Talking About Feelings Is In. Feeling them Is Still Out
Emotional vocabulary has never been richer than it is today. As a millennial therapist, I’ve watched the evolution of our emotional language unfold in real time. When I was a teenager, the word anxiety was only just entering mainstream conversation. Now, society fluently tosses around terms like “overwhelm,” “hypervigilance,” “emotional capacity,” “triggered,” and “dysregulated.” We’ve developed an expansive language for our internal world.
And yet, inside the therapy room, there’s a dissonance.
Clients sit across from me with enormous competence in naming and describing their emotional states. They know the terms, the theories, the patterns. They can articulate the sensations in their bodies and even trace their origins. Cognitively, they get it.
So why are they still struggling?
Why, if we’re so emotionally literate, are so many people feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or disconnected?
Because emotional literacy and emotional tolerance are not the same thing—and somewhere along the way, society confused one for the other.
We Learned to Name Our Emotions, Not to Feel Them
For all the progress we’ve made in talking about emotions, we haven’t kept pace in our ability to tolerate the experience of them. Either in ourselves or in other people.
I can name my anger, but expressing it openly is still seen as a problem.
I can acknowledge a low mood, but showing low energy in a workplace or social setting feels unacceptable.
I can identify my anxiety, but letting it show on the surface is treated as a sign of weakness.
We celebrate emotional awareness but police emotional expression.
We praise vulnerability (in theory) but recoil when the feelings that come with it appear in real time.
As a culture, we jumped from acquiring emotional vocabulary straight to believing that vocabulary was the end goal. But naming the feeling is only the beginning of emotional processing.
Why Tolerance Hasn’t Kept Up
Humans are cognitive creatures. We use language to make sense of the world—including our inner world. It’s only natural that our first response to emotional complexity was to put words around it. Words make things feel manageable, explainable, containable.
But emotion itself isn’t cognitive. It’s physical. It’s relational. It’s sometimes messy and nonlinear.
To process emotions, we have to:
Feel them in our bodies
Express them outwardly
Risk how others might respond
Make room for other people’s emotions too
And this is where the real discomfort lies.
We live in a society that associates emotional expression—especially intense or “negative” emotion—with instability, unprofessionalism, or being “too much.” The phrase overly emotional is still used as a character flaw. Emotional containment is rewarded; emotional lability is judged.
It’s acceptable to talk about your therapy session at work, but unacceptable to show the sadness that came from it. You can tell friends you’re anxious, but not appear visibly unsettled. You can name your grief, but must keep your composure.
We support emotional awareness, not emotional impact.
And so we remain emotionally literate yet emotionally intolerant.
The Therapy Room: Where Tolerance Finally Exists
This is why therapy is so deeply transformative.
It’s one of the few places in modern life where emotional expression is not merely allowed, but welcomed. Where tears are not awkward. Where anger is not inappropriate. Where silence, shaking, sadness, fear, and frustration are met with curiosity rather than judgment.
In therapy, emotions don’t have to be articulated perfectly to be valid. They don’t have to be justified or neatly packaged. They don’t have to make other people comfortable.
They just get to exist.
And when people finally experience what it’s like to express emotions and still be accepted, something shifts. They realise that feeling, not labelling, is what begins the healing process.
Conclusion
Emotional literacy has given us the words, but now we need the courage and the cultural willingness to let those words become lived experience.
This isn’t about grand emotional displays or spilling our inner world everywhere. It’s about small, human acts: allowing our internal state to show occasionally, resisting the urge to apologise for feeling, and offering others the same space. When we each make room for real emotion, we start to normalise what it actually looks like to be human.
Right now, we live in a society where emotions can be analysed but rarely embodied. Where we can speak eloquently about our feelings, yet still feel pressure to conceal them in real time. If we want that to change, we need to make emotional expression ordinary again, not something reserved for therapy sessions or moments of crisis.
Because emotional vocabulary was only the first step. Emotional tolerance is the one we’re still learning.
If we can pair our emotional vocabulary with emotional permission, we’d move from simply talking about feelings to actually integrating them. And that is where real resilience, both personal and collective, begins.