My Therapist Gave Me a Strange Assignment. It Changed My Life.

He forced me to say two words that terrified me. Repeat them daily. Here's what happened.

I struggled a lot in my late twenties. On the surface I had it pretty good. I was a Creative Director in a big NYC ad agency working on a dream account: Häagen-Dazs ice cream.

I didn’t mind bringing “my work” home. (Vanilla Bean was a favorite late-night assignment.)

I also had a kind, attentive boyfriend who was very good to me. He knew I loved my morning coffee, so he’d bring me a cup while I was in the shower. Slip it right through the shower curtain for me to sip, so I could get my caffeine fix while shampooing.

He was what my mother called “a keeper.”

I should have been happy. But to my surprise, I wasn’t.

I didn’t know why. So I went to see a therapist.

Unfortunately, this therapist turned out to be very nosy.

He kept asking me questions about my feelings.

I know that’s what therapists are supposed to do. But at the time I wasn’t used to talking about my feelings. So his questions felt pushy and invasive.

“How do you feel about your job?” the therapist would ask.

“Well, I think my job is…” I’d begin.

“How do you feel about your boyfriend?” the therapist would ask.

“Well, I think he’s…” I’d begin.

Did you notice what my therapist noticed?

Every single time he asked how I was feeling, I’d talk about what I was thinking.

At one point I even opened a sentence with: “I think that I think…”

The truth is: I couldn’t say how I felt. Because I didn’t know how I felt.

I’d been letting my rational, non-feeling brain be the spokesperson for my emotions. And my rational, non-feeling brain made a TERRIBLE spokesperson.

As my brain understood things, its job was to keep my feelings safely away from me.

From my brain’s point of view: my feelings were a liability.

Feelings could announce things that might blow up my life.

For instance, my feelings could tell me that my prestigious advertising job was slowly hollowing me out.

Or that the kind man with the shower-coffee system was a wonderful person… but also not my person.

So my brain (being a good brain, a loyal brain) chose to quarantine my feelings.

But Dr. Nosy was insistent on getting past my brain’s overprotective bodyguards.

So one day Dr. Nosy gave me a small homework assignment.

“For the next week,” he said, “I want you to begin every sentence with the words ‘I feel.’ Not ‘I think.’ Make an intentional choice to say ‘I FEEL.’”

I left his office thinking: how hard can this be? It’s two syllables.

It was diabolically difficult.

I would open my mouth to say “I feel” and my entire face would freeze.

Then I’d recover and say something like “I feel that I think that I feel…” Like a malfunctioning Alexa.

Here I was: a college-educated woman. My entire advertising job was about dealing with words. And I was being defeated by two of them.

But I stuck with Dr. Nosy’s assignment. And eventually my buried feelings began pouring out of the hidden backroom of me.

Suddenly I knew…

I felt: bored.

I felt: uncreative.

I felt: restless, trapped, unappreciated.

I felt I wasn’t feeling it for my boyfriend. Not even with his five-star coffee-through-the-curtain delivery system.

And I felt painfully aware that I wasn’t happy in advertising. I wanted to write books. Real ones. With my name on the spine. But I’d been telling myself this was unrealistic. A word I now suspected was just a euphemism for feeling terrified.

And so I also felt: panicky, dissatisfied, perturbed… and approximately seven other emotions I’d not previously known applied to me.

I began paging through a thesaurus for more words.

It was kind of fun discovering new adjectives for what I felt.

It was as if I’d traded in my basic 4-pack of primary Crayola emotional colors for the deluxe 152-color box, with the built-in sharpener.

Suddenly I had access to distinctive emotional hues like Tired-But-Pretending-Otherwise Mauve and Convinced-I’m-The-Problem Periwinkle.

And it turns out: when you can name a feeling more precisely, you can act on it more precisely.

So I quit my advertising job to become an author of books.

And I broke up with my coffee-shower boyfriend.

I sat across from him at dinner one night and told him, in my brand-new I-feel vocabulary, that I felt we weren’t right.

He looked at me and said: “But I think we’re great.”

And right there I clocked it. He was a Thinker too.

The two of us had each been trapped together in our heads, having a thoughtful, well-reasoned relationship… that nobody’s actual heart had ever signed off on.

That breakup moment was when I first noticed something I now notice constantly.

Most people have a strong preference for “think” versus “feel.” They use one of those two words about ten times more than the other. And it’s almost always a tell.

“I think” people tend to play it safe.

And “I feel” people tend to take more risks, live more boldly.

Now, decades later, when I work with clients as a coach, I love to listen for which words people tend to use. Especially when they want to discuss hard things in their lives.

I’ll ask: “What do you feel you should do?”

They’ll say: “Well, I think…”

And I’ll stop them. Right there. Mid-sentence.

“Try again,” I’ll say. “This time, start with ‘I feel.’”

They look at me like I’ve just asked them to do a pull-up. Because they know. They know the answer waiting at the end of an “I feel” sentence is going to be radically different from the answer waiting at the end of an “I think” sentence.

The “I think” answer is the one their parents would approve of.

The “I feel” answer is the one that’s actually truer.

And here’s the thing about true feelings, especially the inconvenient kind. You can ignore them for a while. You can let your bodyguard brain hustle your feelings back into the holding room and switch off the light behind them.

But they’re still in there. And every “I think” you say when you should be saying “I feel” is one more day of living a safe, limited, primary colored life.

So here’s your assignment.

For the next 24 hours, every time you’re about to start a sentence with “I think”… stop. Swap it for “I feel.” Then breathe in, and finish the sentence honestly.

Also I recommend journaling. Write “I feel….” at the top of an empty page. Stare at it. Then see what comes pouring out of you. Try to use the full 152 box of colorful emotions to write down what comes next.

Let your feelings know they’re allowed in the room. You might be surprised which ones show up.

I sure was.

Please hit the ❤️ button.

Think of it as applause, but quieter.
Here’s my ❤️ back to you for doing that!

👇Now it’s your turn.👇

→ Start a sentence with “I feel…” and finish it honestly in the comments.

→ What’s an “I think” you’ve been saying lately that you suspect should be an “I feel”?

→ Or just share about whatever came up for you as I was sharing my story.

A few sentences. Drop ‘em in the comments!

And if you’re intrigued…

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about your life a little more clearly…
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