If you are not a very outwardly feeling person, you may not think you would want to go to therapy or get much out of it. When I became a therapist, it was tempting to believe that there were in fact, people who were "bad" at articulating their feelings. But I've always come back to realizing that there is no such thing. You can be as eloquent as Oprah Winfrey and still be guarded, defended, and scared out of your mind.

When speaking about matters of the heart, eloquence doesn’t matter. Intelligence doesn’t matter. It doesn't matter how "open" you are. If you can speak, you can be in therapy.

Talking about feelings will look and sound different across gender, race, ethnicity, language, and socioeconomic class. I know that for many Asian American children of immigrants, they may not have heard their parents say I love you to them, but nevertheless heard the words through their actions. Perhaps their parents worked hard to support the family, pushed their children to do their best in school, and expressed worry about their physical health. This is love. And every single person experiences and communicates in a non-verbal form of communication, because what else did we have before we learned how to talk?

Therapy is a talking cure- it will help you translate your actions into words, words that fit just for you, empowering you to own your unique subjective voice. This is important for many reasons, the main one being that if we can’t speak about our suffering, the pain will make itself visible in extremely real ways. Instances of violence, sexual misconduct, eating disorders and drug abuse are a few serious examples of when we act out what is not heard. It is good to talk it out instead.