Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Why Am I Crying After Naming Them All?

A patient of mine once told me she felt overwhelmed every time she tried to identify her emotions when she was in a vulnerable state. She described sensing frustration, self-loathing, disappointment, and the more she tried to name them, the more overwhelmed she became. It was as if naming the emotions meant discovering more battles she had to fight. She said not knowing what she was feeling made her feel out of control, but naming them opened the door to chaos she wasn’t prepared to face.

What a deeply frustrating experience that must be. It’s enough to make anyone feel worried, out of control, angry, insecure, weak, threatened, helpless, frightened, worthless, nervous, pressured, lonely, depressed, hurt, powerless, fragile, abandoned, and isolated.

See what I just did there?

Now that I’ve overwhelmed you with that list, let’s step into a well known fairytale, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

The Evil Queen in the tale is determined to destroy Snow White and makes four distinct attempts to do so. First, the Evil Queen orders the huntsman to kill Snow White. When that fails, she disguises herself as a peddler woman and tightens Snow White’s bodice until she faints. Next, she uses a poisoned comb that nearly ends Snow White’s life. Finally, she gives her the infamous poisoned apple, which puts Snow White into a death-like sleep.

The point is not the Queen’s persistence but rather the distinction between the cause and the means. The Evil Queen is the cause. The huntsman, the bodice, the comb, and the apple are her means.

Our emotions can feel a bit like the Evil Queen. They’re not evil, but they can seem relentless, persistent, and determined to be noticed. When ignored or suppressed, instead of disappearing, emotions would adapt. If they can’t walk through the front door, they’ll sneak in through the window. Suppressed emotions are masters of disguise. They are power ninjas, relentless in their adaptability. Imagine them using the shadow clone jutsu, multiplying endlessly to amplify their presence, increasing their chances of being noticed. Each clone might appear as a different sensation, such as an ache in your chest, a knot in your stomach, or a sudden burst of anger that feels disconnected from the moment. Emotions, like living beings, have an instinctive drive to be recognised and processed. This instinct isn’t malicious though, it’s a call for integration, a plea for healing. When ignored, they evolve. When suppressed, they intensify. The only way to move forward is to face them, not just their variants, but their true form. Here is why.

Negative emotions don’t like being ignored. Suppression might feel like a temporary solution, but it only pushes them into the shadows, where they evolve. Think of them as viruses. When you metaphorically or literally take "medicine" to kill their presence, whether through distraction, numbing, or outright denial, again, they adapt. Like a virus mutating in response to a vaccine, emotions will transform, finding new forms to ensure their message is delivered. You might suppress fear, only for it to reappear as an inexplicable restlessness. You might bury grief, but it resurfaces as a dull, persistent exhaustion.

That’s why the only way to move forward is to face their true form instead of their many clever variants. This doesn’t mean engaging in an endless battle. It means offering them space to exist, to express, to transform naturally. Suppression turns emotions into tricksters, but recognition allows them to reveal their true essence.

Naming emotions can help, but it’s not the end goal. It’s not about ticking off every feeling like items on a checklist. You don’t name anger or sadness just to put them in a box and move on. Emotions aren’t obstacles to conquer or nuisances to eliminate. They’re messengers for you to reconnect with a piece of lost memory, an unresolved experience, or a hidden pain. They show up because something in you, something real, is asking to be seen. Each feeling is like a shard of glass refracting light. Seen alone, it might seem sharp and dangerous, but together, they form a spectrum.

When you name an emotion, you’re opening a door. You’re saying, “Alright, you have my attention. What are you here for?” Anger isn’t just anger. Sometimes it’s the voice of grief wearing armour, protecting a wound you’ve carried for years. Fear might not be fear. It might be the ghost of a time you felt powerless, surfacing to remind you of what you never want to feel again. Emotions are never one thing. They shift, they blur, they overlap. Like light breaking into colours, each one holds a hint of the whole.

This is also why emotions often seem to spiral and it’s easy to get stuck. You feel anxious, so you tell yourself a story, maybe one about failure, or rejection, or not being good enough. And that story creates a new feeling, one that makes the first even worse. Frustration becomes anger, anger becomes shame, shame becomes self-doubt, and before you know it, you’re caught in a storm of your own making. The narratives we build around our feelings can twist them into something they’re not, making the pain sharper, the burden heavier.

Still, naming is a beginning. Not to label every emotion and file it away but to see through it, to understand what it’s trying to point you toward. The sadness isn’t separate from the anger or the fear. They’re all threads of the same fabric, pulling you back to something unresolved. Something that still matters.

And once you get that? Once you stop seeing emotions as problems to solve or enemies to fight, they lose some of their weight. They stop feeling like walls closing in and start feeling more like signals, less like chaos and more like clarity waiting to happen. The pain doesn’t vanish, but it becomes a guide instead of a trap, a way forward.