What If I Don’t Know How to Talk About My Feelings?

When someone asks “How are you feeling?” do you freeze up? Does your mind go blank? Do you find yourself saying “fine” or “okay” even when that’s not the whole truth?

At Televero Health, we meet people every day who struggle to identify and express their emotions. People who were never taught the language of feelings. People who spent years pushing emotions down because they weren’t safe to express. People who sincerely want to open up but don’t know where to begin.

If you’ve ever thought, “I don’t even know what I’m feeling, let alone how to talk about it,” this is for you.

Why Talking About Feelings Is Hard

First, know that you’re not alone in this struggle. Difficulty naming and expressing emotions is incredibly common, for many reasons:

Maybe you grew up in an environment where emotions weren’t discussed.

Maybe you learned early on that certain feelings were unacceptable.

Maybe you had to be “the strong one” who didn’t show vulnerability.

Maybe words just don’t come easily when it comes to internal experiences.

These patterns aren’t your fault, and they don’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. They’re adaptations you developed in response to your environment. They helped you survive certain situations or relationships.

But if you’ve reached a point where those adaptations feel limiting rather than protective, it’s possible to develop new skills around emotional awareness and expression.

You Can Learn the Language of Emotions

Here’s something many people don’t realize: Emotional expression is a skill, not an innate talent. Like any skill, it can be learned, practiced, and developed over time.

At Televero Health, we see people make remarkable progress in recognizing and expressing their feelings, even if they’ve spent decades disconnected from their emotional lives. We see people who start therapy saying “I don’t know what I feel” gradually develop rich emotional vocabularies and deeper connections with themselves and others.

This learning happens through practice, patience, and the right kind of support.

Therapy When You Don’t Have the Words

Many people avoid therapy because they think they need to be articulate about their feelings from the start. They worry they’ll sit down with a therapist and have nothing to say.

But here’s the truth: Therapists are trained to help people who struggle with emotional awareness and expression. They have tools, questions, and approaches specifically designed to help you build the bridge between your internal experience and the words to describe it.

In fact, helping people develop emotional language is one of the most common and important aspects of therapy. You don’t need to come with polished emotional narratives. You can literally start by saying, “I have trouble knowing what I feel.”

That’s enough to begin.

Starting Small: Building Your Emotional Vocabulary

Learning to identify and express emotions doesn’t happen all at once. It starts with small steps:

Noticing physical sensations in your body. (Tightness in your chest? Heaviness in your stomach? Tension in your jaw?)

Using simple, basic emotion words, even if they feel imprecise. (Sad? Angry? Worried? Confused?)

Rating the intensity of what you’re feeling on a scale. (“My anxiety feels like a 7 out of 10 today.”)

Describing emotions through metaphors or images. (“It feels like I’m carrying a heavy backpack that I can’t take off.”)

Noticing when your emotions change throughout the day.

These simple practices begin to build bridges between your internal experience and your ability to express it. They create pathways in your brain that make emotional awareness more accessible over time.

You Don’t Have to Do This Alone

Learning to recognize and talk about your feelings isn’t something you have to figure out by yourself. In fact, it’s one of those skills that develops best in relationship with others who can provide feedback, validation, and guidance.

That’s one of the most valuable aspects of therapy — having a safe relationship where you can practice noticing, naming, and expressing emotions without fear of judgment or rejection.

Your therapist isn’t expecting you to have perfect emotional awareness from the start. They’re there to help you develop it, step by step, at your own pace. They can offer language when you don’t have it. They can help you notice patterns. They can create a space where it’s safe to practice this new skill.

And as your emotional vocabulary expands in therapy, those skills naturally begin to extend to other relationships in your life.

So if you’ve been avoiding getting help because you don’t know how to talk about your feelings, consider this: That’s not a reason to delay therapy. It’s actually one of the best reasons to begin.

Ready to develop your emotional language? Start here.