When “Feeling Your Feelings” Doesn’t Seem to Help
By: Anna Vargas, LCMHC
Therapy encourages us to “feel our feelings.” It’s a key aspect of the work I do and something I’ve talked about extensively in my blogs. I even wrote a blog called “How to Actually Feel Your Feelings.” I wholeheartedly believe in the importance of it. We have to feel to heal.
But I think that advice can also sometimes be confusing.
What if you've been feeling anxious, depressed, hopeless, ashamed, or overwhelmed for years? What if paying more attention to those feelings doesn't bring relief and instead seems to pull you deeper into them?
This is a common fear I hear in the therapy room. That feeling our feelings is going to make things worse, not better. That if we really let ourselves go there, we’ll get stuck in the abyss. And maybe you already feel like you have been stuck in the abyss for too long.
“I'm feeling my feelings. Why isn't this helping?”
This is where the nuance of emotional processing in therapy becomes important. Deepening emotional states like hopelessness, shame, panic, despair, helplessness, or a sense of defectiveness aren’t adaptive or helpful. While it’s important to notice, acknowledge and approach them with compassion, it’s ultimately not a state we can sustain and live in for long. And when we are in these places, they can feel like an all consuming abyss.
Sometimes what seems like the feeling can actually be a response to a feeling, rather than the core emotion itself.
That’s where a therapist’s outside perspective and insight can help. Someone to see and understand where you are emotionally, stay with you there, and help guide you to a more sustainable emotional state without judging, invalidating or minimizing how you landed there in the first place.
Grief vs. Hopelessness
Grief and hopelessness are a good example of this distinction.
Grief can be an incredibly painful experience. It may involve sadness, longing, tears, heaviness, or an aching awareness of something you needed, wanted, loved, or lost. However, when we feel pure grief, it comes in waves and we experience a sense of healing in allowing ourselves to feel the sadness. The pain doesn’t necessarily disappear, but something moves. It’s an example of how feeling feelings does in fact help.
Hopelessness is different. It may sound more like: “Nothing will ever change.” “There’s nothing I can do.” “Why bother?” or “I can’t go on.”
Rather than moving through a painful experience, there can be a sense of collapse. You’re not simply hurting. You feel stuck inside the belief that there is no way forward.
This is NOT an emotional state we want to deepen and feel into.
Instead, the therapeutic focus is about joining with someone in that experience, undoing aloneness and bringing in enough support and care that we can gently begin to explore what else might be there.
Perhaps underneath the hopelessness is profound grief or sadness.
We stay compassionate and curious about why you're collapsing into hopelessness rather than assuming you simply need to “feel it more.” And most importantly, you don’t have to find your way through the feelings alone.
In AEDP, undoing aloneness is central to the work. Feeling that someone is there with us to help carry the weight of an emotional pain like grief gives us the bit of strength and comfort we need to experience something new: riding a painful emotional wave of sadness and coming through the other side intact and strong, rather than hopeless. The sadness was painful but you didn’t get lost in the abyss.
The goal isn't simply to feel more. It's learning to understand what you're feeling, what the emotion is communicating, and whether there may be something underneath it that hasn't had room to emerge.
Shame Can Work in a Similar Way
Shame can be another place where people become stuck in an unhelpful emotional state.
Shame often turns painful experiences back toward the self.
Instead of “that hurt me” and feeling a subsequent core emotion of anger or sadness, it becomes “there’s something wrong with me.”
Instead of: “I deserved to be treated differently.”
It becomes: “I’m too sensitive.”
Instead of: “I needed more.”
It becomes: “I’m too needy.”
Shame is not an emotional state we want to feel and deepen either. If we simply deepen into the belief that there is something fundamentally wrong with us, we may spend a long time experiencing the pain of shame without reaching the emotions and needs underneath it.
Perhaps there is sadness about how you were treated.
Perhaps there is anger that a boundary was crossed.
Perhaps there is a longing to have been understood, protected, or cared for differently.
Or perhaps something entirely different emerges.
The goal is to slow down enough to discover what is true for you.
There Isn’t a Formula for What’s Underneath
It can be tempting to turn emotional work into another thing to figure out.
Hopelessness means grief.
Shame means anger.
Helplessness means fear.
But emotions don’t work that neatly.
Two people can describe feeling hopeless and have completely different experiences underneath that hopelessness.
For one person, slowing down might bring them into contact with profound grief.
For another, anger may emerge.
Someone else may notice fear or an impulse to protect themselves that they’ve spent years suppressing.
This is part of why emotional processing isn’t simply an intellectual exercise.
You don’t have to correctly identify the emotion hiding underneath another emotion.
Instead, we get curious about your experience as it unfolds.
Sometimes We Learned to Get Stuck for a Reason
These patterns usually don’t come from nowhere. There may have been good reasons why certain emotions were easier or safer to experience than others.
Perhaps anger wasn’t welcome in your family. Maybe expressing sadness felt very alone and therefore didn’t bring comfort. Maybe asserting yourself threatened an important relationship. Maybe you learned that blaming yourself helped you make sense of experiences that felt confusing or outside of your control.
These patterns may have helped you maintain connection, protect yourself, or make sense of something you weren’t yet equipped to understand.
That’s why emotional work isn’t simply about trying to get rid of hopelessness, shame, or helplessness.
Those experiences deserve curiosity too. They developed in a context. And understanding that context can help us approach them with compassion rather than treating them as another problem you need to fix.
And from that place, we can begin to wonder what else your emotional experience might be trying to tell us.
Sometimes the Feeling Isn’t the End of the Story
If you’ve spent years feeling hopeless, ashamed, helpless, or stuck, being told to “feel your feelings” may understandably sound like bad advice. You may already feel like you’re feeling plenty.
Sometimes healing does mean allowing ourselves to feel emotions we’ve spent years avoiding. And sometimes healing means recognizing that the emotional state we’ve been living inside isn’t the end of the story.
There may be grief that hasn’t had room to move, anger that never felt safe, longing that felt too vulnerable to acknowledge, a need that you learned not to have or something else entirely that you haven’t had the space to discover yet.
The work isn’t about forcing yourself to feel something different.
It’s about becoming curious about what else might be there.
If This Feels Familiar
If you’ve spent a lot of time understanding yourself, talking about your experiences, or trying to “feel your feelings” but still find yourself stuck in the same emotional places, emotion focused and process based therapy can offer a different way of approaching the work.
I offer therapy in Durham, North Carolina and across North Carolina via telehealth. My approach integrates AEDP, ACT, attachment, and psychodynamic therapy to help people struggling with anxiety, OCD, trauma, relationship challenges, and chronic illness.
If this resonates with you, you’re welcome to reach out to schedule a consultation and explore whether working together might be a good fit.
