Why Some of Us Feel Emotions in Metaphors, Not Labels

I remember being in grad school, clinging to the feelings wheel for dear life.

Everyone around me seemed fluent in the language of emotions—naming, sorting, articulating them with ease. I wasn’t. I worried that something was wrong with me. Worse, I worried that this gap meant I was failing my clients.

I studied the wheel. I tried—really tried—to feel something click. But the words didn’t land. They felt distant. Flat. Like labels applied to experiences I couldn’t quite touch.

At the time, I assumed the problem was me.

Years later, I see this same moment replayed again and again in my therapy room.

Clients stare at the feelings wheel, scanning it repeatedly, trying to find the right word. When nothing fits, they turn on themselves. They criticize. They blame. They wonder why they can’t “handle” emotions better or “process” them the way they think they should.

What I’ve come to understand—through my own journey and through my clients—is that this struggle isn’t a personal failure. It’s a mismatch of language.

This is especially true for many people from immigrant, first-generation, and second-generation backgrounds. And importantly, this isn’t just about speaking English as a second language.

I see this often in people who speak English fluently—sometimes it’s the only language they speak—but who were spoken to in a different language at home from a very young age.

Before there were words like anxious, overwhelmed, or resentful, their emotional world was shaped through tone, implication, silence, obligation, and relationship. Emotions weren’t named—they were felt, sensed, absorbed. That early emotional language doesn’t disappear just because English becomes dominant later in life.

For many of us, emotions were never tidy concepts to be labeled. They lived in the body.

A heaviness in the chest.

Pain curling in the stomach.

A buzzing, electric tension under the skin.

Anger that feels like meat sizzling on a grill.

Emotions understood through metaphor. Through physical sensation. Through how we experience ourselves in relation to others.

Once I had this realization, I put the feelings wheel away.

Not because it’s wrong—but because it isn’t universal.

I made space for a different way of knowing emotions: a somatic, relational, metaphor-rich language. And when I brought this permission into my work, something shifted. Clients softened. The self-criticism eased. The work deepened.

For many people, emotional growth isn’t about finding better words.

It’s about realizing their emotions were never meant to be translated into someone else’s language in the first place.