Help, I Have Feelings: On Emotional Stuckness in Therapy

Recently, I was watching a reel about how “emotionally aware” our generation is. We all are able to identify emotions, label them, work past them but then why aren’t we able to feel them?

We all see these emotionally complicated movies, cry about them, relate to feelings of shame, sadness, anger and yet not able to feel them in the moment we are experiencing them. And thus, we get stuck. We want to move past it but we are just not able to. We know exactly how to solve the problem, what we “should” do or what are next steps should be but instead we aren’t able to do anything. Why are we stuck, you might think, when I’m trying my best? Well, the answer is complicated yet simple, because we are not able to sit and feel.

For people struggling with this, intellectualisation is very much present, even with people who are big on emotions, as if intellectualness and solving problems are more important than feeling them. Because that’s what is propagated, knowing how to solve things while keeping the emotions aside. Intellectualisation feels like growth; it uses the language of insight, therapy-speak, even vulnerability, but it's actually a way to stay safely above the feeling. The most sophisticated way to avoid an emotion is to analyse it to death. Clients come in sounding like they've already done the work, but their bodies and minds tell a different story.

What is this discomfort with emotions, and why?

Nobody is born afraid of their own feelings. Somewhere along the way, they learned to be. They're afraid because their window of tolerance was never widened by a safe caregiver. For many people, emotions were never really explained; they were just managed by parents, teachers, caregivers and more. “How will you manage yourself in the real world if you cry like this right now?” Solutions are handed out before a person can even finish what they are saying. The message received was that feelings are inconvenient. Handle them quickly, or better yet, don't have them at all. So people learned to do exactly that, it’s actually adaptiveness. They watched the adults around them treat emotions as problems to be solved rather than experiences to be had.

Experiencing emotions has rarely been taught healthily. People are aware that they are experiencing some emotion, usually “negative” like jealousy, shame, insecurity, sadness, anger, and they are quick to compartmentalise it. Because feeling these emotions or sitting with them would mean chaos. It would look like bad decisions, acting out, not being able to function, crying and more. Only emotions welcomed are happiness, joy, pride, but those also quickly get tainted when they are conditional and controlled by others.

What does healthy experiencing of emotions even mean then?

Healthy experiencing means feeling an emotion without being controlled or overtaken by it. One can feel anger without becoming aggressive or be sad without collapsing into it. What keeps emotions stuck isn't the feeling itself, it's the resistance to feeling emotions and the shame associated with them. Healthy experiencing means trusting that the wave of intensity will break. You don't have to outswim it.

One of the biggest fears people carry is that if they let themselves feel something like jealousy, rage, grief, even love means that feeling is true or valid in some absolute sense. That feeling angry at someone means they're a bad person, or worse, you are the bad person. Healthy experiencing separates the presence of an emotion from its implication. You can feel something completely and still choose what to do with it.

Emotions don't just live in the mind; they also live in the body as sensations of chest tightening, stomach dropping, and throat closing. Most people notice these sensations and immediately shut them down because the body has learned that these signals mean that something overwhelming is coming. Numbing looks like the absence of feelings but it’s a way of protection. Healthy experiencing means pausing at that physical sensation before searching for an explanation. Not why am I feeling this, but simply where is this sitting in me right now. 

Therapy asks for you to do all of this, to participate in it and reflect. And all of this is uncomfortable, naming sensations, sitting with them, not immediately reaching for a resolution in therapy. But not every session can end on a high, nor should it. Some sessions exist just to highlight the dissonance, to let you feel that something is slightly off-centre inside you. That discomfort isn't a sign that therapy isn't working. It usually means it is. But sitting with that discomfort is easier said than done, and the therapy room itself is not immune to the same patterns.

What this implies for the therapy space and the therapist

A few things can happen in a therapy space that actually make accessing emotions and then feeling them difficult. This doesn’t imply failure of therapy or the process, but a chance to reflect on resistance of what's getting in the way, and why.

When clients are coming in for therapy, they suddenly won’t lose their adaptive patterns and be open to everything. They will carry their histories and the resistances related to them. The stuckness isn't resistance to the work, it's a protection against relational repetition and unfamiliarity with these feelings. Clients often present with a secondary emotion that sits on top of the primary emotion underneath. Thus, the stuckness continues because therapist and client work on the presenting emotion and the real emotion never surfaces.

And sometimes the stuckness belongs to both people in the room. With emotions, the therapist also might be lost. After all, therapy is infamous for making the therapist feel stuck because the client is. Both go around in circles without actually getting to the core of it, without even realising.

The moment a client touches an emotion, the therapist moves toward reflection, reframing, or insight. This pulls the client out of the felt experience and back into the head and thoughts. Therapists also carry their own emotional histories. If a client's grief, rage, or sadness touches something unprocessed in the therapist, the therapist may unconsciously become a part of the client's resistance, moving to problem-solving, psychoeducation, or reframing. Stuckness here is a co-created pattern.

Emotional stuckness in therapy isn't a sign that therapy isn't working. The question isn't "why won't this client feel?" but "what has feeling always cost them, and does this space feel different enough yet?"