Emotions Series Part 1: What's the Difference Between Feeling and Showing an Emotion?

Emotions can feel like a mystery, even to those of us who work with them every day. You might notice your heart racing during a difficult conversation, but your face remains completely neutral. Or maybe you've had the experience of someone asking "Are you okay?" when you thought you were hiding your frustration perfectly well. This disconnect between what we feel inside and what others see on the outside is more common than you might think, and it's rooted in fascinating neuroscience.

As a therapist, I see this emotional complexity play out in my office daily. The difference between feeling an emotion and showing an emotion shapes how we connect with others, how we heal, and how we navigate our relationships. That's why I'm excited to start this four-part series exploring the intricate world of emotions and expression.

The Neuroscience Behind Feeling vs. Showing

Let's start with what's happening in your brain when you experience an emotion. Your emotional experience actually involves two distinct but interconnected processes that happen at lightning speed.

The Internal Experience: Your Emotional Brain in Action

When you encounter something that triggers an emotional response, maybe your teenager rolls their eyes at you, or your partner forgets an important date, your brain's alarm system kicks into gear. The amygdala, often called your brain's "smoke detector," instantly evaluates the situation and sends signals throughout your body.

This happens in milliseconds, long before your conscious mind has time to think "Oh, I'm feeling hurt right now." Your heart rate might increase, your muscles might tense, or you might feel that familiar knot in your stomach. These are the raw materials of emotion: the felt sense that something significant is happening.

The fascinating part? This internal emotional experience is largely automatic and unconscious. You don't choose to feel your heart race when you're nervous about a job interview. Your nervous system is simply doing its job, preparing you to respond to what it perceives as important information from your environment.

The External Expression: Your Choice to Share

Showing an emotion, on the other hand, involves different brain regions entirely. This is where your prefrontal cortex: the CEO of your brain: gets involved. This area is responsible for executive functions like decision-making, impulse control, and social awareness.

When you decide whether to show your frustration through your facial expression, or choose to keep your excitement contained in a professional meeting, you're using these higher-order brain functions. You're essentially making a split-second decision about how much of your internal experience you want to share with the world.

Why We Developed This Internal-External Split

From an evolutionary perspective, this ability to feel emotions internally while controlling their external expression has been crucial for human survival and social connection. Our ancestors needed to be able to assess threats quickly (internal emotional processing) while also maintaining group cohesion and social bonds (controlled emotional expression).
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This capacity serves us well in modern life too. You can feel annoyed with your boss while maintaining a professional demeanor, or experience sadness about a personal loss while still being present for your children's needs. This isn't emotional dishonesty: it's emotional intelligence and flexibility.

The Attachment Connection

From an attachment perspective, our early relationships actually shape how comfortable we become with both feeling and showing emotions. If you grew up in a family where big feelings were welcomed and validated, you likely developed a secure relationship with your emotions. You learned that feelings are information, not emergencies.

But if your emotional expressions were met with dismissal, criticism, or overwhelming reactions from caregivers, you might have learned to create a bigger gap between your internal experience and external expression. This adaptive strategy helped you maintain important relationships, even if it meant hiding parts of yourself.

Here's what I want you to know: There's nothing wrong with you if you find yourself holding emotions close to your chest. This pattern developed as a strength: a way to protect yourself and maintain connections that mattered to you. The question isn't whether you should always show what you feel, but rather whether your current patterns are serving you well in your adult relationships.

The Body Keeps Score (Even When the Face Doesn't Show It)

One of the most important things to understand is that your body experiences emotions whether you show them or not. When you feel angry but maintain a calm exterior, your cardiovascular system still responds to that anger. Your stress hormones still activate. Your immune system still gets the message.
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This doesn't mean you need to express every emotion you feel: that wouldn't be practical or healthy. But it does mean that chronically suppressing emotional expression can take a toll on your physical and mental wellbeing over time.

Research shows us that people who regularly suppress emotional expression may experience:

• Increased stress hormone levels
• Higher blood pressure
• Compromised immune function
• Greater risk for anxiety and depression
• Difficulty with intimate relationships

The Strength in Emotional Awareness

Here's where a strengths-based approach comes in. The fact that you can feel emotions internally while managing their expression shows incredible emotional sophistication. You have the capacity for:

• Emotional awareness: You can recognize what you're feeling
• Emotional regulation: You can modulate your responses
• Social awareness: You can read situations and respond appropriately
• Flexibility: You can choose different responses in different contexts

These are all tremendous strengths that serve you well in many areas of life.

Looking Ahead in Our Series

Over the next three posts, we'll explore:

Part 2: How showing your emotions actually supports healing and emotional processing
Part 3: The way emotional expression deepens intimacy and connection in relationships
Part 4: Healthy vs. unhealthy ways to express emotions, and how to find your authentic emotional voice

Each post will continue to weave together neuroscience insights with practical, attachment-informed strategies for developing a healthier relationship with your emotions.

Your Emotional Journey Matters

"The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change." These words from psychologist Carl Rogers capture something essential about emotional growth. Your current patterns of feeling and expressing emotions developed for good reasons. They've served important functions in your life.

The goal isn't to judge these patterns, but to understand them with compassion and curiosity. From this place of acceptance, you can begin to make conscious choices about when and how you want to bridge the gap between your internal emotional world and your external expression.

What This Means for You

As you move through your days this week, try noticing the difference between your internal emotional experience and what you choose to show others. There's no right or wrong here: just awareness.

You might notice that you feel nervous about a presentation but project confidence to your colleagues. Or that you feel deeply moved by a friend's story but worry about showing too much emotion. These observations are simply data about how you navigate your emotional world.

Remember: Your emotions are valid whether you show them or not. Your internal experience matters, and so does your choice about how to express that experience to others.

If you're finding that the gap between feeling and showing emotions is causing distress in your life or relationships, working with a therapist can help you explore these patterns with curiosity rather than judgment. Whether you're in California and can work with one of our therapists at our Chico or Redding offices, or you're in another state and need to find local support, professional guidance can help you develop a more satisfying relationship with your emotional world.

The journey toward emotional authenticity and connection is deeply personal: and you don't have to walk it alone.

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Therapist Spotlight:
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Juen Arzadon is an associate marriage and family therapist and an associate professional clinical counselor at Inspired Life Counseling.  He is working under the clinical supervision of Deborah Duell-Stephens, LMFT.  Juen is a military veteran from the US Marine corps and specializes in working with individuals and couples who need help understanding their complex emotions and healthy ways to express them.  Juen is a deeply insightful therapist who approaches each session from a judgement-free space.  He is also trained in EMDRIA approved EMDR, and he uses an online program called RemotEMDR to facilitate EMDR sessions online.  Juen fully works as a telehealth therapist and his sessions are typically held on evenings and weekends.  If a session after traditional business hours is what his clients need and they are comfortable with online sessions, then Juen is an excellent choice to join his clients on their healing journeys.  To learn more about Juen, click the button below.

Meet Juen

Juen Arzadon