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Here’s why what you’ve likely learned about feelings is dead wrong.
Most of us were never taught how to feel our emotions — we were taught to manage, suppress, or perform them. In this post, we explore why all emotions carry signal value, and offer practical tools — the body scan, the filing cabinet, and emotional titration — to help driven women build a richer, more honest relationship with their inner lives.
Maya, a driven marketing director, sat in her car outside her office building, gripping the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white. She had just received a scathing email from a client, and while her mind raced with strategic responses, her chest felt tight and her breathing was shallow. Instead of acknowledging the rising tide of anxiety and anger, she took a deep breath, plastered on a smile, and walked into the building, completely disconnected from her internal experience.
Across the country, Chloe, an ambitious architect, found herself snapping at her partner over a misplaced coffee mug. She had spent the entire week navigating complex negotiations and tight deadlines, pushing down her exhaustion and frustration to maintain her professional composure. When she finally got home, the dam broke, and the suppressed emotions flooded out in a disproportionate reaction to a minor inconvenience.
Both Maya and Chloe are experiencing the profound cost of emotional suppression. Feeling your emotions — really feeling them, not managing them or performing them — is one of the most fundamental skills for a full, connected life. And most of us were never taught how to do it.
The Cost of Emotional Suppression
EMOTIONAL LITERACY
The Kitchen-Table Translation: It’s the ability to accurately identify, name, and understand what you are feeling in any given moment. For many who grew up in environments where feelings were ignored or punished, this is a foreign language that must be learned in adulthood.
Dr. Marc Brackett, founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, emphasizes that our inability to accurately recognize and label our emotions leads to a host of negative outcomes, including increased stress, poorer decision-making, and strained relationships. When we lack emotional literacy, we are at the mercy of our unexamined feelings.
Why It Wasn’t Safe to Feel
“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
Many of us grew up in homes where it wasn’t safe to express our emotions. These early experiences may have created beliefs and patterns in us about our feelings — messages like “anger is bad” or “I can’t show someone how I feel.” While these messages likely served a protective purpose in a family where it wasn’t safe to show emotions, they now keep us locked into rigid emotional patterns.
For women with relational trauma histories, the stakes of emotional expression often felt incredibly high. Learning to undo these early messages is crucial for deepening our sense of aliveness and connection.
Recognizing the Value of Your Feelings
Dr. Susan David, founder of the Harvard Institute of Coaching and author of Emotional Agility, notes that emotions are data, not directives. They contain signal value — functional attributes of information that provide clues as we navigate our lives.
There is no such thing as a “good” or “bad” emotion. Emotions are energetic charges in our bodies that come and go. Anger, for instance, is often a sign that a boundary has been crossed or a need is unmet. If we can value and identify these clues, our feelings become a wonderful guidance system.
Tools for Noticing and Naming
If you struggle to notice or name your feelings, here are three practical tools:
- The Body Scan: Close your eyes and notice what’s going on in your body. Describe the temperature and texture of any sensations, and guess the feeling contained within.
- The Filing Cabinet: Imagine a filing cabinet with four major drawers: Sad, Mad, Glad, and Scared. When struggling to name a feeling, consider which drawer it most likely belongs in as a starting point.
- Emotional Titration: Like stepping into a swimming pool gradually, turn toward your feelings in tolerable amounts. When overwhelmed, stabilize and ground yourself before returning.
The Both/And of Emotional Processing
In our healing journeys, we must embrace the Both/And of emotional processing. You can be both deeply committed to feeling your emotions AND still find yourself occasionally suppressing them when overwhelmed. You can both recognize the value of your anger AND struggle to express it constructively. Holding these dual truths allows for self-compassion as you build your emotional capacity.
A Systemic Lens on Emotional Suppression
When we look through a Systemic Lens, we see that the suppression of emotion is heavily reinforced by our culture. Driven women are often rewarded in professional environments for being “unflappable” and “logical,” while emotional expression is penalized as “unprofessional” or “hysterical.” This systemic bias forces women to bifurcate their identities, leaving their emotional selves at the door to achieve success. The exhaustion of maintaining this facade makes it incredibly difficult to reconnect with authentic feelings in personal spaces.
If any of this resonates, you don’t have to navigate it alone. Let’s work on that together.
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
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.
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.
Yes—this is what emotional regulation means. It is 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.
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.
References
- 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.
- 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.
- Levine, P. A. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. North Atlantic Books.
- Permission to Feel — Dr. Marc Brackett’s foundational book on emotional intelligence and the RULER approach.
- Emotional Regulation Resources — Annie Wright’s guide to building emotional capacity as a driven woman.
Further Reading on Relational Trauma
Explore Annie’s clinical writing on relational trauma recovery.
DISCLAIMER: The content of this post is for psychoeducational and informational purposes only and does not constitute therapy, clinical advice, or a therapist-client relationship. For full details, please read our Medical Disclaimer. If you are in crisis, please call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or text HOME to 741741 (Crisis Text Line).
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LMFT · 15,000+ Clinical Hours · W.W. Norton Author · Psychology Today ColumnistAnnie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist, relational trauma specialist, and the founder and successfully exited CEO of a large California trauma-informed therapy center. A W.W. Norton published author, she writes the weekly Substack Strong & Stable and her work and expert opinions have appeared in NPR, NBC, Forbes, Business Insider, The Boston Globe, and The Information.
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