Meaningful social communication between trusted family members, friends, and colleagues involves honest, open emotional sharing. Just as primates bond by physical touch, humans bond by touching each other emotionally. If we were to view emotional sharing on a continuum, one extreme would be locked-in syndrome in which a person is conscious but cannot speak, and the other would be a manic episode in which emotions are shooting out as if coming from a high-pressure fire hose. Overly dramatic people with borderline or histrionic personality disorders would come in a close second on over-sharing. Everybody benefits from being as close to the sweet spot in the middle as possible. I notice that adult clients whose emotions were ignored, dismissed, invalidated or ridiculed as children find it nearly impossible to share feelings. Why? They came to believe their feelings don’t matter, nobody wants to hear them, and nobody is going to listen and respond with empathy and support. Psychotherapy is a great opportunity for under-sharers who struggle to contain and suppress their feelings to come out of their emotional closet. Psychotherapy can help these clients understand the origin of their difficulty expressing their emotions, learn to value their emotions, and come to trust that emotional sharing will deepen rather than burden or damage their relationships.
