She Taught Me That Feelings Have Names

Dear little Priya,

I know you are sitting on the stairs right now, in the bit between the third and fourth step where the carpet is worn, and you are trying very hard to understand what has happened. You have been told. You understand the words. But the words haven’t reached the part of you that still expects to hear her in the kitchen in the morning.

I want to tell you something. Not about what is going to happen — you will find that out, and most of it is better than you think — but about something you are going to learn soon, which will change everything.

You are going to meet someone who will sit with you when you don’t have the words. And she is going to teach you that feelings have names.

What sadness is

You will go into that first session not knowing what to expect. You will sit in a chair that is slightly too big for you, and you will look at the carpet because it is easier than looking at someone you don’t know yet, and you will wait for her to tell you something that fixes it.

She won’t. She will ask what you’re feeling, and you will shrug, because you don’t know. The thing you are feeling is so big and so shapeless that you don’t have a container for it. It sits in your chest like something swallowed wrong.

And she will say: that feeling — the big, shapeless one — that’s called sadness. Sadness means you loved someone and they are gone. It hurts because love is real, and loss is real, and you are real. There is nothing wrong with you.

Little Priya, you are going to cry then, properly, possibly for the first time since it happened. And you are going to feel embarrassed about it. Don’t be. This is the beginning of something.

The names she gave you

Over the weeks, she gives you more names. She gives you confused for the mornings when you wake up and forget for a moment, and then remember, and the remembering feels like falling. She gives you angry for the days when it feels unfair — which it is, it completely is — and she tells you that anger is allowed and that it means you know something wrong has happened.

She gives you love, which you already know, but she helps you understand that loving someone doesn’t stop when they die. It changes shape, she says. It moves from something you can reach out and touch to something you carry inside. You are nine years old and this does not make complete sense yet, but it makes enough sense. It makes enough sense to keep going.

She gives you proud, for the moment you tell her about the time your mother laughed so hard she cried at the kitchen table, and instead of it making you sad, it makes you smile. That is pride, she says. You are proud to have had her. You can keep being proud. Nothing takes that away.

What you did with those names

You took them home. You used them quietly at first — lying in bed at night running through the list like a kind of inventory, checking what was there. Sadness, yes. Confused, a bit. Something that might be scared. Knowing what something is called made it smaller, just slightly. Not gone — nothing made it gone — but smaller in the way that a room feels smaller once you have switched the light on.

You started using them with your dad, who was also finding it hard and did not always have words. You would say: I think I’m feeling sad today. And he would look at you with something like relief, because you had given him a word too. Sometimes he would say: me too. And that — the two of you sitting in your separate sadnesses that were actually one shared sadness — was the closest either of you could get to not being alone in it.

You used them at school when a teacher noticed you were quiet in a corner and asked if you were all right. Instead of saying fine — which was what you had been saying to everyone for weeks — you said: I’m a bit sad today. It’s okay. And she said: I know. And that was enough. That was more than enough.

Who you became

I am you at twenty-four, and I want you to know what those words built.

They built someone who asks people how they really are. Someone who can sit in a room with another person’s pain without flinching. Someone who knows that the most useful thing you can do for someone who is suffering is not to fix it but to name it with them — to say: yes, that is real, and it has a name, and the name is not wrong.

I work with children now. Not as a counsellor — not yet, though I am thinking about it — but as a teaching assistant, and I see children sometimes who are carrying something they don’t have words for. And when I see that, I sit with them the way she sat with me. I say: what you’re feeling right now — what does it feel like? And we find a name together. And I watch something change in their face.

That is what she gave me at nine years old, sitting in a chair that was too big for me. A language. And a language is how you survive.

What I want you to know

You are going to be okay. I know you don’t believe that right now, and I know “okay” sounds like a small and insufficient word for everything you are carrying. But okay is not a ceiling. Okay is a beginning.

Mum would have liked who you are becoming. I think about that a lot. I think she would have liked the way you ask careful questions and actually wait for the answer. I think she would have liked that you keep flowers on your desk and that you write things down. I think she would have liked that you cried in a chair that was too big for you when you were nine, and that the crying was the beginning of learning how to speak.

With all the love you are going to grow into,

Priya (age 24)

Was there a child in your life who needed support — or are you that child now, grown?

Grief counselling for children uses exactly the kind of gentle, language-building approach that Priya describes. If you are a parent, carer, or adult carrying childhood grief, our team is here. Get in touch and we will find the right path together.