We Are More in Control of Our Emotions Than We Think, Even If It Doesn’t Feel Like It

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

It’s a question that has puzzled philosophers for centuries. Lisa Feldman Barrett uses it to open Chapter 7 of How Emotions Are Made, not to dwell on trees, but to radically reframe how we think about emotions.

Her answer? No, the tree doesn’t make a “sound” - at least not until someone’s brain interprets the air vibrations as such. In the same way, an emotion doesn’t exist as a fixed internal object waiting to be discovered. It comes into being when the brain makes meaning out of bodily sensations - using learned emotional concepts, shaped by culture, language, and past experience.

For a patient in therapy, this can be both confronting and liberating.

It means that emotions aren’t something that just happen to us. They are constructed in the moment, influenced by how we’ve learned to categorise our inner world. That tight chest might get labelled “anxiety” on Monday and “excitement” on Friday. The difference isn’t just semantic - it’s neural, relational, and transformative.

If emotions are constructed, then they can also be reconstructed. This opens up profound therapeutic possibilities. You’re not stuck with a fixed emotional template. Therapy becomes a place where you can learn new emotional concepts, broaden your inner vocabulary, and become more precise in how you feel and name your experience - a skill known as emotional granularity.

It also softens self-judgment. If what you’ve been calling “sadness” is actually loneliness, or even exhaustion, that insight can shift how you respond to yourself. You might offer care instead of critique. Space instead of suppression.

And it puts the relationship at the heart of the therapeutic process. If emotion is something we co-construct - not only in our own minds, but in the presence of another - then the therapeutic relationship becomes more than just a setting for insight. It becomes the medium through which new emotional possibilities are made real. Together, therapist and client build a shared emotional language - one that may feel more precise, more compassionate, and more deeply known than what the client could access alone.

Emotion, in this view, is not a solitary truth to be uncovered - but a living, breathing experience that becomes clearer when someone else is truly there to hear it.