Are You Emotionally Illiterate?

Feelings were not a thing in my family growing up.

Or at least, I didn’t think they were.

My parents never talked about how they felt. They never asked us kids how we felt. Nobody said, “I’m sad today.” Nobody checked in with, “Are you okay?” Not once. We were a very functional family. We did chores. We did homework. We practiced piano. We chased good grades and success. We were busy doing. Not feeling.

And it seemed normal. Maybe your home was the same.

But here’s what I’ve come to learn: just because something is the norm doesn’t mean it’s normal.

I grew up in an emotionally illiterate home. So did my parents. Feelings weren’t a thing in their homes either. We pick it up the way a child picks up an accent. Nobody teaches it. Nobody chooses it. You just grow up speaking the way everyone around you speaks.

What Is Emotional Literacy?

Being emotionally literate simply means you know what you feel. You can name it. You can say it out loud. And you can share it in a way that actually helps.

People like me, who grew up without that language, tend to think our feelings instead of feel them.

We say things like, “I feel that you’re not listening.”

That’s not a feeling. That’s a thought wearing a feeling’s coat. Underneath it, the real feeling might be hurt. Or loneliness. Or the quiet, aching fear that you don’t matter to the person you love. Those real feelings got tucked away long ago, because having them was never convenient — and never safe.

Ask someone who grew up this way how they feel, and you’ll usually get one of three answers: Good. Bad. I don’t know.

Except for one feeling. That one comes out loud and clear.

Anger.

Anger, the Bodyguard

When you don’t have words for what’s going on inside, anger steps in like a bodyguard. Its job is to protect the more vulnerable feelings underneath — sadness, hurt, fear, loneliness, shame.

In my family, feelings weren’t expressed. They were acted out.

It was much easier to be sarcastic, critical, or dismissive than to say, “You hurt me.” It was easier to get defensive and shame the other person than to say, “I feel sad when you talk to me that way.” It was easier to go silent, to give the cold shoulder, to be passive-aggressive — than to sit down and actually work through what was going on.

It is so much easier to look strong and tough behind anger than to look soft with vulnerability.

For many of us, those softer feelings weren’t just unspoken. They were shamed. “Don’t be such a sissy.” “Stop acting like a girl.” “You’re too sensitive.” So you learned it was safer not to have feelings at all. But your feelings never left. They went underground. And now they come out sideways.

Here’s the thing — anger itself isn’t the problem. It’s a completely normal human feeling. What is the problem is acting out our anger. The yelling. The slammed doors. The cold shoulder. The disappearing. Over time, those patterns don’t just hurt your partner and your children. They break the bond. (I wrote more about this in How’s Your Emotional Intelligence? if you want to go deeper.)

Signs You Grew Up in an Emotionally Illiterate Home

• No one talked about feelings. Nobody named them. Nobody put them into words. Life just moved forward, and emotions were something you managed privately — or didn’t manage at all.
• As an adult, you often don’t know how you feel. Someone asks, and you go blank. It might take hours, or even days, before you realize: oh — I was actually hurt by that.
• When things get heated, you either explode or shut down. Anger is the only feeling you let out — or you go completely quiet, walk away, and wait for it to blow over.
• You tend to be very functional. Life revolves around tasks, responsibilities, work, and the future. Most of your conversations circle around things, not feelings.
• Other people’s feelings make you uncomfortable. When someone cries or opens up, you squirm, change the subject, or rush to fix it. Sitting with emotion — yours or theirs — just doesn’t feel natural.

If you nodded along to even one of those, I’m talking to you.

You’re not broken. You just never learned the language. And language can be learned.

It Must Stop With Us

What I see again and again in my work is how quietly and completely this gets passed down. From one generation to the next. We hold it up like a torch, as if we’re handing the next generation a light.

But that torch isn’t lighting the way. It’s burning down the home.

Your children are watching how you handle what’s hard. They’re learning whether feelings are safe or dangerous, welcome or shameful. They’re forming the emotional vocabulary — or the emotional silence — they’ll carry into every relationship they’ll ever have. As I explored in How Trauma Transfers Through Generations, so much of what we pass on, we pass on without a single word.

My hope is that it stops with us. For our own sake. For our marriages. For the kids watching how we love.

The good news is this: emotional literacy is a skill. It can be built at any age, in any season of life. It starts with slowing down long enough to ask yourself — not what do I think about this? but what do I feel? It starts with getting curious about what’s underneath the anger, instead of just letting the anger speak.

You get to choose what you pass on.