When You Don’t Know What You’re Feeling: Naming Emotions in Uncertain Seasons

Show Notes

There are moments when it’s not that you don’t feel anything…
it’s that you feel too much at once.

And none of it has a clear name.

In this episode of At the Counter with the Baking Pastor, Laura sits down with Doug Earl Johnston to explore what it means to name your emotions—especially in seasons of uncertainty.

If you’ve ever said:
“I’m just tired.”
“I’m overwhelmed.”
“I don’t even know what this is…”

This conversation is for you.

Doug shares insights from his book Choosing Emotions, a comprehensive guide exploring over 250 emotional states. Together, this conversation gently unpacks how language shapes our inner life—and how naming what we feel can be the first step toward healing, clarity, and moving forward.

This isn’t about fixing yourself.
It’s about understanding yourself… one honest word at a time.

In This Episode, We Talk About:

• Why “tired” and “overwhelmed” only tell part of the story 
• How naming emotions brings clarity to your inner life 
• What it really means to “choose” emotions 
• A gentle first step for identifying what you’re feeling 
• Why language matters more than we think  

Counter Pause Invitation

Take a moment today and ask yourself:
What am I actually feeling right now?

Not what you should feel.
Not what’s easiest to say.

Just… what’s true.

Resource Mentioned:

Choosing Emotions: Thinking with Your Head and Acting with Your Heart by Doug Earl Johnston 👉 https://amzn.to/430dPEM 

Connect with Doug

On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/choosingemotions

Learn more and explore his work:
👉 https://choosingemotions.com/ 

Gentle Reminder

You don’t have to carry unnamed things forever.

Pull up a chair. There’s space for you here. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Pat the Counter with the Baking Pastor. I'm Laura. Pull up a chair. There's no rush here. This season we're sitting with the hard days. The ones that don't resolve quickly. The ones that change us in ways we we didn't ask for.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Here at the counter, nothing needs to be fixed. You don't have to have the right words. You don't have to have it all figured out. You can just come as you are and stay a while. This is hard days at the counter. Hey friends, as you pull up a chair today, I want to talk about things that where we have seasons where it's not that we don't feel anything. Maybe we feel too much all at once. And none of those things always have names we can easily say out loud. Maybe you've said things like, I'm just tired, I'm overwhelmed, I don't even know what this is. But underneath there's something more specific, something waiting to be named. And sometimes naming it is where healing quietly begins. Today we're sitting in that space. I'm glad you're here for our conversation today. Today I am joined by D. Earl Johnston, or better known as Doug. He is a former corporate executive, testifying expert, and world champion sailor with over a multi-decade career span in banking, private equity, and litigation consulting. He developed a deep interest in language, motivation, and emotional definition. And he has a book called Choosing Emotions, which I have read and you need to read, which is the result of nine years of research across disciplines and traditions and explores more than 250 emotional states, helping people better understand what they feel and how to move forward with greater clarity. Doug, I am so glad you're at the counter with us today.

SPEAKER_02 2:18

Joy to be with you. It feels like friendly territory, Laura. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 2:22

Well, you don't know this, but I grew up sailing. So we've got a lot of connections going on. And I, as a pastoral counselor, love the idea of emotions and naming them because I think oftentimes people do things like, I'm tired. I don't know what I'm feeling. I'm I'm stuck. And I think a book like yours is going to be something amazing to help them. If they don't know what they're thinking, they could flip through and probably find things they didn't know they were thinking. But I'm curious, I've read a little bit about this, but tell me how the book started.

SPEAKER_02 2:56

Well, thank you for the background. I I'm mostly a finance and banking type person as a corporate executive, but I I got pretty good at that, traveling to different cities and diving into complex issues in the business world. I I got hired about 10 years ago by a succession of law firms to assist them in that. So when they had a complex lawsuit, they would hire me to dig into the facts and details and help out. So I became a researcher, a professional researcher, and that brings us to 10 years ago. I'm having dinner with my much adored 13-year-old daughter who's in eighth grade, and we created a game. We called it College Bowl, which is where she knew I was a researcher. I would bring Laura, instead of just giving her an allowance, which, you know, I might have expected, I decided to make her earn it. And so we called it College Bowl. I would bring a list of 200 prepared questions to a private father-daughter dinner that we had every two weeks. And the questions could be geography, history, art, science, you name it. But if she got the answer right, I would slide a $2 bill across the table to her. And she loved it. I mean, she could earn a better than average allowance. Uh, it was fun, and it was particularly fun for me because I got insight into what my daughter was really like at 13. That's not not always the case when you've got a teenager that you know what's going on in their lives. Two years later, in 10th grade, she had been out of school for a month with an accident followed by surgery, and a month in 10th grade is eternity. So she came to dinner with a very sad face and she said, Dad, what do you know about depression? And I faked it, all right. I presume that I was hoping she meant economic depression, so I rattled off a business answer. And she said, No, no, no, no, no. It's not no emotional depression, Dad. Sweetheart, I don't know anything about this. And so I went back to school, effectively. I I put on my researcher hat, I went to Barnes and Noble, I went to bookstores online, surrounded myself with books and articles about depression. And, you know, I mean, obviously, I knew the minimum, it was uh an extended period of sadness, but I didn't know anything more about it. I didn't hadn't suffered it, close friends hadn't suffered it. I'd heard the word, but I started to jot down quotes from people who had experienced depression. So that seemed helpful to me. So the first quote I jotted down was from a writer from the 90s. His name is Rollo May. He was a PhD, he also had a bachelor's in divinity. He was one of the first self-help authors before anybody had heard the term self-help. He had survived depression. And his quote about depression was depression is the inability to construct a future. And Laura, when I read that, it just I went, wow. I went now I get it. It isn't just sad. I mean, I I can't imagine rolling out of bed in the morning and not being able to construct a future. But if you talk to depression sufferers, they'll say, yes, that's just what it's like. A couple of days after that, I came across another quote from J.K. Rowling. I'm sure you know who she is. She's the Harry Potter author. She too had suffered terrible depression as a young person before she became a successful writer. Her quote about depression is this depression is that absence of being able to envision you will ever be cheerful again. It's the single most unpleasant thing I've ever experienced. Well, now I was starting to get a feel for what depression is like to experience. Not what it looks like, but what it feels like. So then I came across a few days after that a quote from a uh a writer. She's a freelance writer, not necessarily famous, but but a very talented writer. She too had recovered from depression, and her quote was depression lies to you. It tells you you've always felt this way and you always will, but you haven't and you won't. So I had three really wonderful quotes, and I'm sitting at my desk, it's 10 in the morning. I'm 10 days into my research project to self-educate about depression. I thought, you know what? I'm gonna text him across town to my daughter. She's in class. She shouldn't have been looking at her texts, but she was. So I texted these three to her, and three minutes later, I get a text back, I'm crying. And I went, Oh my gosh, I'm alarmed. And I texted, why are you crying? These people all suffered depression and they recovered from it. There's hope. And her response was, that's why I'm crying. Thank you, Dad. So we had a wonderful father-daughter moment, but we were onto something. We were onto something that describing emotions is best described not by what it looks like, by what it feels like. And so the process of accumulating quotes and insights from people who've experienced emotion became the anchor of this book. And nine years later, we'd expanded from my daughter recovered, she's now a nurse and lives a happy life. We expanded from depression to anxiety to uh OCD to codependence and and on to happier ones like enthusiasm and wonder and joy and zeal and excitement. But nobody's ever done this before, which is to express emotions by what they feel like rather than by what they look like. So this becomes very helpful if if you are like so many people struggling for words to describe the way you feel. I mean, how many mornings have you got? You know what? I'm not sure I know what I feel today. Um seeing the book is laid out 272 different emotional states, supported by 8,000 quotes of people of all walks of life who've experienced them. They might be Nobel level scientists, they might be the wise man at the corner store, but these are people who had great insight. So if you're struggling, you pick up the book, it's alphabetical, it goes from abundance to empathy to to patience to zeal, and you can see 20 to 40 different quotes of people and you can scan down and go, that's it, that's the way I feel. Or maybe it's not that emotion at all. And I'm not a psychologist, but it's I've I've spent my share of hours in a chair with good psychologists. It's not uncommon for the therapist when faced with the patient to say, Well, what's what's bothering you? What's the issue? And let's say, for example, that the patient responds, Well, I struggles for words and says, I'm always anxious all the time. And so the psychologist calibrates to that and assumes that it's anxiety. What if the real problem isn't anxiety? What if the real problem is addiction? And I don't mean drug addiction, it could be addiction to anything. Well, suddenly, if the patient is given a list of multiple options and struggling for words, and you go, that's it, that's the quote. What that person said, that's exactly the way I feel. Suddenly they're communicating about the right thing. So putting, as you mentioned uh at the at the start, putting words into emotions is a difficult thing often, and this book provides a unique help to them.

SPEAKER_01 10:02

I think as I was reading through the book, I saw your name mentioned on a few of the quotes.

SPEAKER_02 10:09

Um I I did. So if you can imagine me for nine years working late into the night, I literally put, I think I calculated seven, eight, nine thousand hours into this with my trusty dog at my feet. On occasion, you know, I would find a quote. On occasion, I had an idea or two that popped into my head. And so I would Google it and I'd say, gee, nobody else has ever said that. It's pretty helpful. One of the quotes that I originated myself out of 8,000 was this if you can laugh at an emotion, it does not control you. And so that's a pretty helpful remark. Humor is a wonderful solvent of problems. If you can step outside yourself and say, you know what, I'm getting angry. I don't want to get angry. Angry doesn't get me anywhere. And you can laugh at yourself. You can you can say, you know what, I'm getting frustrated. I'm gonna take a breather. If you can step outside yourself and laugh at the emotion you're experiencing, suddenly you're in command of it. It's not in command of you. And that was one of my contributions to the book.

SPEAKER_01 11:14

So I love what you say about the psychologist having someone who says they're anxious and then finding out maybe it's really addiction. A lot of my folks come to me tired, exhausted, stuck. And then the more we realize it's the baggage they're carrying, perhaps a lot of it's grief that they didn't necessarily know because most people don't realize that grief is not just death, it's 40 plus things. It's every change could or could not need to be grieved. And so when they sit down, they're like, No, I'm not grieving. Let's think about what's been going on in your life. Did you have a divorce? Change in job, lose a friend, move. And they're like, Yes, yes, yes.

SPEAKER_02 11:58

And it's like, okay, so there are multiple uh emotions that sort of touch on each other grief, sadness, depression, uh and the like. Uh, you know, they're they're fine-tuned differences between them, but um for whatever reason, our society has, and and we're changing, has suggested in many ways, you're weak if you discuss your emotions. And so we tend to bottle them up. Well, that doesn't help. I mean, it just doesn't help. And what does help, what gives people relief, is that's the way I'm feeling. That's what it is. I experienced in my life, Flora, codependence, and I struggled with it of people around me. There were two people who were codependent in my life. I didn't understand what it meant. I mean, I never even really heard the word. And then when I looked up what codependence is, which is I'll give you the quick lay person's uh discussion description of codependence. Codependence is where two people enable each other's bad behavior. One person has a dark secret, and and I'm I don't mean to get uglier. The dark secret may be I'm into pornography, and the other person has a dark secret, I'm into alcohol. And they just quietly agree they are not going to discuss each other's issues. All right, well, that's codependence. You know, there's an advantage to not discussing each other's problems, and so you enable each other's problems. I never put a word, I didn't even understand what codependence was until I dug into that word and I went, oh my god, now I get it. And it was a relief to me to understand it.

SPEAKER_01 13:37

I think sometimes naming it and being able to explain it is the first step in being able to work through it and deal with it. But I think people struggle because their defaults to go to a few words. I'm stressed, I'm tired, I'm overwhelmed. But what changes when we can name the emotions more specifically?

SPEAKER_02 13:57

Here is a very helpful follow-on to what you just observed. In my research over nine years, again, me and my trusty little dog, she's sitting at my feet at the moment. We learned that there are three things that the average person misunderstands fundamentally about emotions. So nobody's average. We're all unique in our own way, but collectively we can talk about averages. The average person has three fundamental misunderstandings about emotion. Number one of which is that they're only between the average person thinks they're only between eight and twenty eight total emotions. And yet, in my book, they're at least into the low hundreds. And these aren't high-tech emotions, these are everyday emotions like blushing or flirtation or bullying or narcissism or wonder or zeal or curiosity or forgiveness or empathy. These are everyday emotions, but the average person doesn't even think about it. You just think, well, I'm gonna deal with this with six or eight or ten or twelve emotions. All right, so that's point number one. The average person misunderstands. Point number two is that the average person tends to think that emotions are very sporadic, that we are otherwise normal and rational. So, for example, on Tuesday, my boss annoyed me. So Tuesday I was annoyed. Thursday, my wife was very cheerful. She got a new smock or something, she was cheerful. This morning, I was fearful when I turned on the news. But all those other in-between moments are presumed to be logical and rational. Well, that's not that's not accurate. Here's what I mean: that emotions are continuously morphing. So imagine it's a Saturday afternoon, you're sitting alone in the house, you're sort of lonely, you're sort of bored, and you say, Well, I'll just reach for the remote and turn on the TV. So you turn on the TV, and there's a rerun. You've seen that one before. So you've gone from boredom and curious uh boredom and loneliness to curiosity. Now you see a rerun, you're bored. You change the channel, you're briefly interested, you've gone to interest, but the football game or whatever you're watching is you know out of control and it's not interesting. You say, you know what, I'm I don't want to watch TV. I'll see what's in the kitchen. Suddenly you're curious. You wander into the kitchen, you see the refrigerator, you're excited. Aha! That goodie I left last night, it's probably still in there. You open the refrigerator door, you are enthusiastic. There it is. That's the goodie that you wanted. You reach for it, your cell phone goes off, you're annoyed. It's a telemarketer. You figure out how to dismiss the telemarketer, you go back to finish your goodie satisfaction, you finish your goody, you're bored again, you pick up the phone and call your friend Mary and say, Mary, let's go shopping. Right? Look at that. You've constantly navigated from one emotion to the next. They're not sporadic. That's what emotions are. They are drum roll, they are our navigation system. They really are our navigation system. And all right, so the third confusion that the average person has about emotions. So let's go to the Star Trek series where you've got Captain Kirk, uh William Shatner, who is the commander, and you've got his first officer, Mr. Spock, who is the Vulcan, who is supposedly a voice of pure reason. And Mr. Spock occasionally will make remarks that how pesky humans are with their emotions. If you lived a life of pure reason, you would be better off. And so it's not uncommon for people to think reason is where I want to be. Emotions are inferior. But that's not at all true. The lead scientists of the world, and they're virtually unanimous on this. I don't know of any lead scientists or uh academicians, to use a word, who disagree with this. Emotions are foundational to reason. Emotions are not inferior to reason. You cannot, this is per Nobel level, folks, and I'm happy to quote them if you like. You cannot exhibit reason unless you have emotions to assign value to your thoughts. So emotions are foundational to reason, they are not inferior. So reason is overvalued in many respects. We all prize being rational and we all often dismiss people. Oh, well, that's Sally, she's so emotional. No, we have it backwards. Emotions are primary. We think with our bodies and our feelings before we think rationally. And the moment you understand that, there's a subtle shift that happens in your life. Emotions are not inferior, they're what God gave us. That's the way we navigate our lives. And it's a very powerful thought, and it's an important thing to correct.

SPEAKER_01 18:52

So I think not necessarily because she's unwilling to move forward, but maybe because she can't quite make sense of what's happening inside her. How would you gently guide her to begin identifying what she feels without it becoming hugely overwhelming?

SPEAKER_02 19:09

Putting words to emotions can be difficult. I think my book has helped immensely. And in my research, I went through the top 10 or 12 or 14 different academic disciplines. And I'm going to give you some quotes that may surprise you about how all of the leading thinkers in the world, whether you're an artist, a sculptor, a nuclear physicist, they all have common agreement that words are the way you solve your problem. So I'm going to read a few uh quotes from different disciplines. All right. So you may or may not, Laura, recall the name Niels Bohr. He was uh a theoretical physicist at the same time as Albert Einstein, a brilliant, brilliant guy. He, like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr also won the Nobel Prize. So he he's no dummy. So Niels Bohr, think of it. This is a theoretical physicist whose world is all about math and physics every day. Here's his quote: What is it that we human beings ultimately depend upon? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language. It's a mathematician telling you that words are the most important thing. Right there. I'll move on. There is an Austrian gentleman, Ludwig Wittgenstein. I hope I'm pronouncing his name right, but he is known throughout academia as a brain in the philosophy of language. His quote, the limits of my language are the limits of my world. I love that quote. You may have heard of separately, you may have heard of the Sloan Kettering Clinic in New York City, the anti-cancer clinic. Well, Mr. Kettering was not a doctor. He was not really even a scientist. He was an engineer. He he was head of engineering for General Motors. He produced and owned 186 patents in his life. So this is a guy that knows how to solve problems. Here's his quote A problem well stated is a problem half-solved. It's simple. If you can break it down to words, you're halfway home. I'll just give you two more. Noam Chomsky, 98 years old now, a Harvard guy known as the father of linguistics. Here's his quote: Language etches the grooves through which your thoughts must flow. If you're expecting magic, you can find it in words. And then lastly, uh you you came up with this yourself a moments ago. There is a clinical psychiatrist at UCLA in California. His name is Dan Siegel. He came up with a phrase that I think five of the most powerful words I ever heard. Name it. If you can put your problem in words, you are home. You can tackle it from there. Name it to tame it. My gosh, what a powerful phrase that is.

SPEAKER_01 22:04

Oh, we think name it, claim it, so we can start working on it, but that name it to tame it. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 22:10

I read it a dozen times. I went, wow, five words. You reduced massive problems to five words.

SPEAKER_01 22:18

I want to pause a moment because I I'm thinking about the person listening who's been carrying something unnamed for a really long time. There's a lot of people, I'm sure. It's not that they ignored it. It's just unspoken. And I want them to know that it's not about fixing. Maybe it's just gently asking yourself, what is this really?

SPEAKER_02 22:42

So is this really? It might be grief. It might be that your dog passed away. It might be that somebody, a person in your life passed away. All of these are real. And and putting them on the table, oftentimes I find that simply saying out loud the way I feel is extremely therapeutic. I'm really sad today. And when you say those words, it suddenly takes the inner dialogue in your head and puts it out there, and you go, Well, that is what I'm feeling. I'm just really sad. Right? And once you say it, once you identify and name it, you're on a different path. You're on the path to solution. You're not bottling it up.

SPEAKER_01 23:24

I think about someone I talked with earlier this week, and they realized that they were struggling with the death of a dream. What they had hoped and grown up thinking they would do and plan to do their whole life. They had just, for whatever reason, was not going to happen. And then they realized, okay, I'm grieving this, now I need to deal with it. And so I love that. Now's a good time for us to take a breath together. For people who are just now realizing that this is more than just those couple words, um, we might need a breath. So I want to encourage people to inhale slowly and exhale without rushing. If you're in a place where you can place your hand over your heart and just notice what emotion has been sitting quietly beneath the surface, you don't have to solve it, you don't have to explain it, just name it. Even if it's messy, even if it's incomplete, and stay there for a moment. So, Doug, is someone who's who begun to name what they're feeling, uh a healthy step. I'm thinking, first of all, they need to go get your book. And the next step is to start flipping through it. But if you could take one small step this week and tell people how to start, what would you tell them to do?

SPEAKER_02 24:50

I would start with openness and humility. I want to tell you a story about an emotion that I made a terrible mistake about. When I was 10 years old, my mother was I adored my mom. She was very, very talented. She was an artist, she painted successfully, she was a writer, she was a really good athlete, she had many friends, and one day I turned to her and I just sort of in admiration for my mom, I said, Mom, how do you do it? I mean, how do you do all these things? And she looks at me and she points at me with motherly advice and she says, Son, it takes a big ego to be a success in life. Well, that was my mom speaking, my highly successful mom, and I accepted that as a core belief. Sadly, I accepted that as a core belief. Uh no doubt that she believed it herself. So I adopted that ego was a really good thing. And as I entered the corporate world, I'm sure there are a hundred people who would attest that Doug Johnston had a big ego. And unfortunately, I inflicted my big ego on people, and I I feel terrible about it. All right. So, in the course of researching this book, 272 different emotional states, ego is a big emotional state. It's it's sort of a device that you project upon other people to keep them out of your hair. I mean, that's that's a very simple way of describing, but it's not you, it's a synthetic you. It's a it's a front. Yeah. I'm reading the works of Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, and there's a man who really had a pretty good head on his shoulders, to put it mildly. And his quote about ego was imagine me, 11 at night. I'm finally coming to Carl Jung talking about ego, and he said, A man spends the first half of his life developing an ego, and the second half of his life understanding how important it is to dismantle it. I honestly put my head in my hands and I cried because I realized how many people I had inflicted my misunderstanding of ego on. How many people out there that in the corporate world might think, you know, that guy is a real ass. I was getting the job done, I was efficient, but I was doing something that wasn't really me, which is what an ego is. It's something you project that's not really you. And I thought, gosh, how will I ever recover from this? All those people. And then I kept reading, and I got some relief from uh a man, Eckhart Tola, that's a name you might know. Uh very insightful guy who's reached 100 million people in his career at least. And his his observation about ego was the minute you spot it, the minute you realize that you've been inserting an ego between you and other people, your ego starts to go away. So he said it it it almost vanishes the minute you see that you've been doing it. And I drew some comfort from that. But but truthfully, to go back to what I said moments ago, I I am deeply embarrassed at how I treated people for so much of my life because I had a misunderstanding about emotions. And I'm really pleased that I solved that. At least I I'm pretty sure I solved it, but you get my point.

SPEAKER_01 28:12

So, for someone wanting to go deeper with your work, they can find your book, Choosing Emotions, Thinking with Your Head, and Acting with Your Heart. And we'll put the link in the show notes. Doug, I am so grateful for your time today and joining us at the counter. I enjoyed the book immensely. Uh, I do have an e-copy, but I can see there's a paperback copy coming soon.

SPEAKER_02 28:34

Thank you for that. The book is fun to read. You can read it five minutes, or you can read it for three hours. You can pick an emotion and you will laugh. I I made sure to include funny remarks from people uh in their experiences. The website is choosingemotions.com. It's now available. The book is now available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Ingram Spark. It's available in hard copy, in paperback, and uh Kindle version. Uh so it's out there and it's been doing very well. Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_01 29:05

Awesome. Um, sometimes we think clarity comes from having all the answers, but often it begins with simply having the right words, not perfect ones, not polished ones, just honest ones. If today helped you even name one thing you've been carrying, that matters more than you know. You don't have to carry unnamed things forever. My friends, hear this blessing. May you find language for what your heart has been holding. May you meet yourself with gentleness, not judgment, and may even the quietest emotions remind you you are still deeply, fully alive. Until we meet you back here next time, pull up a chair.

SPEAKER_00 29:55

Thank you for sitting at the counter with me today. If something in this conversation stayed with you, you might want to carry it gently into your day. No need to rush past it. And if you need a place to pause, reflect, or simply breathe, you can find more at bakingpastor.com. Until next time, take a breath, notice what's in front of you, and remember, you're always welcome here at the counter.