How To Express Difficult Feelings

Difficult feelings like anger, annoyance, irritation, sadness, depression, confusion etc., are very difficult to express. A lot of people don’t know how to properly communicate how they feel, especially to the person that is the reason for the feeling.

We’ll be sharing a few tips that will help make it easier for you to express these difficult feelings, but before we do that, here is something you should keep in mind:

When you want to confront a person that has offended you, you should do so respectfully, express these difficult feelings without attacking the self-esteem of the person and express these feelings on time to prevent them from building up and becoming bigger problems.

1. Try to be specific about how you feel. Using only one or two words to express how you are feeling doesn’t do much good. For example, if someone should ask “how are you feeling?” it doesn’t help to respond with “not good” or “bad” or “upset”, all these are too vague. Help the person understand what you mean by specifying the kind of bad or upset? are you irritated, mad, anxious, afraid, sad, hurt, lonely, etc.

2. Be clear about the level of the feeling,so as to reduce the chances of being misunderstood. For example, if you say, “I am angry” when you are just a little annoyed, it can be misunderstood to mean, very angry.

3. When expressing anger or annoyance to a person, first tell the person the specific thing they did that you don’t like, before telling them how you feel about it. This helps to prevent the other person from becoming defensive because once they become defensive, they will misunderstand or not listen to what you have to say.

4. If you have mixed feelings, express each feeling and explain what each feeling is about. For example: “I have mixed feelings about what you just did. I am glad and thankful that you helped me, but I didn’t like the comment you made. It was disrespectful and I found it annoying”.