Why Can’t I Feel My Emotions? On Disconnection, Cultural Loss, and What It Means to Start Listening Again

Esther Dietrichsen-Farley
Jun 29
4 min read

Updated: Sep 6

You might know the vocabulary of emotion. You can name what others feel. You can function. You can reflect. But when it comes to your own internal world, something misfires.

It’s not that you’re cold or avoidant. It’s that somewhere along the way, you stopped being fluent in your own emotional language.

And when you’ve lived across cultures, when you’ve learned to adapt, when belonging has always come with conditions - that disconnection can run deep.

This post is for those who are emotionally literate in theory, but estranged from the felt sense of their own experience. It’s not about brokenness. It’s about how we’re shaped - and what happens when we begin to unshape ourselves.

A group of people from all different backgrounds engaging in group therapy

Why Is It So Hard to Feel What We Feel?

It’s not just you. Across identities and generations, emotional access is often filtered by culture, class, gender, trauma, and survival.

“When we suppress emotion to fit into a social structure, we disconnect from our truth. And then we wonder why we can’t find peace.” (Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity)

We learn early which emotions are safe. Some are labelled too much. Others, not enough. If you were taught to stay calm, to manage others' reactions, to make sense of big emotions instead of expressing them - of course it’s hard now to recognise what you actually feel.

Researcher Lisa Feldman Barrett notes that emotions aren’t universal reactions, but constructions based on experience, culture, and memory. If you didn’t grow up in an environment where anger or sadness or joy had space, those neural maps don’t develop in the same way. You become emotionally fluent in others but, not in yourself.

In high-functioning adults, this often looks like:

Describing a situation in detail, but not knowing how it felt
Feeling emotionally flooded, but not knowing why
Talking about your emotions instead of through them

It’s not emotional immaturity. It’s emotional interruption. And for many, that story begins in migration, expectation, and the quiet labour of fitting in.

Crossing Cultures, Losing Touch

When you cross a border - by immigration, by upbringing, by class or career - you adapt. You code-switch. You internalise. You become an expert in adjustment.

But emotional life doesn’t always cross with you.

The rituals of expression - the places where people used to understand what your silences meant, what your tears meant, what your humour meant - don’t always survive relocation. You start to flatten. You become more legible. More careful. Less seen.

“When you leave your culture, you don’t just lose a location. You lose a mirror.” (Esther Perel)

For many immigrants or globally mobile adults, the early years of relocation are filled with isolation. The cost of being able to move easily is that your world shrinks at first. Fewer shared reference points. Fewer people who can read the unsaid. And often, no time to fall apart.

So you become functional. Safe. You say what’s expected. You learn to translate. But something in you no longer lands.

And therapy - especially person-centred therapy - becomes one of the few places where you don’t have to shape-shift. Where you don’t need a performance to belong.

The Emotional Cost of Adaptation

It’s hard to feel your feelings when they’ve never been safe to express, or, when they were once too loud, too foreign, or too private for the room.

Many of the people I work with say:

“I know I’m upset but I don’t know why.”
“I’ve spent so long keeping it together I’m not sure what’s underneath.”
“I feel too much - or nothing.”

If you were raised to be high-functioning, to be grateful, to not cause trouble - emotions often go underground. Especially grief. Especially anger. Especially complexity.

In her work on emotional over-adaptation, Perel writes:

“The more you rehearse an identity, the harder it is to feel beyond it.”

This is the hidden tax of coping well.

But it’s also where something different can begin.

Why Therapy Doesn’t Need You to Be Clear

You don’t need to show up in therapy with insight. Or with emotional literacy. Or even with the right words.

That’s the myth - that you need to know yourself in order to benefit from therapy. Often, therapy is where people start remembering what they’ve had to suppress.

This is especially true for those who’ve crossed emotional and cultural borders. You’ve had to compress, adjust, over-function, and adapt to survive. Of course it’s hard to feel what you feel.

But that’s not a flaw. It’s context. And in therapy at The Farley, we honour that.

Sometimes therapy is just the act of not translating yourself. Of not managing someone else’s comfort. Of staying with what you don’t yet understand.

And that’s where emotional language starts to return: slowly, subtly, honestly.

If any of this resonates, you might find it helpful to read What High-Functioning Burnout Feels Like, or Please See Me. Just Don’t Make Me Perform For It - two reflections on what happens when coping starts to cost more than it gives back.

FAQ

Why is it so hard to feel my emotions, even when I know something’s wrong?

Emotion is shaped by culture, family, and survival. If you’ve learned to downplay, suppress, or intellectualise feelings, it can be hard to access them later - even if you’re self-aware.

Is this just emotional numbness or something deeper?

Emotional disconnection is often protective, not pathological. Especially for those who’ve crossed cultures or high expectations, it’s a way of surviving - not a personal failure.

Will therapy help if I can’t articulate what I feel?

Yes. Person-centred therapy doesn’t require you to explain everything. It starts where you are - even in silence, confusion, or disconnection.

The Farley