Struggling to Find Words for Emotions and Self

I feel I have an inability to put words to emotions, to define what I feel and share it with words. I understand what I feel, usually in ways only I can understand. I don’t know if this is me being overly concerned with my feelings and emotions, however I can’t seem to (most of the time) begin to describe what I’m feeling or experiencing. Aside from the larger bits of sadness, anxiety, depression, and anger, everything feels so vast and complex. Just when i think I’ve understood something, it goes deeper. While I am someone who feels very harshly, I try to have restraint in expressing it. I know when I was young this was an issue. Exploding or having a meltdown because I was feeling so much and couldn’t use my words to express it, so I expressed it with my actions. Growing up like that was hard on everyone and not just me. I tried to keep myself roped in with shame, telling myself I can’t embarrass my family like that in public, and can’t embarrass myself like that in private. Now that I’m older. I try to keep myself as stable as I can, but I still have a very hard time pinpointing and labeling words to my emotions and experiences. Surprisingly I am good with words while writing and I grew up loving to read. I guess I just never found the right words for me to use. This whole ordeal with words and myself becomes increasingly difficult with a rather new issue I’ve been having with myself. I am failing at defining and understanding myself in my own words. I always look to others to define me. How their time and experiences with me shaped how they see me, so therefor shaped me. I understand I may be reading too far into it and may be in a slight crisis about this as if recently, but how can I define myself by myself? I was taught to look at all sides of a situation, or even of an equation to reach the end goal, so how can I possibly only look inward at myself? Maybe I need more faith in myself, more understanding with myself and to put more love to myself, but I simply, at this time, cannot see myself inwardly through my own mind. This all sounds like a circus of thoughts, running and jumping and juggling, but I feel like this is the most I’ve peiced together in my head about how I operate. I try and stay occupied with people and activities as much as possible, and this is the most time I’ve gone without doing so in a while. Not to mention I missed some nights of my medications due to being sick a week or so back. Isolation makes me overwhelmed. I don’t like nothing going on, it makes me feel amped up and overwhelmed. I wonder if I just can’t sit with myself and my condition for very long alone. I think I need to learn how to be alone.

The user describes a profound difficulty in articulating emotions and defining their sense of self, stemming from a childhood of unexpressed feelings and a learned external perspective. They struggle to look inward and find their own definitions, especially when isolated or unwell, leading to a crisis of self-identity. The post highlights a desire to learn how to be alone and sit with their internal experience.

Feelings and emotions is a hard one. If most of us are being honest we can't properly identify (in words) an emotion and the feelings it evokes within us. Ask most people "How do you feel today?" And they will respond "I'm good" or "I'm okay". Good and okay are not feelings. That's just one example of the disconnect A good rule of thumb and what helped me and I think honestly you are doing a pretty good job for example : emotion- anger , feeling-shame. Emotion is physically and physiologically hardwired into us and is automatic. While feelings are your conscious interpretation of that emotion. What may help you is to actually describe the physical sensations an emotion triggers you to feel. Do you feel it in your stomach or your chest? Does it affect your breathing &/or heart rate, does your face get flushed, etc. While it's nearly impossible to avoid an emotion bc they're automatic one can still control how they let that emotion make them feel and how much power it allows it to hold.