism or detachment, at least not from the outside. It often looks like competence. It looks like always having a plan. It looks like knowing exactly what to say and when to say it, and never quite being sure what you actually feel about any of it.
Mei is a 36-year-old physician who was referred to me by her own therapist after a panic attack in the hospital parking garage — her third in two months. She’s been practicing medicine for eleven years. She’s been told by colleagues she has the best bedside manner in her department. What her colleagues don’t know is that she can’t cry. Not won’t — can’t. She told me in our first session: “I know I should feel things. My patients are sometimes in agony. I care about them enormously. But it’s like there’s a layer of glass between me and whatever I’m actually feeling. I haven’t cried in four years.”
What I see consistently in Mei and women like her is that emotional shutdown is often a form of profound loyalty — loyalty to a childhood environment where feelings weren’t safe, or a professional culture where they’re actively penalized. The problem is that the body doesn’t stay loyal to those rules indefinitely. Eventually, it starts communicating in the only language that can’t be suppressed: physical symptoms, panic attacks, unexplained fatigue, a flatness that won’t lift regardless of external accomplishment.
Here are three practical tools I offer clients who are beginning to reconnect with their emotional experience:
- The Body Scan: Close your eyes and notice what’s present in your body right now. Describe the temperature, texture, and location of any sensations. Then guess which feeling might be living inside that physical sensation. You don’t have to be certain — a guess is fine. The practice is in turning toward, not in getting it right.
- The Filing Cabinet: Imagine a filing cabinet with four primary drawers: Sad, Mad, Glad, and Scared. When you can’t locate a specific feeling, ask yourself which of these four categories the experience most resembles. Starting broad gives you a way in when the more specific vocabulary isn’t accessible yet.
- Emotional Titration: Rather than trying to feel everything at once, approach your emotional experience the way you’d approach a pool: gradually. Turn toward a feeling in tolerable amounts. When you notice yourself becoming overwhelmed, deliberately shift your attention to something grounding — your feet on the floor, your breath, the texture of what’s in your hands — and then return when you’re ready.
The Cost of Learning to Perform Instead of Feel
There’s a particular way that driven women learn to substitute performing feelings for actually having them. It’s a skill that can look convincingly like emotional presence. And it costs an enormous amount.
Jenny is a 43-year-old chief operating officer who came to me because she was, in her words, “completely empty.” She had a full life: a leadership role she’d worked fifteen years to earn, a marriage that looked good from the outside, two children she adored but felt curiously separate from. In our early sessions, she could talk about her feelings with impressive fluency. But when I asked her what she was actually experiencing in her body right now, in this room, she paused for a long time and then said, “I genuinely don’t know.”
What Jenny had learned — starting in a family where her mother’s needs were always more pressing than her own — was how to produce the correct emotional output without having access to the inner experience that should generate it. She had learned, essentially, to perform emotion. She knew the right things to say about her feelings. She just couldn’t feel them.
This pattern — what researchers sometimes call emotional inauthenticity — has predictable downstream effects. (PMID: 28585761) Relationships feel hollow even when they’re functionally fine. Success stops generating satisfaction. There’s a persistent sense of going through the motions, of being a character in your own life rather than the person actually living it. The childhood emotional neglect that often underlies this pattern isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes it’s simply a household where nobody ever said: what are you feeling right now? I want to know.
The distinction between performing feelings and having them matters enormously for healing because the therapeutic tools for each are different. If you’re suppressing feelings you can actually feel, the work is about building a sense of safety around expression. If you’ve lost access to the feelings themselves — if the glass layer Mei described is part of your experience — the work is more foundational: rebuilding the body-based circuitry for emotional perception through somatic and experiential approaches. Both are possible. Neither is quick. Both are worth it.
If this pattern resonates, trauma-informed therapy can help you identify which pattern is most active for you and begin building the inner relationship that makes authentic emotional experience possible again. You can also explore Fixing the Foundations — my structured course for women doing this kind of foundational healing work.
Both/And: You Can Be Deeply Capable and Still Not Know What You Feel
One of the most important frames I offer in therapy is what I call the Both/And — the capacity to hold two truths at the same time without needing to resolve the tension between them.
Here’s a Both/And for the driven women reading this:
You can be both profoundly emotionally intelligent in how you read other people AND have almost no access to your own emotional experience. These aren’t contradictions. In fact, they often go together. Women who grew up in families where it was their job to read the emotional weather — to track the parent’s mood, anticipate their needs, manage their feelings — often become extraordinarily attuned to others while losing access to themselves. The antennae that scanned outward became so calibrated to external emotional data that the internal signal got harder and harder to receive.
You can also be both deeply committed to feeling your emotions AND still find yourself suppressing them regularly, especially under stress. This doesn’t mean you’re failing at healing. It means you’re a person with a nervous system that learned to protect you through suppression, and that pattern doesn’t uninstall itself because you’ve decided intellectually that it should. Change happens through practice, through relationship, through slowly expanding the window of what feels tolerable to feel — not through sheer force of will.
Both/And thinking also allows for this: it’s okay that some feelings still feel dangerous. You don’t have to rush toward the ones that feel most threatening. You can start with what’s manageable. You can build capacity incrementally. The goal isn’t to become someone who cries at every tender moment — it’s to become someone who has access to their own inner life and can use it as the guidance system it was designed to be.
The Systemic Lens: Why Culture Rewards Emotional Suppression — Until It Doesn’t
When we talk about driven women’s relationship with their emotions, we can’t do it responsibly without naming the systems that actively reward emotional suppression.
Professional culture in most high-stakes fields — medicine, law, finance, technology, executive leadership — is organized around the assumption that emotions are liabilities. Being “cool under pressure” is considered a positive trait. “Not letting it get to you” is considered competence. The woman who can deliver bad news without her voice cracking, who can navigate a brutal board meeting without her face betraying what she’s actually feeling, is often the woman who gets promoted. The system rewards the performance of emotional invulnerability, which means it rewards chronic suppression.
This systemic pressure compounds what many driven women already brought in from their families of origin — the sense that feeling too much was dangerous, too much, or unacceptable. By the time a woman has been in a suppressive professional environment for ten years, the original family wounding and the occupational conditioning have layered on top of each other into something very dense. Disentangling them requires naming them both.
There’s also a gendered dimension here that can’t be ignored. Women who express anger or distress in professional settings are routinely penalized — labeled as “emotional,” “difficult,” or “unstable” — in ways their male counterparts are not. This creates a genuine double bind: suppress your feelings and lose access to your own inner life, or express them and risk professional consequences. Most driven women choose, rationally, to suppress. And then they wonder why they feel so hollow.
Naming this systemic dynamic doesn’t make the problem disappear. But it does something equally important: it reduces shame. The difficulty you have with your own feelings is not a personal failing. It’s a predictable response to a system that has been actively hostile to the authentic expression of women’s emotional experience for a very long time. The healing work is individual AND systemic. Both matter.
The cultural water that ambitious women swim in deserves naming explicitly. Joan C. Williams, JD, distinguished professor at UC Hastings College of Law, has documented extensively how women in high-status professions face what she calls the “double bind” — judged harshly when they’re warm (read as not competent enough) and judged harshly when they’re competent (read as not warm enough). Add a relational trauma history to that bind, and the inner monitoring becomes nearly continuous. Healing has to include a clear-eyed look at how much of the exhaustion isn’t yours alone — it’s a load you’ve been carrying for systems that were never designed to hold you.
How to Begin: Unlearning What You Were Taught About Feelings
In my work with clients, one of the most consistent threads I encounter is a deeply held — and deeply inaccurate — set of beliefs about emotions. That feelings are dangerous if not managed carefully. That some feelings are acceptable and others aren’t. That expressing emotion is a sign of weakness or instability. That the most reliable people are the ones who don’t let feelings get in the way. These aren’t abstract ideas; they’re often rules that were handed down, explicitly or implicitly, and they’ve been shaping behavior and relationships for years.
The first step is recognizing that they’re beliefs, not facts.
Emotions are not the enemy of good judgment. They’re neurobiological information — signals from your nervous system and your history that tell you something meaningful about your inner state and outer situation. The research is robust: people who have access to their emotional data actually make better decisions, not worse ones. The cultural story that rationality and emotion are opposites is simply wrong. Reclaiming a healthy relationship with your feelings means updating that story with something more accurate.
One of the most effective clinical approaches for relearning how to relate to your emotional experience is Internal Family Systems (IFS). IFS understands emotions not as floods to be controlled, but as signals from different parts of you that have something important to say. When you feel a rush of anger, IFS helps you get curious: which part of you is angry? What’s it protecting? What does it need you to know? This approach moves you from suppression or overwhelm into a genuine, collaborative relationship with your own inner experience.
Somatic Experiencing (SE) is also deeply valuable here. One of the most common consequences of learning that feelings are dangerous is a disconnection from the body’s felt sense. SE helps you rebuild that body-based awareness so that you have access to the full spectrum of your emotional data — not just the thoughts about your thoughts.
On a practical level, start with an extremely simple practice: a daily emotional inventory. Not a lengthy journaling exercise — just a moment, two or three times a day, where you pause and ask yourself honestly: what am I feeling right now? Name it. Let it be whatever it is without immediately trying to fix, analyze, or justify it. For people who’ve spent years intellectualizing their feelings or bypassing them entirely, this practice can feel awkward at first, and then surprisingly powerful.
Your feelings have always been trying to tell you something. It’s not too late to start listening. If you’re ready to build a real relationship with your own emotional life, I’d love to support that work. You can learn more about working with me in therapy, explore executive coaching, take the free quiz to identify where your healing starts, or join the Strong & Stable newsletter for weekly clinical writing on exactly these topics.
This is one of the more quietly profound dimensions of emotional healing: you start to find out who you actually are. What you’re actually moved by. What genuinely interests you vs. what you’ve been doing because it was expected, or because it was safe, or because it kept the anxiety at bay. For women who organized their entire adult lives around achievement and performance, this discovery — that there’s a self underneath the role, with its own hungers and its own sense of what matters — can feel alternately exhilarating and disorienting.
Jenny is a 43-year-old COO who described her early work in therapy as “finding out I existed.” She’d come in to deal with anxiety. What the anxiety had been covering, it turned out, was a grief — a grief for the version of herself that had never gotten to develop fully, the one who had learned so early to organize around other people’s feelings that her own had become, essentially, invisible to her. “I cried for three sessions straight,” she told me. “Not about anything specific. Just about the fact that I had feelings, and I’d been living without access to them for thirty years.”
The tears Jenny experienced weren’t breakdown. They were thaw. They were the first signs that the long-frozen emotional life was beginning to move again. This is often what the beginning of emotional recovery looks like — not a tidy progression from suppressed to expressed, but a gradual, sometimes tearful, sometimes surprisingly funny process of discovering what you’ve been carrying and what it actually feels like when it finally has somewhere to go.
If you’re ready to find out what’s been living underneath your own efficient surface, trauma-informed therapy is one of the most reliable paths to that discovery. You can also start smaller: the free quiz on my site helps identify where your particular relational patterns may have originated — which is often the most clarifying first step. Your feelings have been there all along. Learning to hear them is what changes everything.
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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Q: What are the biggest myths about emotions that most driven women believe?
A: The most damaging include: that negative emotions are bad and should be eliminated; that expressing emotion is weakness or losing control; that if you feel something strongly it must be acted on immediately; and that other people are responsible for how you feel. Each of these creates significant problems in both self-relationship and intimate relationships.
Q: Why do driven women often struggle to identify what they’re feeling?
A: Driven, ambitious women frequently developed the capacity to perform and produce in environments where emotional expression was either unsafe or irrelevant. Over time, the skill of identifying internal emotional states can become genuinely diminished — not from lack of intelligence but from years of disconnection from the feeling body. This is especially common in women who grew up in families where their role was to manage or regulate others’ emotions.
Q: How does childhood affect my relationship with my own emotions?
A: The emotional rules of your family of origin — what was safe to feel, what had to be suppressed, whose feelings mattered, how emotions were expressed and responded to — become internalized as your own nervous system’s approach to emotion. Changing your relationship with feelings means understanding those original rules and consciously updating them, often in the context of a safe therapeutic relationship.
Q: Is it actually possible to feel emotions without being overwhelmed by them?
A: Yes — this is what emotional regulation means. It’s not the absence of feeling but the capacity to tolerate, process, and express emotions without either suppressing them or being flooded by them. This capacity develops through consistent practice and, for women with relational trauma histories, often through therapeutic support.
Q: What does a healthy relationship with emotions actually look like in practice?
A: It involves being able to notice what you’re feeling with some accuracy, tolerate uncomfortable feelings without immediately acting on them or pushing them away, express feelings in ways that are honest and contextually appropriate, and use emotional information to guide your choices and relationships rather than being driven by it unconsciously.
Q: How long does it take to rebuild a healthy relationship with your emotions?
A: This varies enormously depending on the depth of the original wounding, the therapeutic approach, and the consistency of the work. What I can say with confidence is that meaningful change — the ability to feel things you couldn’t feel before, to tolerate emotions that used to be overwhelming, to use your feelings as information rather than threats — is entirely achievable. It’s also not a linear process. But it moves, and it compounds.
Related Reading on Emotional Health and Trauma Recovery
- Brackett, M. A. (2019). Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Ourselves, and Our Society Thrive. Celadon Books.
- David, S. (2016). Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life. Avery.
- van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.
- Gross, J. J. (1998). Antecedent- and response-focused emotion regulation: Divergent consequences for experience, expression, and physiology. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(1), 224–237.
- Brown, B. (2010). The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are. Hazelden Publishing.
Further Reading on Relational Trauma Recovery
One of the most important things I tell clients in early sessions is this: the patterns we’re going to look at together aren’t character flaws. They’re the residue of strategies that once kept you safe. The over-functioning, the difficulty resting, the way you find yourself absorbing other people’s moods before you’ve registered your own — every one of these adaptations made sense in the original environment that shaped them. The work isn’t to shame the strategy. It’s to update the system that keeps generating it.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven, ambitious women — including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs — in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
