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How to express feelings and connect with someone, in 6 steps

How to express feelings and connect with someone, in 6 steps

March 28, 2024

Many times we forget that, when developing a healthy way of relating to our emotional side, it is not enough to know how to control oneself or identify which feelings dominate in each moment. As well It is very important to know how to express feelings .

In this article we will see several keys to communicate to others the reality about how we feel, especially in relation to those mental states whose nature goes beyond words.

  • Maybe you're interested: "The 8 types of emotions (classification and description)"

How to express our feelings in personal relationships?

Much of what holds us together is our ability to connect emotionally with others. It is difficult to maintain a relationship, be it family, partner or friendship, with someone who does not know anything about how he feels, in what range of colors he usually sees reality, and how he does it.


However, knowing how to express feelings is a challenge. First, you have to deal with a series of cultural barriers that have led to belittle certain kinds of affective manifestations, and that has been especially primed with men and with people with a non-normative sexual orientation, but that in the end has affected the whole world. For centuries, letting emotions dye the most important aspects of our way of life was considered a sign of weakness, or directly something inappropriate and censorship.

But another component that hinders our way of expressing feelings is something that goes beyond our cultural contexts: feelings are, in themselves, something that does not have to fit with the usual ways of expressing oneself through language.


Just to help you progress in the mission of connecting more and better with others, here is a series of tips on how to express feelings both through words and using other communication resources , independently if we apply them with our partner in the context of love, or with friends and family.

  • Maybe you're interested: "What is Emotional Intelligence?"

1. Always adapt your way of expressing yourself

It is essential, first of all, to discard the idea that we can always express our feelings in the same way, as if we had a way of expressing them that was so personal that we could not adapt it. This is not the case: if the person in front of us is not able to understand what we want to say, we will not have expressed anything.

So, if you really want to show a part of you that you consider relatively intimate and that has to do with how you feel, you should think about the perspective from which the other person starts . For example: how would you interpret a physical approach on our part? Is it likely that he understands a concept that we will use to make a metaphor? Do you know first of all that we have enough confidence with her to express that, or will she think it's a joke?


Knowing how to ask the right questions to adapt our communicative style is an art, and for this it is usually necessary practice and have the honest intention to express yourself, and not simply to give a certain image because it responds to our interests.

2. Learn assertiveness

Express feelings it is also an act of courage . Therefore, you should avoid making shame an excuse, and that is achieved among other things by working on your assertiveness, the ability to assert your own feelings and your own values.

3. Make your social circle healthy

To start having it easier when expressing feelings, it is also important not to surround yourself with people who react negatively when we do it. Therefore, it is good to find open and receptive people that they do not see in the emotional a reason to criticize or to mock .

4. Take advantage of non-verbal language

When expressing feelings, non-verbal language is essential. Be careful not to ignore it and not take it into account or even suppress it, since an expression that is too neutral when communicating feelings can completely turn around what we want to say. In particular, it is of special importance that you put at attention to the whole of voice that you use and its musicality, as well as to how you manage the distances with the other person, and what do you do with your arms and look : the latter must be directed to the eyes of the other.

5. Write what you feel

This is a very good way to know first what you feel , something necessary to be able to express it.In addition, it can serve you to rehearse linguistic ways of communicating it, although, as we have seen, these will not be perfect or sufficient in itself to truly express what we feel.

6. Find suitable places

The context is almost as important as what is said. Like using one or another style of non-verbal language can make the same words mean different things , the context in which we find ourselves when we say it also has this effect. Therefore, make sure that there is a coherence between the content of what you are going to communicate and the place where you do it, so that there are no misunderstandings that need to be clarified.


How To Help An Emotionally Unavailable Man Share His Feelings | 6 Ways To Make Him Emotionally Open (March 2024).


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