Emotion Is a Skill, Not a Trait

Most of us grow up thinking emotions are a bit like weather: unpredictable, universal, and definitely outside our control. You feel angry because someone wronged you. You feel sad because something bad happened. And if you don’t feel much at all? That’s just your wiring - stoic, rational, emotionally low-maintenance (or possibly dead inside, depending on who’s judging).

But there’s another view - a growing body of research led by neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett - that quietly rewrites everything we think we know about emotion. According to Barrett, emotions aren’t hardwired reactions. They’re not universal. And they’re not even “triggered.” Instead, they are constructed by the brain, on the fly, using a mixture of internal sensations (interoception), context, memory, culture, and language. Emotions are not something you have. They’re something you do.

Barrett’s theory suggests that the brain isn’t reacting to the world - it’s predicting. Constantly. Based on your past experiences, cultural learning, and current bodily signals, your brain makes a best guess about what emotion “fits” this moment. That fluttery stomach? Could be anxiety. Could be excitement. Could be indigestion. Your brain decides - usually before you’ve had your first conscious thought about it. This process happens fast, often unconsciously, and it builds your emotional experience. That’s why one person feels shame in a meeting, while another feels anger. Same moment, different internal prediction.

And this is where it gets interesting. Because if emotions are constructed - not hardwired — then they’re learnable. And that’s the part the therapy world is (quietly) thrilled about. It means if you didn’t grow up in an emotionally fluent environment, you’re not broken. You’re undertrained. If you feel “too much” or “not enough,” that’s not a flaw. It’s your nervous system working with the templates it has. If you struggle to tell whether you’re anxious, tired, angry, or just slightly existential - welcome to the very human project of emotional learning.

Therapy, then, isn’t just a place where you “talk about your feelings.” It’s a place where you build the capacity to feel - more clearly, more safely, and with more vocabulary. It’s a space where new emotional patterns are formed - slowly, experientially, and often through the relationship itself. Barrett’s work gives scientific language to something many psychotherapists - especially relational ones - already sense: that people don’t just need to regulate emotion. They need to construct it differently.

And the more nuanced your emotional “library” becomes, the more options your brain has when it tries to make sense of a racing heart or a quiet ache. If you’ve ever thought “I’m just not an emotional person,” this model would gently suggest: not yet.

Emotion is a skill. A system. A set of internal habits. And like any skill, it can be practised, shaped, and grown — with time, with language, and with the kind of relationships that make space for the mess of it all.