If you feel misunderstood by other people, and your individual therapy is failing on top of it, the likely reason is that you and your therapist are emphasizing your feelings and failing to see your emotions as social phenomena. It is unlikely that you or your individual therapist will understand your emotions in a real-world context just by examining your feelings or their presumed significance to your childhood.
The truth is, emotions tend to feel very different on the inside then they look on the outside. Resentment and the many forms of anger are primary examples. On the inside you feel like a victim or at least treated unfairly. That is definitely not what you look like on the outside, which is why you get such a negative reaction to what are often legitimate complaints made out of resentment or anger.
What's more, people's descriptions of their emotions during a past interaction are usually not accurate or complete when the recorded interactions are reviewed by objective observers. Just ask any marriage counselor who interviews clients individually before treating them as a couple how the observed emotional responses differ from the unilateral descriptions.
The Social Function of Emotions
Humans were tribal from the beginning of our time on earth. Emotions were the glue that held us in the tight social units that proved so advantageous to survival. To this day, our response to one another is essentially emotional. We do not respond primarily to each other's appearance, smell, ideas, or beliefs. We do not even respond primarily to behavior, unless it threatens a physical boundary.
For the most part our emotions are automatic responses to the emotional states of others, which are often directly transmitted through contagion and attunement. Here we tend to be pretty accurate in judging other people's emotions, i.e., you feel the other person. But more often, we infer the emotional states of others from their appearance, smell, ideas, beliefs, and behavior.
Modern humans have lost a great deal of accuracy in inferring the emotional states of others, especially in regard to what other people are reacting to, i.e., what we are doing. When it comes to our part of emotional interactions, we have built-in blind spots. The stronger the emotion, the bigger the blind spots. If you feel like a victim on the inside, there is a very good chance that on the outside you seem aggressive, rejecting, dismissive, or self-righteous.
Display Inhibition
In addition to the psychological reasons for our inaccuracy at inferring the emotional states of others (e.g., blind spots, projection, and the temporary narcissism of emotional arousal), a powerful social evolutionary factor systematically misleads us.
Long before the development of sophisticated language, humans used emotions to communicate and to serve as a social alarm system. We sensed in one another important messages like:
"The saber tooth tigers are coming!"
"The elk are leaving!"
"Sweet berries are over there."
Our emotions retain primitive social display characteristics. These include facial expressions (smiles, frowns, glares), vocalizations (cooing, moaning, sobbing, screaming, roaring, verbal inflections), changes in posture and muscle tone (slumping, tensing, imminent springing, or fleeing), and various expressive behaviors such as stomping feet, gesticulating, beating one's breast, and pulling one's hair.
Although current research suggests blends and strings of emotional response rather than a singular emotional experience, specific emotions have specific displays when they are predominant. The display of anguish, for example, includes weeping, wailing, and flailing, with a sharply down-turned mouth similar to the ancient mask of tragedy. A shame display includes slumped head (neck muscles weaken, making eye contact impossible), flushed face, and constricted shoulder muscles, as the exposed self contorts to the smallest space possible. The display of anger includes bulging, dilated eyes, tightened jaw, exposed teeth, tense, swollen muscles, inflated body posture, and either deepened or shrieking voice.
With the development of sophisticated language and thinking, the communication need for emotional display waned, and so did our tolerance of it. We pretty much don't like to see emotional displays in others, because they make us uncomfortable. As soon as language-acquisition reduces the need of children to broadcast their wants and vulnerabilities, they face increasing adult discouragement, if not punishment, for emotional display. The uninhibited display of emotions is rare in people over three years old. Most cultures tolerate raw emotional displays by adults only under clearly defined circumstances of ceremony or tragedy.
By adulthood, the vast majority of emotional displays are inhibited by habit. You will almost certainly refrain from screaming and jumping up and down when you bump into someone on the subway, but not because you are inhibited by shame or fear of consequences; the inhibition of emotional display occurs too quickly for such elaborate pre-frontal cortical operations. Rather, you have been conditioned over time that such discomfort is not threatening enough to require emotional response and your organs and muscles receive less intense electrical signals. Motoric inhibitions of emotional displays are not likely to cause psychological problems. But they are likely to diminish the accuracy of your inferences about - and reports of - other people's emotional states.
Sometimes conditioned inhibition is associated with the emotion itself, rather than the motor reflexes of its display, and that can cause psychological problems, which we'll address in another post. The point here is that neither you nor your therapist can understand your emotions or your sense of self by examining your feelings apart from their social context. Most of the time awareness of their social context, i.e., taking other people's perspectives, regulates your emotions, while focus on your feelings apart from their social context distorts reality-testing.
