You Can’t Regulate What You Can’t Recognise

On emotional literacy, sobriety, and the things we were never taught

I was thirty-four years old when I learned how to name an emotion.

Not in a poetic sense. Not in the way we say things like I felt everything too deeply or I was overwhelmed. I mean literally. Someone handed me a laminated chart with words on it and asked me to point to what was happening inside my body.

I remember feeling quietly stunned. Embarrassed, even. How could a grown woman, a mother, someone who had lived a full adult life, not know the difference between anxiety and excitement, between sadness and shame, between fear and anger?

But I didn’t. And it turned out I wasn’t alone.

For most of my life, every emotion came out the same way. Loud. Sharp. Reactive. What looked like anger on the outside was often something else entirely on the inside. Anxiety masquerading as confidence. Grief disguised as irritability. Shame hardening into defensiveness. If I was excited to go out, to drink, to disappear into noise and movement and sensation, it wasn’t always joy driving me. Often it was nerves. Anticipation mixed with dread. A body that didn’t know how to settle unless something external did the job for it.

At the time, I thought this was just my personality. I was “passionate”. “Intense”. “A lot.” The kind of woman who felt things big and lived fast and burned bright. It took me years to understand that what I was actually doing was translating every internal experience through the only language I knew how to speak.

Anger.

Anger was not my problem. It was my translator.

I didn’t grow up learning how to identify emotions in the body. No one taught me to notice my breath, my jaw, my shoulders, the subtle cues that tell you something is off long before it explodes. Like many people, I learned how to perform feelings rather than understand them. I learned how to cope, how to push through, how to override discomfort. I learned how to keep going.

And I learned how to drink.

It wasn’t until I was in rehab, away from my usual environment, stripped of the distractions that had helped me avoid myself, that this gap became obvious. Days were structured. Therapy was relentless. Group sessions. Individual sessions. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Dialectical Behaviour Therapy. Over and over again, we returned to the same deceptively simple question.

What are you feeling?

Not what happened. Not what you did. Not what you should do next.

What are you feeling.

At first, my answers were vague. Bad. Overwhelmed. Stressed. Fine. Slowly, painfully, I began to realise that these were not emotions. They were summaries. Protective shorthand. A way of staying at a distance from the actual experience.

When I finally learned to name what was happening in my body, something shifted. Anxiety felt different to excitement once I knew where to look. Shame had a texture. Sadness had weight. Fear had a rhythm. And anger, real anger, was rarer than I had believed.

This was the beginning of regulation. Not the end.

Emotional regulation begins with language, not calm.

There’s a misconception that emotional regulation means calm. That it looks like serenity, restraint, grace under pressure. In reality, regulation starts much earlier. It begins with recognition. With language. With the ability to say this is anxiety instead of I need a drink, this is grief instead of why am I so angry, this is fear instead of I’m fine.

You cannot regulate what you cannot recognise.

Once I understood that, sobriety stopped being about abstinence and started being about literacy. Learning the internal alphabet I’d somehow missed. Discovering that many of my reactions made sense in context. That I wasn’t broken or dramatic or inherently volatile. I was uneducated in a skill no one had thought to teach me.

I often think about how different my life might have been if someone had handed me that laminated chart years earlier. If emotional education had been treated as essential rather than optional. If we taught children, especially girls, how to identify what they are feeling before we asked them to manage it.

But regret is not the point of this story.

The point is that it can be learned. Even late. Even after damage. Even after shame.

This space is for women who sense that something about their inner life has always felt loud or confusing or overwhelming. For mothers who love fiercely but feel reactive. For people who have used substances, busyness, relationships, or perfectionism to manage feelings they didn’t have words for. For anyone who has been told to calm down without ever being shown how.

I don’t write from a place of mastery. I write from practice. From repair. From the ongoing work of noticing myself with more care than I once knew how to offer.

Emotional regulation is not about being good. It’s about being able to stay.

And sometimes, the most radical thing we can do is learn the names of what we are feeling, and speak them gently, for the first time.

This is what my service looks like now.

Quiet. Present. Regulated.

Not fixing, not rescuing, just holding space and staying.