In many therapeutic conversations about emotion, there is an implicit assumption:
that the task is to identify what someone is feeling—and to name it more precisely.

From a contemporary neuroscience perspective, this assumption is misleading.

What matters more than naming emotion accurately is whether the brain feels safe enough to remain with experience without rushing toward closure.

The brain does not begin with a single emotion waiting to be labelled. It begins with ongoing streams of interoceptive and sensory data—signals from the body, the environment, and the relational context—that are continuously shaped by prediction.

Emotional experience emerges when the brain categorises this data using learned concepts, drawing on past experience, cultural knowledge, and situational expectations.

Importantly, this categorisation does not need to resolve into one definitive emotion. It can be partial, multiple, or delayed. Several possible emotional meanings may coexist, compete, or remain unresolved.

Emotion labels, in this sense, are not discoveries. They are learned predictive categories the brain uses to make sense of bodily and contextual signals—useful, but not inherently final.

In environments where emotional expression carried relational........

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