Tips from a Therapist in Tacoma, WA: Connecting Emotions and Needs
Therapist in Tacoma, Wa here to help! Today I want to share a quick tip that can instantly help you experience greater degrees of emotional well-being. Simply put: learn to connect your emotions to your needs. And then feel empowered to get your needs met.
But is it really as easy as it sounds? Let’s dig a little deeper.
Emotions are messages
Emotions are like the lights on the dashboard of your car. The gas light is a feedback signal that lets me know my gas tank is empty. Since I can’t see my gas tank, if it weren’t for my gas light, I’d have no idea how my fuel was doing and I’d end up broken down on the side of the road unexpectedly. Pretty anxiety-provoking and out of control, no?
When we are unaware of emotions, we’re not getting the feedback signals that let us know when we need to pull over, refuel, or meet some internal need. And this does create anxiety for us or makes us feel like life is a little out of control. This can look like fights with our partners when they blow off the chore they said they’d do; burnout at work when the projects pile on; or resentment toward the old high school buddy who asked us to help them move even though can’t they see how busy I am???
Without the emotional feedback signals, often we don’t see a problem coming until it blows up in our face and we react poorly.
So what’s the alternative? Let’s break it down using some helpful tools from Nonviolent Communication.
Connect with your physical body to feel the emotional signal
We can learn to really pay attention to our emotions closely, and they will give us invaluable messages about what our internal needs are, so we can avoid the blow-ups.
Step one is to notice the physical feeling of an emotion showing up in our bodies. All emotions have physical signatures—that’s literally why they are called feelings. (This blew my mind when I was in therapy the first time). If I’m paying attention to my body, I’ll feel the hot flicker of frustration on my cheeks with my partner before it builds up into a fight. I’ll feel the chest-tightening of stress when yet another deadline piles onto my plate. Or I’ll notice the sinking pit in my stomach when someone asks me to help them move. All of these physical feelings are clues about the emotion.
2. Label the emotion
Many of us were not raised in homes or schools where people used robust emotional vocabulary. Outside of tired, mad, sad, glad or hungry, we might have a harder time finding the right word for what we are feeling.
That’s where using an emotional inventory comes in handy. Being able to see the emotion word helps us to filter through all the choices and name that feeling. Having a specific word is helpful. Annoyed or rageful are pretty different, no? Specific language means we can better address the need and figure out how to get that need met more effectively.
Nonviolent Communication has a great inventory of emotional words here. I recommend clients to literally print this out and create a habit to check-in with themselves once a day for 5 minutes to notice what their body is feeling and label the emotion to describe it.
3. Connect the emotion to a need
This next step is a game-changer and the missing link for many people. Once you have named the emotion, you are likely to already be feeling just a little better. Because now instead of a mysterious and unknown monster under the bed, you know what you are dealing with. And your brain is going to start problem-solving how to help you feel better right away.
One way to expedite this is to pull out your inventory of universal human needs found at this link. This list has some of the major needs that we all experience. If we have an unmet need, that’s going to feel a little painful. Like a hunger pain, the pain is driving us to identify the need (sustenance) and take action (buy a taco) to feel better (happy belly).
Using the examples above, with my partner, my frustration is coming from an unmet need of being able to depend on them when they say they are going to do something. With my job, my stress might be due to not getting the support I need from my manager or team. With the resentment I feel about being asked to move someone I used to know, I’m alerted to my need to protect my time for myself and my highest priority relationships because my time and energy are finite resources.
4. Finally, when we know the unmet need, we can take action to get that need met
Connecting our body to our emotions and then to our unmet needs shows us exactly where we need to take some action to get that feeling to resolve. When you put gas in the car the gas light goes off, right?
When I communicate to my partner that their flaking on the chores breaks trust, and I ask them be mindful to keep their word, we can have a conversation that can lead to a repair in that situation and help them understand how to build trust with me in our relationship. Then that frustration feeling goes away. If I reach out to my boss and let them know I am feeling overwhelmed and tell them the ways that they and the team can step in and support me, I have given specific action steps to fix this with my team and I have help to carry that burden. Therefore, the stress diminishes. And when I listen to my resentment and realize it’s telling me that I don’t have the time and energy to help this person move, I can set a boundary and say no, and no longer be haunted by the resentment of giving my control away to other people.
Now, of course, it doesn’t always work out so easily. Sometimes people don’t respond well to us making our needs known. Or our needs may compete with their needs and we have to compromise. And sometimes if a need can’t be met we have to make a hard choice about that relationship, or we have to accept the unmet need, like in the case of grief or loss. But even in these situations, we feel more empowered because we know what we feel, we know what we need, and we are being active on our behalf, instead of riding the emotional run-away roller coaster.
So let’s recap…
Locate the feeling in your body
Give the emotion a name
Connect the emotion to a need
Take action to get that need met
Sounds simple enough, right? Well…why does it feel so hard sometimes?
what if I still don’t know what I feel?
If you are a person who has a hard time knowing exactly what you are feeling, you’re in good company! I work with many clients who feel this way, and I myself remember feeling this way too when I first started going to therapy. For example, it took me a few weeks of therapy to discover that I was actually really angry about some things in my life—but before my therapist helped me go there, I had no idea!
How can this be that we don’t know what we feel?
We may have grown up in homes where emotions weren’t talked about. No one modeled for us emotional vocabulary or how to attune to ourselves or others.
We may have grown up in homes where emotions raged wild and unchecked, and this was scary. So we may have subconciously disconnected from our emotions because the alternative felt unsafe.
We may have experienced trauma, which caused our nervous system to get stuck in a freeze response. That leaves us feeling disassociated or numbed out. We may not feel safe enough to be connected to our bodies, thus we don’t realize when our physical body is giving us signals about our emotions.
Or because of trauma, we are more in a fight-or-flight response. In that case, we may feel so anxious and keyed up all the time that we aren’t aware of any other emotions beneath those.
Or, as a way to deal with trauma, we got stuck in a fawn response. This is where we use people-pleasing and over-attuning to the needs of others to try and keep ourselves safe. If this is us, we may have a hard time differentiating our emotions from those of others around us that we take on.
If you relate to any of these, therapy can help to process the trauma, calm your nervous system, create a safe space, and help you practice the skills to get connected to your body and emotions again.
I’m a therapist in Tacoma WA and I can help
If you’d like to grow in any of these areas, you might want to reach out to a therapist. I can help! I’m a therapist in Tacoma, WA and work with clients for online therapy in Washington state. Feel free to reach out today for a free 15-min phone consultation. Let’s chat and see if we’d be a good fit to help you attune to yourself, know what you’re feeling, and know how to move forward to get your needs met in empowered ways. I look forward to talking with you!
My specialties include: anxiety therapy in Tacoma | Brainspotting therapy in Tacoma | EMDR Therapy in Tacoma |