I’ve spent my life incredulous of people who can state “how they feel” with confidence. I realize now it’s because I never learned to trust, or even pay attention to, my own sensations: physical, emotional, otherwise.

MOST PEOPLE I’m feeling XXXXX

ME But how do you KNOW?

Just as every grade-schooler ponders whether “you see green the way I see green, what if green is actually purple to you?” I always had a similar reaction to feelings… Is this sadness? And how much?

“Can you rate the pain from 1 to 10?”

But what if I’m a wimp? Or what if I’m super tough? How do I know if this is really bad pain or just whatever pain?

This is one of the reasons in the past I’ve been skeptical of some mental illness. Like, is this Depression? How depressed? Depressed enough to miss work? Depressed enough to get medicated?

I can see how talk like this can be offensive to sufferers but I’m legitimately BAFFLED.

If I’m the only one who can experience my own experience, how can I measure how it compares to others’, much less to some shared standard?

Two things have helped me begin to get over this (unhelpful) frame…

The first thing that’s helped me is accepting that every decision is made with incomplete information.

Example: “Do I know if this is real pain I’m feeling and is it a lot? I don’t KNOW but it’s wicked uncomfortable and it FEELS like lot.”

Proceed like it’s a lot of real pain.

The second (very important) thing that has helped me is accepting that NO JUDGMENT OF FEELINGS HAS EVER BEEN HELPFUL TO ME IN ANY WAY.

Example: “This feels like a lot of pain, but it’s probably not, because this shouldn’t hurt that bad because—“ PEACE.

I also realize that on some level these reflexive judgments of my feelings weren’t much more than a strategy to suppress them. A deeply ingrained, problematic suppression strategy, but a suppression strategy nonetheless.

It definitely doesn’t work, by the way, suppressing them.