Losing touch with our feelings means losing ourselves

When Life Feels Off, You May Be Losing Your True Self

Losing touch with our feelings means losing ourselves.

KEY POINTS

• Disconnection starts when you hide who you are to meet the expectations of others or avoid rejection.

• Emotions guide you back to authenticity, helping realign your life with what truly matters to you.

• Emotional suppression creates protective layers that distance you from your true self and desires.

When life doesn’t go your way, you might be disconnected from yourself. You may have hidden parts of who you are to fit in or gain approval. Over time, this creates a false self, a version of you shaped by what others expect, not by what you truly feel or need. Disconnection often begins when you believe you have to show up differently than who you really are.

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When you’re out of touch with your feelings, it’s easy to lose sight of your desires, boundaries, and instincts. You might find yourself living a life that looks okay from the outside but feels empty or misaligned. In that way, disconnection isn’t just internal—it quietly steers your choices, relationships, and direction, pulling you further away from a life that feels like your own.

The false self often emerges as a survival mechanism. From a young age, you learn to adapt to the expectations of those around you—parents, teachers, peers, and society. For example, if expressing emotions like anger or sadness led to criticism or rejection, you might have suppressed those feelings to be accepted. Over time, this suppression creates protective layers that keep you safe but also disconnect you from your emotional truth.

Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called this adaptation the false self, which forms in response to environments that don’t welcome your authentic emotional expressions. You might become the helpful one, the high achiever, or the easygoing friend—roles that once helped you belong, but now leave you wondering where you went.

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Understanding why this false self developed can help you approach it with compassion. You weren’t weak or wrong—you were surviving. And now, you have the opportunity to reconnect.

A powerful way to begin is by simply noticing what you feel. Ask yourself, “What am I feeling right now?” “What do I truly want?” These questions might feel unfamiliar if you’ve spent years tuning out your inner voice. Be patient. The answers may surface slowly.

You might find the feelings wheel by Dr. Gloria Willcox helpful.¹ It gives you language for emotions that are often hard to name. Instead of just “good” or “bad,” you might begin to notice feelings like discouraged, hopeful, tense, grateful, or ashamed. Naming your feelings can be surprisingly soothing—neuroscience shows that affect labeling (putting emotions into words) helps calm the brain’s emotional centers.²

Take Elena, for example (name changed). On the outside, she appeared calm and successful. But inside, something felt off. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but life wasn’t going the way she had hoped. She had followed the expectations of others—working hard, being a reliable friend, and keeping a smile on her face—but she felt disconnected from her true self.

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Elena had lost touch with her feelings over the years. She had learned to suppress her emotions to fit in, to avoid conflict, and to gain approval. In her childhood, expressing emotions like anger or sadness had often led to rejection; she built layers of behavior designed to keep her safe, even if it meant ignoring her inner needs. As a result, she wasn’t living in alignment with her authentic desires, and her life felt empty despite outward success.

When she began exploring her emotions, Elena realized that her disconnection was at the root of her struggles. The false self she had developed—the helpful, agreeable persona—wasn’t who she truly was. It had been a survival mechanism, shaped by fear of rejection. She didn’t know exactly how she felt at first—her responses were vague: “I feel tired.” “I don’t know.” But as she started using the feelings wheel and permitted herself to reflect, she identified deeper emotions: irritation, grief, relief, and even desire.

Through this process, Elena found a path to reconnect with herself. By naming and acknowledging her feelings, she was able to bridge the distance between her false self and her true self. This journey wasn’t quick, but each step brought her closer to living in a way that felt authentic and fulfilling.

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You don’t need a long or complicated practice to start. Just pause once a day and ask, What am I feeling? Use the feelings wheel if you like. Say it out loud, write it down, or simply notice it inside. Let your answers be honest, not perfect.

That small act of listening to yourself can begin to bridge the distance between your protective self and your true one. It can guide you back to a life that feels authentic, while living according to others’ expectations can steer you off track and leave you feeling lost.