You Don’t Need to Know Why You Feel Something for It to Matter

By Ryan Snodgrass, LMFT, LPCC

Sometimes what we feel makes perfect sense given what is happening around us.

Someone we love leaves, and we grieve. We witness injustice, and we feel angry. Something frightening happens, and we become scared.

Other times, the intensity of what we feel doesn’t seem to match what is directly in front of us. A small change feels like rejection. A difficult conversation brings up a fear that seems larger than the conversation itself. We feel unsafe in the presence of someone who has shown themselves to be safe. We experience a sadness we can’t quite explain.

This is one of the reasons I’ve never agreed with the phrase “feelings aren’t facts.” This saying wants us to challenge what we’re feeling. It attempts to highlight that sometimes what we feel and what’s happening around us aren’t the same. And that may be true. Feeling abandoned doesn’t necessarily mean we are. Feeling unsafe doesn’t always indicate danger. And yet, that doesn’t make our feelings any less real or any less worthy of our attention

Our feelings may be responding to what is in front of us. They may also be responding to what is within us- the experiences we carry, the relationships that shaped us, what our bodies have learned to anticipate, or a past that suddenly feels very close to the present.

Often, it’s a combination of both.

But we don’t have to choose between honoring what we feel and staying curious about what is truly happening. And we don’t have to know exactly where a feeling came from before we decide it matters.

Feelings Are Information, Not Instructions

When we talk about validating feelings, there can be a fear that doing so means agreeing with everything they tell us.

Listening to a feeling doesn’t mean we have to let it determine what happens next. Fear can tell us to leave when staying may be safe. Shame often tells us to hide even when support and connection are available. The feeling matters and we can continue being curious about the story it is telling us.

Validation doesn’t require certainty. It simply asks us to consider that what is happening within us is worth paying attention to.

What Is in Front of Us and What Is Within Us

We do not enter each moment without a history.

We bring with us relationships, losses, experiences, expectations, memories, sensations, and beliefs. Sometimes the present feels reminiscent of the past in ways we immediately recognize, and other times in ways we don’t quite see at first glance.

A delayed text may stir something larger than waiting for a response. A tone elicits a feeling we can’t quite place. Receiving care might bring grief alongside comfort. Seemingly ordinary moments might leave us wanting to pull away, hold tighter, become quiet, or protect ourselves.

There are times when our reactions seem bigger than the event- when I have a 9/10 response to a 3/10 stressor?

There is a line often said in this work: if it’s hysterical, it’s historical. It is not said to judge our reaction or to say that everything we react to is based in our past. It simply reminds us that when we have a big response, something big may be happening within us. That big thing may just not be what’s in front of us. It may be an old bruise, emotional scar tissue, that’s being touched in some way.

But telling myself the feeling isn’t valid doesn’t magically make it go away. Often, doing so only comes at the cost of shame or disconnection from ourselves. We can notice we are feeling scared without knowing what it is we’re afraid of. We can ask for connection without having an explanation for why we feel we need it.

We may understand why we feel something. Understanding may come later. But understanding isn’t required before we can respond to ourselves with care.

Curiosity Does Not Have to Become an Investigation

There is enormous value in understanding ourselves.

Sometimes finding the origin of a reaction changes our relationship with it. We recognize that what once felt confusing actually makes sense in the context of what we have lived through. We begin to see patterns. We have more choices. This is part of what therapy can offer.

Sometimes, “why?” is an invitation into curiosity. Other times, it becomes a prerequisite we make ourselves meet before we’re willing to believe our own experience. The pursuit of understanding can quietly become another way of asking ourselves to justify what we feel.

We can know ourselves deeply without requiring ourselves to explain every internal experience. Curiosity can sound less like Why am I like this? and more like:
What am I noticing right now?
What does this part of me need?
What is true in the present, even while this feeling is here?

We can be curious without putting ourselves on trial.

We Can Hold More Than One Truth

Part of emotional flexibility is increasing our capacity to hold experiences that seem contradictory.

I feel afraid, and I still want to move toward this.
I feel grief, and I don’t entirely understand what I am grieving.

One truth does not have to erase the other. In fact, this is often where we find more choice. When we don’t have to prove that our feeling is an accurate description of reality, we can more freely listen to what it wants to tell us without giving it complete authority over what we do next.

We can tend to what is happening within us while staying connected to what is happening around us.

You Don’t Have to Earn the Right to Feel

There are feelings that make sense immediately. There are feelings we understand years later. And there are some feelings we may never be able to fully explain.

They can all matter.

When we were young, feeling would often come before understanding. We would begin to understand what we felt, or why we felt it, only as we went through the experience. We would, hopefully, have someone sit with us in our tears and hold us before asking why we were crying.

But we didn’t all get that. Or somehow, along the way, we learned to minimize our feelings, justify them, or believe that every feeling required action. Eventually, we may begin to demand self-understanding before allowing ourselves self-validation.

Not every feeling comes with a clear understanding. Not every feeling requires action from us. Sometimes, they simply want to be noticed, acknowledged, felt. They want us to hold ourselves in our grief or our anger or our tears, and ask what happened later.

They want us to remember that what happened- or didn’t- doesn’t change our deservingness of care.