What Words Cannot Hold: A Therapist’s Reflections on Emotional Awareness

I was in New York last spring, and like many visitors, I did the classic New York thing and I went to a Broadway show. I was with my family, and they wanted to see Hadestown. *Spoiler Alert* If you don’t know what Hadestown is about, it’s a musical adaptation of the Greek tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice. In this interpretation, Orpheus falls in love with Eurydice and they marry shortly after. The winter season has come and is unusually long. Hades has taken Persephone, the goddess of spring, life, warmth, and vegetation, to be his wife down in the underworld and away from humanity above. Their arrangement is complicated and he only allows Persephone to live up above for only part of the year. Eurydice is out one day searching for food and leaves Orpheus at home, while he is focused on working on a song in hopes that Spring will return to them soon. Eurydice encounters Hades while looking for food, and in her desperation for security and provision, makes a deal to work for him, despite the rumors of the never-ending work down below. Orpheus notices Eurydice’s absence and thus begins his journey to the underworld to save Eurydice.

I had seen Hadestown before. However, I was not bothered by taking the time to see it a second time. The first time I saw Hadestown was two years prior to my trip to New York, and I was completely enamored by the story even with a touring cast. I was struck by how it wove together a variety of musical genres such as folk, indie, blues, and New Orleans-inspired jazz, and the way that the integration of those genres in itself, brought the story to life in a complex and deep meaningful way. I found myself trying to take in everything from the lighting, the choreography, the rhythm and movement, the vocal talent, and the range of expression of each performer, and all to the way they held their bodies, moved with the music, and engaged with one another. There were so many things happening at once on the stage, bringing this story to life, it felt both exciting and overwhelming at the same time.

Fast forward a couple years to last spring in New York, something about this performance landed differently that I couldn’t immediately name. Almost halfway through the show, in the middle of one of the intense musical numbers, I noticed tears welled up in my eyes, my nose began to tingle, and my body shifted from feeling relaxed in my seat, to a wave of alertness, tension, and warmth rush through my body. A heaviness set in. It was a deep sensation of sadness and tenderness as I watched the conflict unfold between the characters on stage. In that moment, I was grateful for the darkness of the theater as I sat there taking in the story and experiencing multiple emotions at once. I was surprised by how intense my own reaction was to what I was viewing, almost feeling embarrassed for having such a visceral reaction to the story. I noticed I wanted to dismiss my own emotions thinking “why am I reacting this strongly, I’ve seen this before, I know how the story ends.” I felt overwhelmed by the emotions arising and a pull to avoid them, torn between sitting with my feelings and intellectualizing the experience.

This dynamic that played out on the stage felt all too familiar, both at times in my own life and in the lives of patients that I have worked with. But as I came to know what I was feeling and how I was experiencing that feeling, I took a deep breath and allowed myself to settle into whatever was coming up for me. I felt as if the emotions I was holding moved from my head, back into my body. As I settled into the moment of what I was feeling in response to the heaviness, grief, and heart ache of the characters and the story, a sensation of relief washed over me. I felt closer to the character’s experience, and keenly aware of my own emotions in a way that didn’t feel scary or overwhelming, but felt affirming and comforting.

It wasn’t just the lyrics or the dialogue that moved me, or even the content of the story, although that plays a significant part in any story. It was everything the actors weren’t saying or singing, and everything that they were doing, and how they were embodying their role that drew me in closer to this experience and feeling that was being enacted on stage.

It was all of the nonverbal parts of the show occurring simultaneously that moved me. It was the tone of a voice on a certain note, the pitch, cadence, rhythm, and subtle bodily movements or the look in their eyes as they embodied everything this story had to offer. Whether conscious or unconscious, these are ways (and maybe not singing or dancing per se) that we might use to communicate when words fall short of capturing a particular feeling, sensation, or experience. Sometimes the most powerful communication in a therapy session is the silence, the sudden dropping of your shoulders, the deeper exhale, or the felt presence of the therapist even after closing your eyes.

Where Language Fails, Feeling Speaks

There are moments when we encounter or experience something so deeply and/or so powerful, that we simply don’t have words or language for it yet. But this experience, sitting in the dark theater and taking in this story and watching the musical, made me reflect on something deeper.

Have you ever heard of the word evocation? Evocation refers to the process that occurs when an interaction, a person, a piece of art, a song, or a dance, whatever it may be, brings up a feeling, memory, or maybe even sensation, within us. Sometimes that feeling doesn’t feel entirely our own, or it emerges only after an intense emotional or visceral experience. You may find yourself wondering, “Why am I feeling this way? Where did this come from?” Raise your hand if you’ve ever experienced this when watching a movie, listening to a song, reading a book. I know I have. There’s an unspoken thing that happens for us when we have a particular experience or stimuli that activates our emotional world. It can feel flooding, overwhelming, and you may find yourself wanting to avoid said experience. It may feel like too much to handle or you may feel lost regarding how you want to respond. It is rarely our automatic response to sit, engage, and be curious about the experience.

Before we are able to speak, we experience the world preverbally. As infants and children, we take in our surroundings through our senses such as sound, touch, taste, movement, smell, and sight. As adults, it can feel as though we’re expected to have words for everything we feel, experience, desire, or even dislike, although we often don’t. It can be incredibly challenging and maybe even frustrating, to want to express ourselves when our words have not come to mind, sentences aren’t formed in a coherent way, and we don’t know how else to express what we are feeling.

Many of us have been taught to suppress or ignore the signals our bodies send. Or, we may not have developed a full awareness of them. Yet, our bodies often sense our emotions before we even have the words to articulate them, whether we are aware of that process or not.
It’s common to feel tension when you’re feeling anxious or scared, or a heaviness or a level of fatigue when feeling sad or overwhelmed. These physical sensations often reflect something deeper happening inside of us, even when we don’t consciously recognize it. Our bodies are constantly communicating with us, sending us messages about our emotions, whether we're aware of it or not.

Final Reflections

As I reflect on that moment in the theater, I realize that moment offered me more than just a story or a fond memory with family. It highlighted how intertwined our emotional world is with our physical bodies, and how our nonverbal experiences connect us with the parts of ourselves that exist beneath the surface, parts that we didn’t know existed. It reminded me that meaning and insight don’t always come from words, logic, or an intellectualized understanding of our experiences or feelings. Sometimes, words simply aren’t enough to express what we are feeling. In those moments, we may find ourselves turning to other ways to process what is happening for us like listening to music, going for a walk, moving our bodies, painting, drawing, to name a few. These kinds of embodied activities can help us get in touch with our emotions and can aid in our processing of our internal world to help us express what words can’t. It may come in the form of a sensation, a tightness in the chest, a tingling feeling, or a sudden wave of grief, excitement, or nervousness we didn’t know we were carrying. And from that sensation, it opens a doorway and invitation to deeper awareness of our emotions and experiences.