Why We Don't Know What We Feel, and Why That Matters

If someone asks you how you are feeling right now, how confident are you in your answer? Not what you think you should be feeling, or what would be convenient to feel, but what is actually there.

For most of us, the honest answer is that we are not entirely sure. And that uncertainty is not a personal failing. It is the result of years, often a whole lifetime, of learning to live at a careful distance from our own emotional interior.

How We Become Strangers to Ourselves

Nobody sets out to lose touch with their feelings. It happens gradually, usually for good reasons at the time. A child learns that certain feelings upset the people around them, so those feelings get quieter. An adult learns that certain emotions are inconvenient at work, or in a relationship, or simply too much to feel while everything else is demanding attention — so those emotions get pushed down, postponed, managed.

Each of these adjustments makes sense on its own. But over years, they add up to something significant. A person who is, in a quiet and unintentional way, a stranger to a large part of themselves.

What It Costs

The cost of this distance is not always dramatic. Often it shows up as a vague sense of flatness, or restlessness, or the feeling of going through the motions of a life without quite being inside it. Sometimes it shows up as relationships that feel hollow, even when nothing is technically wrong. Sometimes it shows up as a breakdown, when everything that was quietly pushed down finally demands to be felt.

Becoming Less of a Stranger

This is, in many ways, what counselling actually is. Not advice, not techniques, but the slow project of becoming less of a stranger to yourself. Of learning to ask what you actually feel, and being willing to hear the answer, even when it is inconvenient or unexpected.

A Note From Sabrina Barbara

People often arrive expecting this work to be about other people — a partner, a parent, a child. And often it is, in part. But underneath that, almost always, is this quieter project. Getting to know yourself again.

The relationship you have with yourself sets the tone for every other relationship in your life.