Is It Possible to Talk About Feelings Too Much?

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Reena Ninan:
Episode 215, When Is Talking About Feelings Too Much?
Alright, some of you asked, I just want to give you an update. Colonoscopy went well. Everything was good. I have a confession. I did have three frozen blueberries like two days before, which you’re actually not supposed to do the day of. It’s all clear liquids, but it is great to have that done. And when you’re 45 now, Lisa, you need to do it.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I know they dropped it in the time. I didn’t have to do it at 45. I had to do it at 50.

Reena Ninan:
Yeah, the hardest part is the not eating before. You’re fine. Otherwise,

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah, it’s, it’s lousy. But Reena, I can’t help it. But it all came out okay.

Reena Ninan:
It did. And your advice of broth, drinking that to get a little sustenance was very helpful, so thank you.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, you’re welcome. I’m glad that that is behind you.

Reena Ninan:
Yes.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I’m sorry.

Reena Ninan:
Oh, so we’re going to talk today a little bit about when is sharing your feelings too much from your child. I want to get right into the letter.
It says, Dear Dr. Lisa and Reena, firstly, thank you for your lessons and candor. I have an intelligent 14-year-old daughter who is well-versed in social and emotional learning. It’s been part of her school curriculum since kindergarten and she also sees a therapist every three to five weeks for anxiety and mild OCD. We are supportive parents who believe in open discussions and mental health. However, it isn’t something my husband and I grew up with and we are new to parenting in this way. That said, I feel that discussions around my 14 year old’s mental health have come to dominate our life. I’m no longer certain that she’s engaging in this topic with us because she’s truly sitting in deep feelings or if it has become an intention seeking type behavior. I don’t know if she’s aware of the difference of either. Our therapist says we mustn’t shut down teenagers when they speak about their feelings. But I am worried that focusing too much on analyzing her emotions is unhealthy. It is also straining relationships in our family with my husband and our other children. So when is talking about feelings too much and could it become an enabling behavior for pessimism?
Isn’t this a fascinating letter?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s an incredible letter like all of our letters, but just the thinking that people put into what they share with us.

Reena Ninan:
And I never thought about this. It’s so hard when you’re having teens to get them to open up, but I can see when you’re sort of talking about this, as she says from kindergarten on, you’re doing the good work of seeing a therapist. So when should we make mental health not a dominating conversation? Walk us through this.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, I’m going to start with actually a pretty simple answer that I think hopefully can offer guidance to this family and lots of families, but there’s a lot to unpack here. Talking about feelings is a perfectly adaptive way to manage feelings so long as talking about them starts to bring relief. The goal of talking about feelings is one of the ways we talk about is almost like a discharge. You get them out, you say the words. We have studies showing that if you say I feel anxious, you typically feel less anxious. I feel sad. You feel less sad that there’s sort of magic in verbalization. It helps bring feelings down to size. So that’s why we talk about feelings is that there’s an end goal, which is relief. Now sometimes it goes that way and sometimes it turns into what we call rumination, which is the sort of spinning of one’s mental wheels.
And I think it’s a fine line between talking about feelings that brings relief and talking about feelings that turns into rumination and the way that you can know where you are with this fine line, is the kid feeling better the more they talk about the feelings? Is it letting them sort of lay them down and move on? And this is kind of gross, but it’s a really good analogy. Does it feel like picking at an emotional wound that that’s the best analogy for rumination, which is the more examination of it, the more discussion of it, the more kind of detailed analysis of what’s going on actually only seems to leave the kid feeling crummier and lousier, then it’s gone too far and it’s time to not use talking as a solution.

Reena Ninan:
Is it ever okay to completely shut down your kid talking about their feelings? How do you know when you need to do that?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah. Well, and it’s so interesting. The clinician is right. If a teenager wants to talk about their feelings, you don’t want to be like, yeah, we’re not having that conversation. I mean, I get where that clinician is coming from. I think the key question is, is it helping? And if you start to make the assessment as the adult, this is not helping. You are just in a going round around or back to it picking at that wound. I actually do think it’s not only just okay for an adult to reroute that kid, I actually think it’s important because I think it’s too easy for both adults and kids to feel like, oh, talking is the answer. And if we’re talking and it’s not getting better, then more talking is the answer. That’s not true. So there are times where it is absolutely okay to help the kid move in another direction in the name of relief for them.

Reena Ninan:
So if you feel that they are just bringing up these emotions and picking at this emotional wound over and over again and almost to a destructive way that’s making it worse, how do you reroute them?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay, this is the magic question. Of course you’ve got a kid who’s in pain, who’s vulnerable, who’s sharing, and you don’t want to be like, I don’t think this is working for you. I mean, you don’t want to in any way seem dismissive or callous. I think this is where you actually bring in a little more teaching and you say something like, honey, ideally talking about feelings brings relief and I am so glad you are talking with me about how you feel. What I’m getting a sense of is actually the more you’re talking about this, the worse you feel. Am I barking up the right tree? So start by bringing the kid on board with this understanding that talking is an option. It’s not the only option and it may not be the best option.

Reena Ninan:
But then you do another thing where you kind of throw it back at them to help them kind of make this discernment path on their own.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Like reflecting like, oh, okay, so then let’s say that the kid’s like, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know what else to do, right? I am trying to feel better. And this is a problem actually, Reena, when something that sometimes works doesn’t always work because it’s easy for kids to go to it. So often talking about feelings does help kids feel better, and so then it makes so much sense that they would naturally start down that road whether or not that’s going to be the answer today. So it may be a kid who’s like, actually, the more I talk about this, the worse I feel. You’re not wrong, then this is very easy because then you can say, great, here’s the good news. When it comes to feeling better, the menu is actually quite big. And we just had that fabulous episode with Ethan Cross where he talked about his book “Shift” and that there’s lots of options for regulating emotion. Sometimes it’s listening to music, sometimes it’s going outside, sometimes it’s watching SpongeBob, sometimes it’s cuddling with the dog. We need to bring all of those up to the level of talking in terms of how much we value them. We value talking, I think more than is necessarily helpful. And we undervalue, you know what, going for a run outdoors. And so I think if the kid is like, yeah, what else you got? It’s very easy then to put out a menu or ask them what else would help them feel better.
I think it’s a little trickier if the kid’s like, I don’t know, let’s just keep trying talking. Right.

Reena Ninan:
Yeah. Well, I do want to ask you about that. Can overanalyzing your emotions be unhealthy?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yes, yes. We know this. And what happens is people get stuck. They get stuck in distress. I remember Reena this moment in my training, it was so interesting. I had this wonderful supervisor and she said, we have the strangest of all jobs, the strangest of all jobs. Our job is to help people really get in touch with their feelings to really become fluent in what’s going on internally, to take their emotions incredibly seriously, she said. And we get them all the way there and then we get to a place where we say, and they’re just feelings. They’re just feelings, which is her way of saying they don’t call the shots. They don’t get to decide how your whole day is spent. Once you have acquainted yourself well with them, you get to now try to bring them back under control so that you can move on and pass them.

Reena Ninan:
In this letter, she talks about how her daughter’s got anxiety and mild OCD. Do you approach this differently with different diagnosis?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So it’s interesting, right? So kids with anxiety and OCD, these are kids who are thinking, thinking, thinking. They often tend to be very, very bright kids who have a lot of intellectual firepower, and so they can readily imagine all the things that could go wrong. That’s anxiety or OCD is sometimes they have an obsessive thought that’s followed by a compulsive behavior to try to counter the thought. But the obsessive thought is they’re thinking about something that could go wrong. Maybe my hands are dirty or maybe I said a mean thing, but the point being they are obsessive that there’s a part of their mind that will just work and work and work and work. That’s not true for every kid that they’re going to go to language, they’re going to go to grinding on things with their minds. There are other kids who just don’t exert energy that way.
They’re much more physical kids. You can tell that they’re having a hard day, not because they’re sitting there thinking, thinking, thinking, but because they’re being physical, maybe getting in everybody else’s space or bothering people with their bodies.
This approach of wanting to talk a lot about feelings, wanting to go very deep. It feels a close cousin of anxiety and OCD, I don’t know that you’re going to see it as much with kids who may have other diagnostic pictures. I’m thinking about a kid who may be depressed, they may be very blank. They may have a very hard time even putting words around what they’re experiencing. It sort of fits a picture that we as clinicians would recognize of, oh, a kid who’s likely to ruminate as also not unlikely to have some anxious thoughts and not unlikely maybe to be prone towards obsessive concerns. Whereas kids who maybe their distress comes out in other ways, they may not go down these roads in the same way. And the fact of the matter is getting them to talk about feelings, maybe more of the challenge.

Reena Ninan:
Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Also, I know we’re talking about oversharing, but I want to talk about the opposite a little bit because I have found it’s often hard to get teens to open up. So let’s say there’s a problem or an issue and you know something doesn’t feel right, but they’re like, oh, everything’s okay, everything’s great. What works in getting your teen to open up?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, first of all, let me just say you like you’re so right. Anytime I have been with large groups of parents and one parent’s, like my kid’s having meltdowns are going on and on about their feelings and we address it, then someone else will raise their hand and be like, I wish my kid were having meltdowns. I wish my kid were telling me about their feelings.

Reena Ninan:
You can have a window. I know. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Right? That at least you got exactly like a window. You know what’s happening. So then there’s also the kid who’s like comes home clearly something’s wrong. We know our kids, we know our kids. We can sense it right away and they’re giving you nothing. They’re giving you absolutely nothing about what the issue is. Okay, Reena, one of the things I love about being a psychologist, I’m like, well, all behavior makes sense, you just have to know why. There’s always a logic to it. Even if as an adult we’re like, but I love you and I’m so safe and open and we want to have this conversation. So I’ve asked kids about this, about that thing. When you’re super upset, clearly, and you won’t tell your folks anything, and they’ve actually given me different reasons for why they’re like this sometimes they’re like, well, I’m afraid you’re going to go tell people this thing that I’m upset about. It’s really close to my heart. And so you’ll tell the neighbor, you’ll tell your sister, I don’t want you to. Sometimes it’s, I know what you’re going to say. I’m bummed out about the test. I messed up and you asked me if I was ready, and I told you I was, but obviously I wasn’t and I don’t really want to hear “I told you so.”
And then one kid one time said to me, and I love this so much, she said, by the time I get home, I’m like 90% of the way over it. And rehashing the whole thing for my folks is not going to help me feel better.
Who knows why anyone’s kid on a given day is not given it up and telling us what’s going on. But this is to say there’s a reason. And I think another thing that’s important is it’s not usually what we think it is. If we’re like, why aren’t you telling me things? It must be terrible. They can be like, no, I’m just mostly over it. So we want to make space that there’s a logic to why kids don’t want to share and then we can work within that space.

Reena Ninan:
I think that’s the problem though, because you want them to open up and you also don’t want to overcompensate for what you think is what they’re going through. But I find how do you get in and out? How do you build that trust? I think every parent would love for their child to come to them when they need help, but what we found is they’re more reclusive. They like to be alone and be left alone. They get annoyed when you ask them questions, but is there a way to open the door to where they’re not, this is all we’re talking about are our feelings, but to also have them come to you and they might really need something or have massive anxiety over something that’s actually legitimate to have anxiety over.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah. Yeah. No, these are the, I think so many families have this question, how do we keep this strong connection where you can share with me and how can I help you? I mean, it’s all that we want to help. So Reena, I think that one question all parents should have in their pocket if they feel like their kid is clearly upset, but not open to sharing is just to say, is there something getting in the way of you feeling you can tell me? So it’s that kind of that half step, I’m the queen of half steps asking a little bit more, and the kid might be like, yeah, you’re going to call your sister and then I’m going to see her at Thanksgiving and she’s going to bring it up and it’s going to be super weird. That’s really helpful. If the kid, or you’re going to be mad at me, and I don’t want to tell you or no, but I’m mostly over it. I just don’t want to get back into it. I mean, now you’re having the conversation you want to be having, you’re into it. So I think there’s that. The other thing, Reena, that I totally get how adults could get here, but I want us to not go there. I think that sometimes we’re like, until you tell me what’s wrong, I can’t help.
That’s the premise.
And let’s tease this apart a little bit because okay, first of all, well no, maybe you can’t help, but maybe they don’t want your help. Maybe they want their friend’s help or maybe they just want the feeling to die down, or we were talking about last week, maybe they just want to go get on a video game. Let it be in the past, the idea that you’re in pain. I’m your loving parent. I’m here to help. That’s our framing. That may not be where the kid is.
The other thing I’ll say is, oh, but you can help, even without knowing what’s wrong, let’s just imagine one of our kids, I’m just making this up, had some huge crush finally confess their crush to their crushy and their crushy was like, yeah, let’s be friends. Okay, so let’s say that that has ruined one of our kids’ days and let’s say for lots of reasons, kids don’t want to get into the deep romantic details of their lives with their family. Let’s say that they’re like, yeah, lady, you’re never going to find out what this was really about. This is going to be a secret forever, but you can see your kid is suffering. You don’t know why. You can see your kid is suffering. We can still comfort kids without having that information. So we could say, listen, I get it. You don’t have to tell me what’s up, but what would help you feel better? Should we go for a walk or do you want to go watch? Right now we’re watching Gilmore Girls.

Reena Ninan:
Great series.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Great series, right? Or I know boys who like their parents to watch them play video games. Have you been invited to do this?

Reena Ninan:
No, no, no. It’s quite the opposite always comes out.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay, so don’t put that on the table.
But you know a guy, you know your daughter, you know what helps them feel better? You guys have a dog. I think there’s something kind of triple parenting points if we’re giving points for parenting, I think there’s triple points on generously comforting a kid who will not tell you what’s wrong.

Reena Ninan:
But I feel so inadequate as a parent. It’s not just I can comfort. I can comfort, but I want to know what is wrong. How can I help? If you don’t tell me and share with me, I can’t help you.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, okay. Yes you can. And what I would say, Reena, is you may already have run into this place as a parent. You will certainly run into it this place as a parent where your kid is just like, I’m not telling you what the issue is. I will deal with it one way or another. I think that it is really powerful for us to recognize that our kids do actually need to develop the capacity to manage their feelings themselves. We’re not going with them into adulthood. Theoretically. They’re moving out at some point. And so rather than taking the position of I’m here to help and you have to tell me what’s wrong, the only way I can help, we can take the position instead of, I’m going to trust that you’re making your choices about how useful I can be to you. Our kids know us well and I’m going to stand back and admire, while you figure out how to handle this feeling well without me, that’s kind of a good place to get.

Reena Ninan:
But you’re asking me to let go of the training wheels, which some of us want to think that they need the training wheels until they’re like 82.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I know. I know. I mean my experience of teenagers, they’re more fun. I am like.

Reena Ninan:
I see that. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s so fun and it’s really, you’re like, no, stay with us forever.

Reena Ninan:
Completely, completely.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s true. Okay, but Reena, something else has come up. I just want to thread back together.

Reena Ninan:
Okay. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So there’s a kid who won’t talk. And so we have to then get creative with all of the other wonderful ways that either they can go manage their feelings independently or we could support their feelings management, whether it’s the dog or their favorite meal or whatever. If we go back to the kid who is ruminating, ruminating, ruminating, ruminating, and we say, Hey, do you think maybe talking about this is making you feel worse? And they’re like, I don’t know. It feels great. Let’s keep going. You may come to a point where you say, I’m not convinced that continuing to talk about this is going to help you feel better or is working. Can we try something? Can we make a plan to come back to this conversation tomorrow? So you’re not saying we’re done. We’re saying let’s revisit this and let’s go try something else that might help you feel better. Like, Hey, I’m putting together a bunch of stuff for the local soup kitchen. Do you want to come help me get those cans together? Take ’em over, drop ’em off. I think that there may be times when we gently require a changing of gears towards something that may also provide relief on its own. And I do think that one of the more elegant ways to do that is to say, let’s get on each other’s calendars to revisit this. It’s pretty common that when you come back to it later, the kid’s like, oh, I am fine. It does die down, and we want to see that happen.

Reena Ninan:
I want to ask you really quickly before we go about the school piece here, are there any downsides to, as this child has said, being well-versed in social and emotional learning?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
This is a really complex question, and what I will tell you Reena is we have started to see some data that are kind of mixed in their results about educating kids in depth about pathology. And we’re starting to see some data indicating that it actually might leave ’em feeling a little worse. And the worry is we look at this and we’re like, is the worry that it’s like we tell you just enough to make you very anxious about your own emotions, but not enough to help you know what to do next? So I feel cautious sometimes about how we approach questions of SEL. If it were entirely my call about how we would do this, I would focus very heavily on coping. I would focus very heavily on distress is part of life. It is absolutely going to be actually woven into every day for you.
It’s about coping in ways that bring relief and do no harm versus coping in ways that come at a cost. So coping I think is really essential. I do think there’s a lot of space for talking about pathology, especially as kids get older in terms of helping kids know when it’s time to bring in an adult. So I’m a big fan of social and emotional programming that’s like, Hey, here’s what depression looks like. Here’s what an anxiety disorder looks like versus healthy anxiety. Here’s what. And then saying to kids, if you see these in yourself or a friend, an adult needs to know, and certainly suicidality worries about that. An adult needs to know. And what’s really nice is kids are usually quite relieved. They’re like, great, I don’t want that. I don’t want to feel responsible for that. And then actually work needs to be done on making sure they will tell adults and making sure the adults will handle it well when they do. So there’s a lot of resources that I think can be deployed in that direction. But in my ideal universe of SEL, there’s a lot of time spent making sure kids know when it’s time to bring in an adult. And when I’ve been in this position, I’ll say, look, it’s not because your kids and we’re adults, it’s because you or your friend deserve someone who’s actually trained in this and we need to connect that. And then I would spend most of the time on coping.

Reena Ninan:
These are all valuable lessons that we don’t think about as we’re growing up and trying to learn and gain. But having the conversation with your kid really opens their eyes as to what’s happening. Your feelings are all over the place in the teen years.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
They are. It’s like it’s so wonderful Reena to have teenagers and be around them, and they’re so vivid and it’s so intense and everything’s so big. And at the same time we’re often like, whoa, how do we keep this down to size so that it doesn’t derail you? And I think that that’s really the goal, to feel one’s feelings, to use them for guidance, to use them for feedback, but to be able to then move forward with that information.

Reena Ninan:
So what do you have first, Lisa, for Parenting to Go?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So in my book, “The Emotional Lives with Teenagers,” I share a metaphor that I got from a colleague of mine in town, Terry, who I love. And what she says is, we should think about our feelings as one member of our personal board of directors. They don’t share the board and they don’t have a deciding vote, or they very rarely have a deciding vote. We all have a board of directors that helps us make decisions about our lives. That might be our interests, our morals, logistical considerations, financial considerations, feelings. They’re all coming together to guide us. But you don’t want feelings calling all the shots. You don’t want feelings dominating family life in terms of conversation. You don’t want feelings annoying, right? This is also in the letter like annoying people with their sort of primary focus. They’re important, they’re valuable. They are incredibly useful if we recognize them as a dataset. And like my supervisor said, their feelings.

Reena Ninan:
Their feelings. And they can be incredibly powerful, especially in the teenage years.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Absolutely.

Reena Ninan:
And next week, Lisa, we’re going to talk about fat shaming. This is something that happens between kids and a discussion we need to take up.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Absolutely.

Reena Ninan:
I’ll see you next week.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I’ll see you next week.