Emotions Are Not Fixed Across Time

A woman sat across from me last week and went still in the middle of her own sentence. Her voice thinned. Her breathing shifted. Her eyes stayed on mine, but something had already moved through her body before she could catch it. When I asked her what was happening, she said, I don't know yet.

That sentence is where a lot of clinical work actually lives. Not in the naming of the emotion, but in the arriving.

Emotions Are Not Fixed Across Time

I have been reading the historian Rob Boddice, whose work on the history of emotions argues that feelings are not universal biological constants passed unchanged from ancestor to descendant. In The History of Emotions (Manchester University Press, 2018), and in his more recent Humane Professions work, Boddice makes the case that emotions are acts of interpretation shaped by the language, culture, and century a person is born into. A twelfth-century mystic like Hildegard of Bingen wrote about a living Light moving through her body. A modern neurologist reading the same account is likely to say migraine with aura, and the neurological reading may be accurate. Something still falls out in the translation. The mystic's experience was not only physiology. It was physiology met by a specific interpretive world, and that world does not exist any more.

Lisa Feldman Barrett has pushed a related argument from a very different angle. In How Emotions Are Made (Houghton Mifflin, 2017), and in her theory of constructed emotion (Barrett, 2017, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(1)), she proposes that the brain does not read pre-formed emotions off the body like a thermometer reads temperature. It constructs emotions in the moment, using prior experience, concepts, language, and the body's internal signals, interoception. Two women can have the same racing heart and constricted chest, and one will construct anxiety, the other anticipation, depending on the concepts and history her brain has available.

I find this useful. It matches something I see clinically. Two women describe an almost identical body state and reach for two different words, and both are telling the truth.

The Layer Before Language

Before there is interpretation, before there is a concept, before there is a word, there is activation. A woman goes still mid-sentence. Her voice thins. Her diaphragm changes shape. Her skin colour shifts. Her eyes soften or harden. This is not an emotion yet, in the constructed sense. It is a nervous system doing what it learned to do long before any meaning got attached to it.

Stephen Porges' polyvagal work (The Polyvagal Theory, Norton, 2011) describes this layer in terms of autonomic states, ventral vagal engagement, sympathetic mobilisation, dorsal vagal shutdown. These states move fast, below conscious awareness, and they carry the imprint of what the body has previously needed to do to survive. Peter Levine, in Waking the Tiger (North Atlantic Books, 1997) and later work, describes the same territory as incomplete defensive responses held in the body.

The Body Ahead of the Word

The women I work with often arrive with bodies that are ahead of their language. Something moves through, and the word for it comes later, if it comes. Sometimes it never quite arrives.

The body responded before there was a self who could speak. In developmental trauma, this is especially pronounced. A three-year-old whose caregiver was frightening did not have language yet. The body did what it did, and the meaning got attached decades later, if at all.

What Naming Actually Does

There is a real body of research showing that putting a feeling into words changes how the body carries it. Matthew Lieberman and colleagues at UCLA published a well-known fMRI study (Lieberman et al., 2007, Psychological Science, 18(5)) showing that affect labelling, naming an emotional state, reduces amygdala reactivity and increases activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Subsequent work, including Torre and Lieberman's 2018 review (Emotion Review, 10(2)), has extended and complicated this picture but preserved the core finding. The word does something back to the body.

This is real. I use it clinically. I ask women what word arrives when they notice a sensation. I watch the sensation shift when the word lands accurately.

Where the Naming Story Gets Oversold

Where I become cautious is when the naming story expands into a claim that a richer emotional vocabulary would resolve the gap. There is a whole wellness discourse built on this now, emotion wheels, feelings lists, granularity as the answer. Barrett's research on emotional granularity (Kashdan, Barrett & McKnight, 2015, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(1)) does suggest that people who make finer emotional distinctions tend to regulate better and drink less under stress. That finding is real.

But naming is not the same as arriving. And the moment before the word, the moment my client sits in when she says I don't know yet, is not a deficit. It is often the most honest thing in the room.

What This Changes in the Session

If I take Boddice seriously, I have to hold that the words a woman reaches for are not neutral. They are inherited from a culture that gave her some concepts and withheld others. Her mother's era named some feelings and refused to name others, and that inheritance shapes what she can currently think about her own state.

If I take Barrett seriously, I have to hold that her brain is actively constructing the emotion in the moment, using whatever prior material it has. Two similar bodies with different histories will produce different feelings from the same physiological state.

If I take Porges seriously, I have to hold that all of this happens on top of an autonomic response that has already happened. The body has already moved. Interpretation catches up.

Staying Near What Has Not Yet Been Named

Most of the clinical work is in the catching up. Not translating too soon. Not handing her a word before her body has finished doing what it is doing. Not tidying the state into a concept when the state is still moving.

I sit with women whose bodies are ahead of their language. Sometimes a word arrives ten minutes later and it is unexpectedly precise. Sometimes the word is close but not quite right, and we stay with it until something more accurate surfaces. Sometimes no word arrives at all, and we let that be true.

The women who make the most durable change are often not the ones with the largest emotional vocabulary. They are the ones who can tolerate the layer before the word. Who can stay with a body that is doing something they cannot yet describe, without rushing to explain it, medicate it, or make it mean something.

That capacity is not innate. It is built. Slowly, with another nervous system nearby that is not frightened by not knowing yet.

The Gap Is Not a Failure

The twelfth-century mystic had her Light. The modern reader has migraine. Neither reading is complete. Something was moving through her body that her century helped her interpret in one way and ours interprets in another. The activation itself, the fact of something moving, was the same across both centuries. The meaning was different.

I keep meeting this gap in my sessions. A woman goes still mid-sentence and does not know yet what is happening. Her body is ahead of her language, which is often what her body learned to do to survive.

The work is not to close the gap faster. It is to stay near it, without needing it to resolve, until whatever is moving through her has room to be met on its own terms.