Understanding Emotional Wounds

By Lynn L. West, PhDc, BCETS, LCPC

Lynn L. West & Associates, LLC

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Understanding Emotional Wounds

Have you ever been emotionally affected by an action, behavior, or words used by someone else, and when you attempted to get your point of view heard by the other person, instead of becoming conscious of the experience of the effects of what you are feeling, the other person responds using “explaining words.” This just intensifies the frustration in the argument because of the inability to communicate and be heard, even though both people are using the same language.

To perceive a sensation or emotion is a state of mind that is always accompanied by biophysiological changes in the body, which is called an affective state. The affective state (the emotional feeling) has to be addressed in order to resolve the issue at hand. This explains why communication requires the responder to connect with the other person at a feeling or emotional level, and not at in “intellectual” (non-feeling level).

Intellectualization is characterized as a flight into reason, where the person avoids uncomfortable emotions by focusing on facts and logic. Further, the situation is treated as an interesting problem that the person contemplates only on a rational basis, while the emotional aspects are completely ignored as being irrelevant.

To connect with someone expressing an experience of an emotional feeling, requires the responder to express sympathy for or compassion toward, or to empathize with the individual using “feeling words” when communicating and not using “explaining words” to offer reasons for or a cause of or to justify one self.

Explaining words intended to make something plain or comprehensible from the responder's point of view, is experienced by the wounded party as just being dismissed or to get rid of or minimized by the explanation. This is a psychological defense mechanism employed by people who are not in touch with their feelings and avoid bringing them to the surface. Pointing this out, by the way, will not work to change anything.

Mental and emotional states affect how our bodies work. Now known as symptoms of the human stress response and the familiar term flight or fight response to symptomatically characterize the symptoms associated with the excitation of the biophysiology underpinning the sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system. Biophysiological homeostasis must be restored, meaning the disrupted ANS must be calmed and without the influence of the emotions of fear. This does not happen in response to explaining words.

How do you know whether to use feeling words or explaining words? If someone uses the words “I feel” to describe what they are experiencing, then the responder uses only “feeling words” to respond and discuss the topic.

It is never appropriate to use “explaining words” to respond to a feeling problem someone else is trying to discuss. The person with emotional reaction does not react to a rational explanation of how the other person explains or justifies his/her behavior. The only effective solution is connection and empathy with the emotionally wounded individual.

The connection between individuals is only reached through coexperiencing someone's suffering and validating their experience of pain through genuine feelings of empathy. This includes interactions between adults but especially between adults/parents/caregivers and children.