Why Do I Struggle to Talk About How I Feel?

The Training Started Early

Because you were taught that feelings are weakness. That real men handle things. That emotions are for women, children, and people who can't cope with reality.

And now you're 35, 45, 55, and you're dying inside.

Not dramatically. Not obviously. Just slowly suffocating under the weight of everything you've been carrying alone. The anger you can't express. The sadness you can't access. The fear you can't admit. The loneliness of being the strong one, the provider, the one who has it all together.

You've become emotionally homeless in your own life.

How You Learned to Disappear

Maybe it was "big boys don't cry" when you fell off your bike. Maybe it was watching your father swallow his disappointment, his rage, his grief, until it hardened into something impenetrable. Maybe it was learning that your emotions made your mother anxious, your friends uncomfortable, your teachers impatient.

So you learned to be fine. To handle it. To figure it out on your own.

You got good at thinking your way through problems instead of feeling your way through them. At doing instead of being. At performing strength even when you felt fragile, capable even when you felt lost.

You became an expert at being what everyone needed while losing touch with what you needed.

The Cost of Going Underground

Decades of emotional suppression doesn't make you stronger. It makes you stranger to yourself.

You react to things and don't know why. You find yourself angry about small things and numb to big things. You can analyse everyone else's feelings but yours remain a mystery. You know what you think about everything and feel about nothing.

You've become so good at not feeling that you've forgotten how.

Your emotions don't disappear when you ignore them. They leak out sideways. Through your body: the tension headaches, the insomnia, the digestive issues no doctor can explain. Through your behaviour: the drinking, the workaholism, the porn, the emotional affairs, the explosive anger over minor irritations.

Through your relationships: the distance you create, the walls you build, the way you can be present physically but absent emotionally.

The Impossible Position

You've been trained to be emotionally available without being emotionally real. To be the shoulder others cry on while never having permission to cry yourself. To handle everyone else's feelings while treating your own like dangerous explosives.

You've become the therapist in your relationships while being forbidden therapy for yourself.

And the cruel irony? The more you suppress your emotions, the less attractive you become to the people whose approval you're trying to earn. Because no one wants to connect with someone who's not really there. No one desires someone who's performing strength instead of embodying it.

You've traded authenticity for approval and ended up with neither.

What Numbness Actually Is

Emotional numbness isn't the absence of feelings. It's the presence of too many feelings that have been forced underground. It's not that you don't feel. It's that you feel everything at once, all the time, at such a low frequency that it just registers as emptiness.

All that suppressed anger, sadness, fear, longing doesn't evaporate. It accumulates. It forms a kind of emotional sediment that makes everything feel muffled, distant, unreal.

You're not broken. You're buried.

The Missing Language

Nobody taught you the vocabulary for your inner world. You can discuss market trends, football statistics, work projects for hours. But ask you how you feel about your father's death, your marriage, your fears for the future, and suddenly you're speaking a foreign language.

It's not that you don't have feelings. It's that you don't have words for them.

"Fine" becomes your default response to everything. "Stressed" covers the spectrum from mild irritation to existential crisis. "Tired" describes everything from physical exhaustion to spiritual depletion.

You've been emotionally illiterate in your own life.

What Happens When You Start

Psychodynamic therapy isn't about teaching you to "share your feelings" like some emotional skills workshop. It's about creating space for whatever's been buried to finally surface.

At first, you might sit there feeling ridiculous. Wondering what you're supposed to say. Thinking this is a waste of time because you don't have anything to talk about.

That's exactly where the work begins.

In the silence. In the not knowing. In the gradual recognition that beneath all that "fine" is a lifetime of unexpressed grief, rage, longing, terror. That beneath the performance of coping is someone who's been drowning for years.

You don't need to have the right words. You need to stop pretending you don't need words at all.

The Thaw

Learning to feel again isn't comfortable. It's not like flipping a switch. It's more like thawing out: painful, messy, unpredictable.

You might find yourself crying at films that never affected you before. Getting angry about things you've been tolerating for years. Feeling sad about losses you thought you'd processed. Recognising how lonely you've been even when surrounded by people.

This isn't regression. This is return. Return to the parts of yourself you abandoned when being emotional became too dangerous.

What Becomes Possible

When you finally stop performing emotional competence and start developing actual emotional intelligence, everything changes. Your relationships deepen because you're actually present in them. Your decisions improve because they're based on what you actually want, not what you think you should want.

Your anger becomes useful instead of destructive. Your sadness becomes cleansing instead of overwhelming. Your fear becomes informative instead of paralysing.

You stop being a stranger to yourself.

The Real Work

This work isn't about becoming more sensitive or learning to cry more. It's about reclaiming the full spectrum of human experience that was trained out of you. It's about developing tolerance for your own complexity instead of constantly editing yourself down to what feels manageable.

It's about finally understanding that emotional availability to others means nothing if you're emotionally unavailable to yourself.

If you're tired of being the strong one, the reliable one, the one who handles everything while feeling nothing. If you're ready to discover what's been buried under decades of "fine." That's what this work offers.

Not another performance of capability, but actual capability. The kind that comes from knowing yourself fully, not just the parts that are socially acceptable.

The kind that lets you be real instead of right, present instead of perfect, human instead of heroic.