I don’t feel anything, or I feel something incomprehensible—it’s rare for anyone to formulate a request for therapy in such a pure form. Usually it takes the form of a story - my friends stopped communicating with me, my relationship with my husband has deteriorated, I don’t want to go to this job. But when collecting information from the question “how do you feel about your friends/husband/work?” can't be avoided. And this is where the difficulties begin. In the previous text, I talked about how useful it is to develop the skill of self-exploration. An important part of this skill is the ability to recognize your emotions, as well as name them. Emotions are a signaling system for us, they are an expression of our attitude to the outside world. Through emotions we understand our needs and the degree to which they are satisfied. And it happens that we have no contact with them. Simply put, we don’t understand what we feel. The reasons for this misunderstanding may be different. For example, we were simply not taught. There were no lessons on emotional intelligence at school, and rarely did anyone in their families study it. Another reason may be the experience of psychological trauma, due to which the attitude has been established that it is dangerous to show certain emotions. One way or another, learning to recognize them, name them, and act in relation to them is the path to solving many psychological problems. If there is no contact with emotions at all, in consultations I suggest dancing from the stove - using the categories “good” and “bad.” Then you can increase the level of complexity - name what you feel at the bodily level. For example: - what do you feel in your body when we talk about this topic? - my face turns red and I breathe heavily. This is already a lot of information. Based on this, you can, together with the client, assume what kind of emotion he is experiencing. There are bodily signs of basic emotions, such as tears and a lump in the throat for sadness, burning cheeks and heavy breathing for anger. But there is a nuance here. Emotions are always accompanied by bodily reactions, but you cannot rely only on them. You can blush from both anger and shame. Therefore, it is important to take into account other information - thoughts, actions, context of the situation, and so on. And to make it easier to name an emotion, tools such as the wheel of emotions and other similar ones will help, there are many of them on the Internet. Gradually, you can learn to track the patterns between the situation and your physical state. And based on this, name your emotion here and now. This will be a ready-made skill, just like how to ride a bicycle - you will never unlearn it. And knowing how you feel, it is much clearer what you want to do with all this.