Name It to Tame It: Putting Words to What You Feel

Psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel and psychotherapist Tina Payne Bryson, in The Whole-Brain Child (2011), describe a simple technique for handling a moment of intense emotion: name it to tame it, that is, putting into words, in an orderly way, what happened and what was felt.

An example from the book: the fear of flushing the toilet

The authors tell the story of a nine-year-old girl who, after watching a toilet overflow, no longer wanted (and almost no longer could) flush again.

Her father, who knew this technique, sat down with her and went back over the whole episode: what happened first, what she felt at that moment, how it all ended. He let his daughter add the details she remembered, including the fear that had stayed with her.

After telling the story several times, according to the authors’ account, that fear faded until it disappeared.

As Siegel and Bryson explain, what the father did was help connect two ways of processing the experience that, at first, had become disconnected: the emotional and sensory record of what happened, and the ability to put it into words and order.

Telling the story forces you to do both at once: to give meaning and order to something that, until then, existed only as an intense, diffuse sensation. In the book, the authors explain this with the image of a logical, verbal left hemisphere and an emotional right one. It is a useful metaphor for parents, but it simplifies a great deal: language and emotion depend on networks spread across both hemispheres.

Why naming reduces intensity

The authors cite a striking finding: putting a name or a label on what you feel reduces the activity of the emotional circuit linked to that feeling. That finding comes from one specific laboratory, and it is worth telling in detail.

The faces experiment

In 2007, psychologist Matthew Lieberman and his team at the University of California, Los Angeles showed a group of volunteers, inside a scanner, photos of faces with angry or fearful expressions. In some trials they had to choose, between two words, the one that described the emotion on the face (“angry” or “scared”). In others they had to choose the name that matched the person’s sex, or match the face with another showing the same expression.

When they named the emotion, the amygdala responded less than when they only looked at or matched faces, and an area of the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex became more active. The more that area activated, the less the amygdala did. The authors called this effect affect labeling.

It works even when it doesn’t seem to

In 2018, Jared Torre and Lieberman reviewed what was known about this effect and described it as a form of implicit emotion regulation: unlike reappraising a situation or distracting yourself, naming an emotion isn’t done with the intention of calming down, and yet it lowers its intensity. A curious detail comes from four earlier studies by the same team (Lieberman and colleagues, 2011): participants predicted that putting unpleasant images into words would increase their distress, and they kept predicting it even after finding that it reduced it. The effect is not limited to the negative, either: naming also dampened pleasure in response to pleasant images.

From spiders to real life

Katharina Kircanski, Lieberman and Michelle Craske (2012) took the idea into a setting closer to the clinic. They repeatedly exposed people who were afraid of spiders to a live one. One group described out loud what they felt (“I’m afraid the spider will jump”), another reappraised the situation, another distracted themselves and another simply underwent the exposure.

A week later, facing a different spider in a different place, the group that had named its fear showed less physiological reaction (skin conductance) than the others. They did not, however, report feeling less afraid. And those who had used more fear and anxiety words during the exposure were the ones whose reaction dropped most.

What we still don’t know

Affect labeling studies are mostly laboratory studies, with brief stimuli and small samples, and the effect sometimes shows up in the body and not in what people say they feel. On writing or talking about difficult experiences, the line of work James Pennebaker opened in the 1980s, a 2006 meta-analysis of 146 studies by Joanne Frattaroli found a positive effect, but a small one that depended heavily on the conditions. Our reading is that naming helps, and that it does so more modestly than the lines circulating on social media suggest.

Naming precisely: emotional granularity

Not all names are worth the same. Psychologists such as Todd Kashdan, Lisa Feldman Barrett and Patrick McKnight (2015) study emotion differentiation, or granularity: the ability to tell apart similar emotions, such as anger, frustration, disappointment or contempt, instead of lumping them all under “I feel bad.”

In their review, people who differentiate their negative emotions better tend to regulate them better and to fall back less on unhelpful responses under stress. Saying “I feel awful” is not the same as being able to say “I’m afraid this will happen again”: the second sentence already contains information about what is at stake.

This also explains why avoiding talking about something that hurt rarely helps you get past it. It is tempting to think that not mentioning a difficult experience keeps the wound from reopening, but often the opposite happens: what is needed is precisely to tell the story, both to make sense of it and to move toward feeling better about what happened.

The urge to understand why something happened is itself, as the authors describe it, so strong that the mind keeps trying to make sense of an experience until it succeeds, with or without help.

Another example: the boy who no longer wanted to ride his bike

The authors tell another story that shows well how the technique is applied step by step. A ten-year-old boy fell off his bike after failing to see a storm drain grate in the middle of the street, and from then on he got very nervous whenever he thought about riding again.

His mother helped him rebuild the episode with simple, open questions:

Do you remember what happened when you fell? And then what happened?

Telling each step, calmly and without rushing, let the boy put into words something that until then had existed only as a physical alarm reaction: tension and nerves whose origin even he wasn’t clear about.

Naming each part of the sequence (the scare, the fall, the fear afterward) was, once again, what allowed that reaction to lose its force.

Don’t force the conversation

Siegel and Bryson are clear about an important nuance: this technique is not about making anyone talk about something they don’t want to share at that moment, which tends to backfire.

Instead, they suggest choosing the moment well (many of the best conversations happen while doing something else at the same time, not face to face and under pressure) and, if the words don’t come, offering alternatives such as drawing what happened or writing it down.

What matters is not the exact format but giving the experience a structure with which the mind can finally finish processing it.

A technique that doesn’t expire with childhood

Siegel and Bryson develop this idea mostly through parenting examples, but the underlying mechanism has no expiration date.

Keeping a journal after a bad day, telling someone you trust in detail what happened instead of just saying “I’m not doing well,” or even talking it through with yourself using concrete words for what you feel, are adult forms of the same technique.

It connects directly with what other articles on this site call emotional self-awareness: identifying precisely what you feel is almost always the necessary first step before you can manage it, the ground covered by emotional self-regulation.

If you tend to stay with the visible reaction without reaching the emotion underneath, you can check with our primary and secondary emotions quiz.

Disclaimer: this article is for general information only and does not replace the assessment, diagnosis or intervention of a mental health professional.

Sources

• Siegel, D. J., and Bryson, T. P. (2011). The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind. Delacorte Press.
• Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., and Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421-428. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x
• Torre, J. B., and Lieberman, M. D. (2018). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling as implicit emotion regulation. Emotion Review, 10(2), 116-124. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073917742706
• Lieberman, M. D., Inagaki, T. K., Tabibnia, G., and Crockett, M. J. (2011). Subjective responses to emotional stimuli during labeling, reappraisal, and distraction. Emotion, 11(3), 468-480. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023503
• Kircanski, K., Lieberman, M. D., and Craske, M. G. (2012). Feelings into words: Contributions of language to exposure therapy. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1086-1091. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612443830
• Frattaroli, J. (2006). Experimental disclosure and its moderators: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(6), 823-865. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.6.823
• Kashdan, T. B., Barrett, L. F., and McKnight, P. E. (2015). Unpacking emotion differentiation: Transforming unpleasant experience by perceiving distinctions in negativity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(1), 10-16. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721414550708