Are You Mislabeling Your Emotions? How Trauma, Anxiety, and Cognitive Distortions Keep You Stuck

Hey, beautiful souls. Welcome to Reclaim Your Inner Rockstar, the space for high-capacity leaders who lead boldly yet often feel overstimulated beneath the surface. I'm Amy Robinson, aromapsychologist and cognitive coach with more than 25 years of helping others find emotional clarity through scent and science. My work began when I realized scent could instantly shift my thoughts and regulate my entire inner world. And I knew women like me needed access to that same power. Each week you will receive grounded tools and conversations that help you steady your nervous system and think more clearly. Are you ready to feel like yourself again? Then you're in the right place.

Hey, beautiful souls. Thanks for listening in. We're going to be diving into this topic about, are you mislabeling your emotions? You know, so often, especially as trauma survivors, we think we're feeling one thing— anger, stress, anxiety— when underneath it's something completely different. Vulnerability, longing, rest, or even hope. And when we mislabel our emotions, our mind and body respond in ways that keep us stuck in cycles of pain instead of guiding us toward healing. In this episode, we're going to talk about why this happens, how cognitive distortions play a role, and what it looks like to start peeling back the layers so that you can become more emotionally aware. And align. I'm going to share a few stories that bring this to life and give you tools to pause, reflect, and recognize what's really going on inside. This is about reclaiming your emotional intelligence, learning to trust yourself again, and discovering the healing power that comes when we call our feelings by their true names. So let's get into it.

Inner confidence is not a showy display. It's a very quiet, and solid quality that comes from deep within. It's the understanding that we are imperfect and that we're okay with our imperfections and we don't have to prove anything to anyone ever. And that's a really beautiful place to be. For trauma survivors, that's an incredibly challenging thing to do because most trauma survivors are trying to prove themselves to someone all the time. And it's a really insatiable need for them to feel that they are approved by others, and it could come out in many different ways. Today's topic is on, are you mislabeling your emotions? Cognitive behavioral therapy talks about cognitive distortions. Every person has a level of trauma. Some carry it so long and it is so heavy that it's affecting your day-to-day living, that you're one person outside the house that everybody thinks you're great and always willing to help and be everybody's support system. And yet inside, you're internally agonizing. That's when you know your trauma has gotten to the point where it's like, I need support. I don't know how to get past this. If your mind is always racing, trying to figure out what is going on, That's a signal. Learning about cognitive distortions is really important. As a cognitive distortion, when we mislabel something, it's giving it a name that's not really what it is. For example, I hear so many people say, "I have seasonal affective disorder," but they've never gotten diagnosed for it. There's information on the internet about it, but is that really what it is, or is it just grief over a really beautiful season. Going from the warmth to the cold can bring on sadness and grief, and our bodies naturally respond that way. Is it something heavier than that? Could we be labeling something in our life that isn't really there? As human beings, we need answers for everything. If we don't understand it, we're gonna label it. That's human nature. Our society tends to mislabel things too much. Without full support, we just assume that's what it is. Our mind believes this is exactly what it is. If our mind thinks that's what it is, our thoughts create our emotions, create our actions. If our mind thinks we're in this state, then that's what our thoughts are gonna be on, and that's how our emotions are gonna feel. We're gonna act that way instead of leaning into healing and joy for the season that's coming. I wanna give you in the form of 3 different stories, First, we're gonna talk about Sarah. Sarah is a story on mislabeling our emotions. Sarah has a family and she's at a gathering and she feels a knot in her stomach. She labels it as anger, but as she tunes into herself, she realizes it's not anger at all. It's the feeling of vulnerability. And a longing for connection. With Sarah, what she thought may be anger, she's estranged from her family. There are people in her family she longs to get closer to, but she feels scared. That brings on vulnerability and makes her feel very uncomfortable. She's mislabeled it as anger, but actually it's vulnerability. And that loss of connection. Mislabeling our emotions often stems from our society's conditioning to suppress our softer feelings. When I work with my clients one-on-one, we break out the feelings wheel and work through degrees of emotions because what may look like sadness is actually not sadness all the time. I did a poll on those who feel that they're emotionally intelligent. And many people were very confident in saying, "Yes, I'm very emotionally intelligent." Mislabeling is a very common thing, and many would be surprised to know that they're not as intelligent as they think they are. We may think we have a handle on our emotion because we tell ourselves, "I'm good. I'm okay." Once we start peeling back layers and we allow ourselves to be vulnerable like Sarah, When we start looking deeper than what's on the surface, we realize, wait a minute, maybe I'm not as emotionally intelligent as I give myself credit for. Maybe it's a form of masking. Sarah's a good example of that, labeling it as anger when it's actually vulnerability, because trauma survivors hate to feel vulnerable. Yet vulnerability is where the healing begins. Let's look at another story. This is about misunderstanding our emotions. This short story is about Alex. He's a young man who often feels restless and on the edge. He wants the next big adventure. He's quick to label it as stress. If he were to take a moment and go deeper with his emotions and connect with gentle awareness, he could uncover that beneath that restlessness is the need for self-care and relaxation. Trauma survivors hate to self-care. They don't know how. They hate to sit and just be. Yet it's in those moments when our body tells us it's restless that we pay attention to the deeper level emotions and genuinely are tapping into the emotional intelligence that we all have. It could be our body saying, slow down. It's okay. You don't need to prove anything to anyone. The one who matters the most already sees you. Take a moment and just breathe. So what's the lesson in Alex's story? The lesson is that sometimes our emotions are like whispers from our inner person asking us to nurture ourselves. Elephant in the room, spiritual community, there's a lot of y'all out there misreading and misunderstanding what God's principles are for you. We don't get into the kingdom by running faster. We get into the kingdom by becoming faithful. Faith is what leads to action. Knowing when to stand still, knowing when to just be, knowing when to step in. This constant barrage of running everywhere, doing all the things all the time for everyone else. Could that be a mislabeling of what your emotions are really telling you? Could that be a misreading of what God's principles are really telling you? Nurturing ourselves is part of the process of healing, and our God gives us a massive amount of space to do that. I used to have very dear spiritual men in my life tell me, Amy, if you don't slow down, you're no good to our God, dead. Those were my full-time service responsibilities, helping everybody all the time. And these spiritual men came to me and said, it's a whole organization that can do the work. You don't always have to be all up in the middle. Mm. You can control your stress levels. Third story, emotional complexity is what we're gonna be talking about. Maya is a person who frequently finds herself feeling overwhelmed. She labels it as sadness and anxiety. Her anxiety has gotten the best of her, right? And there is true, y'all, it's true. There are clinical anxiety. I've had it. I've had chronic anxiety. I was diagnosed with general anxiety. Understanding my emotions on a deeper level and taking a moment to listen, to really pay attention to them. It's not always anxiety. Maya feels overwhelmed, and so she labels it as sadness and anxiety. But when she dives deeper, she uncovers a beautiful tapestry of emotions: sadness, fear, hope, and even excitement. There are so many more emotions y'all may not even know you Those who claim to be emotionally intelligent can't be on an elementary level. Within my Healing Membership, I'm always coaching my clients on deeper level belief systems, going deeper than what's on the surface. Think of a 3-year-old who's learning how to speak a language, and then they become 5 years old and are learning that language on a deeper level. But then you hear them as a 12-year-old and you ask them, how do you feel? I'm sad. By 12 years old, they should understand the deeper range of what sadness entails and what it looks like for them. But a majority of people, we are stuck mentally and emotionally at the age when our trauma really happened. For those of us who don't even know we are walking around with unresolved heavy chronic trauma, imagine how emotionally stunted we really are. Maya is feeling overwhelmed, but she doesn't know where it's coming from. Once she starts to dig deeper, she's understanding, wait a minute, you mean I have hope in me and excitement? Sadness, that's good. Sadness is not always a bad thing. The world labels it as depression, but it's not a bad thing. Sadness allows us to process. Fear. Fear's not a bad thing. When we live in it and it cripples us, that's red alarms. Even a Bible principle says there's no fear in love, but love gets rid of fear. So love for self— you're afraid, you're holding back love from you. Think about that, because true love Let fear go. It's trauma holding you back. And that mislabeling of your emotions, that fear could be deeper level stuff. It could be anger. It could be frustration. Our third lesson is that emotions are complex and it's okay to feel a mix of them. It's a reminder to honor the depth of our emotional experiences. That's heavy stuff. Within my community, we go deeper. My healing membership, like I mentioned earlier. Ladies, remember, emotions, when we mislabel them and we get them wrong, we could be sitting uncomfortably and being uncomfortable in our life for no reason. Once we start to understand where our emotions are taking us, and how they work as signals to help us, not to hurt us and become our weapons, that's where the empowerment comes. I have a client that she's doing incredibly well in my one-on-one. She told me when she stepped into my space, I do not wanna be here. I am doing this as a promise to a friend, and I don't wanna do this, but I'm going to. When I say she is unpacking and leveling up in her emotional state, she said one of the biggest things that she was afraid of is being by herself. She has to have noise every second of the day, but she says, my goal is to have a little bit more quiet so that I can start paying attention to my deeper level emotions. That is healing. When we can shut the noise out and pay attention to what's really going on on the inside. For those of you who may not know, I was diagnosed with chronic anxiety, clinical depression, bedbound for 6 weeks, just couldn't do anything, couldn't eat, slept all the time. My son watched me and it affected him deeply to this day. Through the techniques that I coach my clients with, the deeper level stuff. That's how I got to where I am. I'm not on medication. I use aromatherapy as my tool. I get to understand my emotions so deeply that I know exactly where it, where it is to use. And I can do that for my clients as well. My clients are having transformations because of it. I have clients who have gotten off of 14 different types of medications and are down to 1 or 2. Medication. So this stuff works, y'all, once you're ready to step into it. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me. Have a beautiful day, and I hope to see you on the inside of my membership. We'll talk to you guys later. Bye!