You know that moment when someone asks "How are you feeling?" and your mind goes blank?

Or when happiness shows up—a genuine flutter of joy—and within seconds your chest tightens, your brain whispers something bad is about to happen, and you can't let yourself rest in that feeling for even a moment?

Maybe you've noticed you have different versions of yourself. The you at work. The you with family. The you with friends. And somewhere beneath all those performances, you wonder: which one is actually me?

If you've tried communication workshops, therapy homework about "expressing your feelings," or meditation that somehow still feels like you're driving a car you can't stop—you've probably assumed the problem is that you're just not trying hard enough. That you need to find your "real self." That you have an anger problem when those hours-long rage episodes erupt over something as small as dishes in the sink.

But what if I told you that every single one of those attempts has been addressing the wrong problem?

Why the Common Advice Doesn't Work

When someone struggles to express emotions, gets stuck in their head, or experiences sudden explosions of uncontrollable rage, most people—therapists included—diagnose one of three things:

1. Poor communication skills — "You just need to practice being more open."
2. Anger management issues — "You need better emotional regulation techniques."
3. Identity confusion — "You need to find your authentic self."

So you try to communicate more. You practice "I feel" statements. You attempt to share what's going on inside.

But here's the problem: you can't communicate what you can't identify.

You try anger management strategies—breathing exercises, counting to ten, removing yourself from the situation.

But here's what happens: the rage doesn't start with the trigger. It starts days before, accumulating silently while you feel... nothing.

You search for your "real self" among the fragments.

But what if all those versions are real? What if the fragmentation isn't the problem—it's a solution your nervous system created long ago?

The Real Culprit: Your Nervous System

Here's what's actually happening, and why almost no one catches it:

The inability to rest in happiness, the emotional numbness punctuated by explosive rage, the fragmented sense of self—these aren't three separate problems. They're three symptoms of the same hidden cause.

Your nervous system learned, very early, that letting your guard down might mean missing something critical.

Think back: when did you first learn that you had to always be watching, always be ready?

For many people with this pattern, there's a specific origin point. One woman I worked with traced it back to age three or four, watching her mother have seizures. If she was playing, if she was happy, if she let herself relax—she might miss the signs. She might not be ready.

Her nervous system encoded a rule: happiness = danger.

Years later, even when the original threat is long gone, that flutter of joy still triggers the same response. Chest tightens. Guard goes up. The body won't let her stay in that feeling for more than a second.

This isn't a thought pattern you can talk yourself out of. It's a neural pattern programmed into your autonomic nervous system before you had language to process it.

The Second Hidden Cause: Emotional Bypassing

But it gets deeper.

Most people who suppress emotions still feel them—they just don't express them. You feel angry, but you don't say anything. You feel hurt, but you smile through it.

What you're experiencing is different. And it has a name: alexithymia.

Alexithymia means difficulty identifying and describing emotions. But you've taken it a step further into what researchers call protective emotional bypassing.

You don't just suppress emotions. You bypass emotional awareness entirely.

The pathway looks like this:
Stimulus → Awareness → Response

But you've developed a shortcut:
Stimulus → ~~Awareness~~ → Response

You don't register what you're feeling. You just do what needs to be done.

Your colleague asks you to cover their shift. You don't feel the exhaustion or the resentment—you just say yes.
Your sister calls upset. You don't notice your own emotional capacity—you just talk her through it for an hour.
You get home and stare at your phone, feeling... nothing.

The emotions didn't disappear. They got deposited in an account you never check.

The Emotional Bank Account Explained

Here's what research on emotion regulation shows: suppressed emotions don't vanish. They accumulate.

Imagine making deposits in a bank account you never look at. You keep adding to it—$10 here, $50 there, $200 from that thing you didn't let yourself feel.

Then one day, someone leaves dishes in the sink.

And the account explodes.

Hours of rage. Screaming, shaking, feeling like you can't control it once it starts. It feels like it's about the dishes, but it's not about the dishes at all.

It's carrying the weight of the colleague you covered for. The sister you supported. The dinner you didn't eat. The hundreds of moments where you bypassed your own experience entirely.

This is why anger management techniques don't work for you. The rage isn't the problem—it's the overflow.

And here's the surprising part: that rage is actually a healthy emotion trying to emerge. The problem isn't the anger itself. It's that it's carrying the accumulated weight of every moment you bypassed.

Your Fragmented Self: Not What You Think

Now let's talk about those different versions of yourself.

Research on self-concept fragmentation shows that people who experience childhood emotional neglect often develop what are called context-dependent selves. Not as a pathology—as a survival mechanism.

When your caregivers never showed affection, never asked how you felt, never modeled emotional expression, you learned to read the room and become whatever that room needed.

At work: competent, unflappable, strong.
With family: the one who holds it together.
With friends: warm but never too needy.
Alone: still performing for an invisible audience in your head.

They're all you. They're all authentic responses to different contexts.

The problem isn't that you need to find the "real" one beneath all the masks. The problem is that they're not integrated. They're not talking to each other. They're competing, judging, fragmenting your sense of self.

And here's what they all have in common: they're all performing. They're all being what others need. Even the version that's alone is still playing a role.

That's exhausting. That's the car you can't stop driving.

How This Explains Your Life

Let's connect this back to your life.

You couldn't share your emotions in your marriage—not because you weren't trying hard enough, but because you literally couldn't identify what you were feeling in the moment. Your ex-husband was communicative, wanted you to open up, and you simply... couldn't access the data.

You maintain that yoga and meditation practice, but even in stillness, your mind races. You're planning the next thing. Replaying conversations. Still driving the car. Because your nervous system learned that letting your foot off the gas means everything crumbles.

You feel like you "failed" your father because you didn't take him to London before he died. But what you actually failed to do was prove you turned out okay despite everything. And now you're still trying to prove it—to colleagues, friends, family, everyone—by being whatever they need.

But there's no one left to prove it to. So the proving never ends.

The Solution Isn't What You Think

Here's what actually works, and why it's different from everything you've tried:

You don't need to force yourself to feel. You don't need to find the "real" you. You don't need better anger management.

You need to build the pathway that was never built: the one between stimulus and awareness.

The practice is almost insultingly simple:

Three times a day, set a timer for two minutes. Complete this sentence out loud: "Right now, I notice I feel..."

That's it.

Not "I should feel" or "I want to feel." Just "I notice I feel."

And if the answer is "nothing," you say: "Right now, I notice I feel numb."
If the answer is "I don't know," you say: "Right now, I notice I feel uncertain."

Numbness is a feeling. "I don't know" is information about your internal state.

The goal isn't to force feelings to appear. The goal is to create space where they're allowed to exist.

Why This Actually Works

This practice does something neuroscience calls affect labeling—the ability to recognize and articulate internal states.

Research shows that naming an emotion, even when the name is "numb" or "blank," begins to activate the neural pathways between your limbic system (where emotions live) and your prefrontal cortex (where language and awareness live).

You've been bypassing that pathway your entire life. This practice builds it.

It's short enough that your protective system doesn't perceive it as threatening. Two minutes can't hurt you.

It's frequent enough—three times daily—to start establishing new patterns.

And here's the critical part: you speak it out loud. This prevents it from becoming another internal conversation, another performance. Externalized observation is different from rumination.

You're not analyzing. Not fixing. Not judging. Just noticing.

For someone who's spent their whole life being strong for everyone else, this is how you begin to be present for yourself.

What Happens When You Start

I won't lie to you: it's going to feel strange. Maybe even threatening.

You've been operating on the belief that if you take your foot off the gas, everything collapses. That if you start listening to what you actually feel, the whole structure falls apart.

But here's what actually happens when people start this work:

Things don't collapse. The exhausting effort of holding everything together starts to ease.

You begin to discover that you don't have to be the one holding up the whole world. That other people can carry their own weight.

The rage episodes don't disappear immediately—but they start to make sense. You catch the accumulation earlier. You notice the numbness for what it is: a signal that you're bypassing again.

And most importantly, you start to meet yourself. Not the work version or the family version or the friend version—the actual you beneath all those protective adaptations.

Your First Week

Here's how to start:

Choose three anchor times. For example:
- Right after waking up
- During lunch break
- Before your evening yoga practice

Set phone reminders. Make them specific: "Right now, I notice I feel..."

Track completion with simple checkmarks. Not journaling, not deep reflection—just a check that you did it.

The first week, focus only on completion. Not on having "good" or "insightful" feelings to report. Not on whether you're "doing it right." Just on saying the sentence out loud, three times a day, whatever comes after it.

If you notice resistance—if the timer goes off and you think "not now, I'm too busy"—that's the protective system engaging. That's the part that's afraid that if you start listening, something will fall apart.

Do it anyway. Two minutes won't break anything.

What This Opens Up

Once you can name what you're feeling in isolated moments, a new question emerges:

How do all these different parts of you—the work version, the family version, the friend version—start talking to each other instead of competing?

How does the accumulation process transform into moment-by-moment awareness, so emotions get expressed in real time instead of building to crisis?

How do you build the bridge between noticing feelings and expressing them appropriately in relationships—especially in future intimate partnerships where someone might actually want to know what's going on inside you?

Those are bigger questions. But they can't be answered until you've built the foundation: the pathway between stimulus and awareness.

That pathway starts with two minutes and one sentence.

"Right now, I notice I feel..."

What comes after that is up to you.

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What's Next

Stay tuned for more insights on your journey to wellbeing.