Emotional Anomia Or Inability To Verbalize Emotions

More and more frequently, patients come to my office who are worried about having a feeling that they cannot feel, and who find it extremely difficult to put into words what they feel, affecting their closest interpersonal relationships, since in appearance are branded as cold and insensitive people.

Generally, when asked how they feel, they tend to use very simple language “good, bad, fatal, anxious, sad, angry” and during therapy when they describe their ailments, they do so in a concrete way, generally describing the events and without going into more details.

This produces in the interlocutor a vague idea of ​​what they feel more or less, but, since they cannot put their emotions into words, a space of incomprehension can be generated that later creates an internal concept that they are incapable of being. fully understood by others, further increasing their emotional isolation.

It is not that these people cannot feel, but that they have difficulties in being able to adequately identify these emotions internally. I give an example:

A man comes to the consultation because he has explosions of anger that are disproportionate to the context or triggers. One day he comes home and doesn’t get dinner cooked, this generates an explosion of anger similar to that of a child, but in an adult, he screams, throws down the doors, shouts curse words and once the explosive event is over, he goes away. He feels guilty and does not remember well the reasons for his anger or the things he has said and done in this episode.

From the outside this can be seen as a form of tyranny, machismo and aggressiveness, however, when analyzing in depth the meaning that “dinner” has for him, we find a lot of emotional material that has not been able to be clearly identified and verbalized at the time. correct.

For him, dinner meant the moment in which he felt loved by his family, like the gesture of gratification for being the one who worked more than 12 hours a day to be able to give his children and his partner everything they needed. By breaking down much better the emotions that were at play in this episode of anger, we found a pain, a feeling of not feeling loved or valued, which was something that he had not been able to identify or verbalize to his family.

Several situations in his daily life were generating these emotions, however, since he was not able to identify them or express them at the correct moment, they accumulated and detonated in apparently illogical contexts.

This way of functioning is more common than we imagine, it is given by a failure in emotional learning from childhood where parents are the ones who teach children to name with the appropriate words the things they feel “today you feel embarrassed because the teacher asked you a question in class and you didn’t know the answer” “you don’t want us to look at your grades because you are afraid and ashamed of what might happen.

This type of persons They usually have fathers and mothers who they point out as distant and cold, not very affectionate and with those who do not feel comfortable engaging in deep conversations.

Psychotherapy focused on emotions, assertiveness, emotional intelligence and communication, in these types of cases brings very good results, increasing the capacity for self-observation, identification and communication of emotions and consequently visibly improving interpersonal relationships. of those who present this type of conflict.