The Common Moment in Therapy
“I don’t know why I feel this way.” Have you ever said that out loud while sitting with a friend or a counsellor, trying to make sense of what you’re feeling? I know I’ve been there. Sitting there, feeling the wheels of my mind turning, searching for any possible reason that could explain what I feel. And the thing is, whenever I go looking for a reason, I’ll always find one. I’ll explain a feeling away with whatever makes the most sense in that moment. That’s the left side of the brain doing what it does best: filling in the gaps, not worrying whether it’s true, only that it fits.
I know I’m not alone in this. (Yes, you — I’m talking to you.) I’ve heard that same sentence from so many clients in therapy, and it’s what made me want to write about it. The idea of not knowing exactly where a feeling comes from often brings up guilt or frustration, as if not knowing is some kind of personal failure. Like being unsure of your feelings means you’ve somehow failed at being a person.
But not being able to name or explain what you feel isn’t a sign of disconnection. I’d actually argue it might be the opposite. We live in a culture that teaches us to name and categorise everything (maybe because it makes us feel safe, because uncertainty is uncomfortable). And somewhere along the way, we started applying that same rule to emotions. The moment a feeling shows up (especially an uncomfortable one), we’re told to identify it, label it, find it on the emotions wheel (have you ever been shown one of those?), then analyse it, explain it, and make sure we can justify why it’s there. To me, that sounds like an exhausting process for something that, physiologically, only lasts about 90 seconds. Wouldn’t it be kinder to just let ourselves feel it, instead of rushing to understand it?
Our Obsession With Knowing
We live in a culture that worships knowing. From a young age, we’re taught that the goal is to figure things out, to analyse, to explain. Uncertainty means you haven’t done enough. Remember school? There was always a right answer, and if you didn’t know it, you just had to try harder. That lesson sticks.
As adults, we bring that same mindset into our emotional world. We treat feelings like problems to be solved instead of experiences to be felt. We think if we can just understand why we feel something, then we’ll have done it “right.”
Iain McGilchrist writes beautifully about this — how our culture has become dominated by the left hemisphere of the brain, the side that values logic, categorisation, and control. It’s brilliant at making sense of things, but it also struggles to leave space for what can’t be neatly explained. And when that part of the brain takes over, we start to believe that knowing equals competence. That not knowing means failure.
So we analyse, interpret, and overthink our own emotions. We chase explanations instead of sitting with the actual feeling. It’s as if we can’t allow ourselves to simply be until we’ve written a full essay on why we’re feeling sad, angry, or lost.
What Happens When We Overthink Our Feelings
Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor talks about something called the 90-second rule: the idea that an emotion, as a physiological experience, only lasts about a minute and a half. That’s how long it takes for the chemicals triggered by an emotion to move through the body. After that, what keeps the feeling going isn’t biology — it’s thought.
Emotions are meant to rise, peak, and pass. They’re waves, not storms. But when we start analysing them (Why do I feel this way? What does it mean? Should I be feeling this?), we keep activating the same emotional response over and over again. It’s like hitting “refresh” on a page we don’t actually want to stay on.
That’s how sadness turns into heaviness, how anger lingers as resentment, how fear becomes anxiety. Overanalysis traps us in a feedback loop where we’re no longer feeling the original emotion, just the story we’ve built around it.
And it can happen with any emotion. For some people, sadness feels unsafe. For others, it’s anger or even joy. So the mind steps in to manage it, to think it away, to control it, to make it make sense. But all that thinking just keeps us stuck inside the feeling we were trying to escape in the first place.
Therapy and the Value of Unknowing
Even in therapy, the “why” mindset sneaks in. We’re trained to look for root causes, to find patterns, to make meaning out of everything that hurts. And while understanding can be powerful, I’ve learnt that searching for answers too soon can actually pull us away from what’s most alive in the room: the feeling itself.
There was a time when I thought that was the work. Help people figure out their feelings. Make sense of them. But over time, I started to notice that the moments of real change didn’t come from explanation. They came from presence. From slowing down enough to actually be with what was happening, without rushing to label or fix it.
I’ve had to learn that myself too. I grew up in the same culture that values analysis over experience, knowing over feeling. So learning to stay with uncertainty, to resist the urge to tidy things up, has been a slow and ongoing process. To this day, I still catch myself trying to decode something instead of sitting with it.
It’s something I still work on, too. As a therapist and as a person.
What It Means to “Stay With” a Feeling
So what does it actually mean to stay with a feeling? It’s simpler than it sounds and harder than it looks. It means noticing what’s happening inside you without rushing to understand or change it.
You might feel your chest tighten or your stomach drop. Maybe your jaw tenses or your breath gets shallow. Staying with it means allowing those sensations to be there, without turning them into a story. No analysis, no self-critique, no “why”. Just noticing.
It’s about presence, not understanding. Acceptance, not control. Letting the feeling move through instead of trying to pin it down.
If you want to try this, the next time you notice a strong emotion, pause before asking, ‘Why am I feeling this?’ Instead, see if you can bring your attention to your body. What do you notice? Where do you feel it? You don’t need to name it or make sense of it. Maybe do a slow scan from your head to your feet, or just follow the rhythm of your breath for a minute. That’s it.
It’s a practice that doesn’t offer quick answers, but over time, it builds a kind of trust in yourself. The kind that doesn’t depend on knowing, only on being.
The Reframe: Understanding Comes Later
Staying with your feelings doesn’t mean giving up on understanding. Insight isn’t lost. It just arrives differently. When we allow ourselves to fully experience a feeling without rushing to explain it, understanding tends to emerge naturally, in its own time.
This is how the therapeutic process often works. When safety and acceptance are in place, reflection comes on its own. Clarity shows up after presence, not before it. You don’t need to force it.
So if you’re sitting with an emotion and feel uncertain, remind yourself: it’s okay not to know yet. You’re simply feeling. And for now, that’s enough.
In therapy, we make space for not knowing. That’s often where the real work begins: in the unknowing, in the pause before explanation.
If you recognise this in yourself, if you notice the urge to figure things out instead of just feeling them, there’s a way to explore it with support. You can practise sitting with what’s here, noticing it, and letting it pass, without needing all the answers right now.
If You’re Interested in Reading More
If you want to dig deeper into the ideas I’ve mentioned here, these are a couple of great places to start:
- Jill Bolte Taylor’s work on the neuroscience of emotions and the 90-second rule, which explains how emotions naturally rise and pass: My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey (2008).
- Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary (2019) explores how our culture and left-brain–dominant thinking shape the way we perceive and interpret the world.
Both offer fascinating insights into how our minds work and why learning to sit with feelings, rather than immediately trying to explain them, can make such a difference.
