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

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My Therapist Gave Me a Strange Assignment. It Changed My Life.<br>He forced me to say two words that terrified me. Repeat them daily. Here's what happened.

Karen Salmansohn<br>May 14, 2026

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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.<br>I didn’t mind bringing “my work” home. (Vanilla Bean was a favorite late-night assignment.)<br>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.<br>He was what my mother called “a keeper.”<br>I should have been happy. But to my surprise, I wasn’t.<br>I didn’t know why. So I went to see a therapist.<br>Unfortunately, this therapist turned out to be very nosy.

He kept asking me questions about my feelings.<br>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.<br>“How do you feel about your job?” the therapist would ask.<br>“Well, I think my job is…” I’d begin.<br>“How do you feel about your boyfriend?” the therapist would ask.<br>“Well, I think he’s…” I’d begin.<br>Did you notice what my therapist noticed?

Every single time he asked how I was feeling, I’d talk about what I was thinking.<br>At one point I even opened a sentence with: “I think that I think…”<br>The truth is: I couldn’t say how I felt. Because I didn’t know how I felt.<br>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.<br>As my brain understood things, its job was to keep my feelings safely away from me.<br>From my brain’s point of view: my feelings were a liability.

Feelings could announce things that might blow up my life.<br>For instance, my feelings could tell me that my prestigious advertising job was slowly hollowing me out.<br>Or that the kind man with the shower-coffee system was a wonderful person… but also not my person.<br>So my brain (being a good brain, a loyal brain) chose to quarantine my feelings.<br>But Dr. Nosy was insistent on getting past my brain’s overprotective bodyguards.

So one day Dr. Nosy gave me a small homework assignment.<br>“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.’”<br>I left his office thinking: how hard can this be? It’s two syllables.<br>It was diabolically difficult.<br>I would open my mouth to say “I feel” and my entire face would freeze.<br>Then I’d recover and say something like “I feel that I think that I feel…” Like a malfunctioning Alexa.<br>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.<br>Suddenly I knew…<br>I felt: bored.<br>I felt: uncreative.<br>I felt: restless, trapped, unappreciated.<br>I felt I wasn’t feeling it for my boyfriend. Not even with his five-star coffee-through-the-curtain delivery system.<br>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.<br>And so I also felt: panicky, dissatisfied, perturbed… and approximately seven other emotions I’d not previously known applied to me.<br>I began paging through a thesaurus for more words.<br>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.<br>And it turns out: when you can name a feeling more precisely, you can act on it more precisely.<br>So I quit my advertising job to become an author of books.<br>And I broke up with my coffee-shower boyfriend.<br>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.<br>He looked at me and said: “But I think we’re great.”<br>And right there I clocked it. He was a Thinker too.<br>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.<br>That breakup moment was when I first noticed something I now notice constantly.

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