Why You Feel the Way You Do: A Guide to Your Teenage Emotional World

You’re Not “Too Much.” You’re Not Broken. You’re Becoming.


Being a teenager is intense—not because you’re dramatic, but because you’re literally rebuilding your emotional, social, and identity systems all at once. You’re trying to figure out who you are while still carrying the emotional rules you learned as a kid. That’s a lot for anyone.

And I am among many who didn’t enjoy a single bit of my teenage years – you and I are not alone; many of us experienced traumas within those years. It wasn’t only the nerds or the geeks that experienced pain, believe it or not, even the jocks and the cheerleaders experienced similar strife – maybe not in the same exact way but strife, nonetheless.

This isn’t a “what’s wrong with teens” article.
This is a “here’s why you feel what you feel, and why it makes total sense” article – so you’ll know you’re not alone and not crazy.

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Your Emotions Feel Big Because Your Brain Is Upgrading

Your emotional brain (the part that feels things) is fully online. Your logical brain (the part that helps you slow down, think ahead, and stay calm) is still under construction. I never wanted to hear anything of the sort from my parents, but internally I knew they were probably right, since they were adults, but I was certain they couldn’t relate to what I was going through now.

But what this all mean is that:
• emotions hit fast
• intellectual logic shows up late
• fear shows up first
• everything feels personal, and therefore, from our perspective, everything is personal
• everything feels important; and therefore again, from our perspective, everything is important!

You’re not imagining it. Your emotional volume is turned up because your brain is literally trying to incorporate new wiring within the old circuitry.

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You’re Still Carrying the Emotional Rules You Learned as a Kid

Every kid learns emotional rules—what I call POOL rules (primary occurrence of learning)—long before they become a teenager. These rules teach us and reveal to us without anyone knowing it:
• what gets us accepted
• what gets us rejected
• what emotions are “allowed” (and therefore, what emotions are not – or at least discouraged)
• what behaviors get us in trouble (and therefore, what behavior is expected)
• what version of us keeps us in “good graces” (which our emotionality interprets as feeling safe)

When we hit your teen years, these rules don’t disappear. They get louder.

If we learned – whether we were actually taught or merely learned by witnessing:

“Don’t upset anyone,” we end up wanting to avoid conflict.
“Be perfect,” we stress ourselves out over the smallest mistake.
“Don’t show fear (which we interpret as a weakness),” we shut down every emotion.
“Fit in or else,” then we obsess over what people think and often start to alter our behavior until we discover what will be acceptable to whomever we want to approve of us; the or else part is when we might give up and decide, we must be alone because we will never fit in.

We’re not choosing these reactions when these thoughts come along – it is our unconscious emotional mind attempting as best as possible to get us to as safe a place as possible. These are automatic emotional habits we learned long before we knew we were learning them.

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Fear Is Behind Most of Your Reactions (Even the Ones That Look Like Anger)

Every negative emotion—anger, frustration, shutting down, defensiveness, overthinking—comes from fear. No negative emotion can exist without the ingredient of fear, but since we are taught so early to hide our fear, we now no longer have the ability to be introspective. People think teenagers can’t be introspective, but the reality is that the typical teenager isn’t introspective because they’ve been taught to hide from fear; it isn’t until the later adult years that the fear causes enough emotional pain that it can no longer be ignored.
If we taught our children to experience fear as an ally to help diagnose where we need to emotionally grow, our teenage years would not be as trauma and drama-filled as we experience them.

The fears I am discussing are not fears like “there’s a monster under my bed.”

They are fears that will be around for a long time – a lifetime, really, until we address them. They are fears like:
“What if they judge me?”
“What if I’m not enough?”
“What if I get rejected?”
“What if I disappoint someone?”
“What if I lose my place in the group?”

And in many circumstances, the teenager won’t ask the “what if” portion of those questions; they often just presume they will be judged or rejected, etc.

You’re not weak for feeling this. You’re perfectly human. And your brain is wired to care deeply about belonging right now. That’s not a flaw—it’s biology. In fact, every single child considers ‘belonging’ the most important element in their life – the child won’t often admit it, because the unconscious emotional mind considers that need to be a flaw and a weakness – after all, if our caretakers teach us not to cry, why would we ever feel that showing fear is safe?

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You’re Trying to Figure Out Who You Are (And That’s Messy)

Being a teenager is basically the emotional version of trying on outfits in a dressing room:
• some fit
• some don’t
• some feel right for a week
• some feel right for a day
• some feel right until someone judges you

You’re not “crazy.” You’re basically experimenting.

Identity isn’t built by sitting quietly and thinking. We build it by trying things, messing up, learning, and trying again – and a lot of pain comes from messing up a few times; as we are all aware, kids can be cruel.

You’re not lost. You’re evolving.

If you don’t believe what I am writing here, I’ve got a perfect example from my own experience.
I never fit in growing up. I was Black in a small Vermont town where everybody else was white for 2000 square miles, until I was 17, when another minority family moved into town. So, I was used to not fitting in – I mean, I truly didn’t have an official date until I was 21, when I met my future wife. That means I really never fit in! But here’s where it gets interesting.

I decided to go to my 10th high school reunion. I skipped my 5th because it was too soon, and I was still remembering the painful days of high school. But on my 10th, I had a sports car, a good job, I was fit and decently good-looking, so I was going to go – and I was looking forward to it. Well, that night I spoke with Melody, Becky, Carolyn, and others of the “in” crowd; these were the girls whom every boy wanted to date, they were the cheerleaders and athletes – the ones that every misfit like me wanted to be like, because after all, they had it all. They had celebrity looks, personality, and even the teachers liked them. And on that evening of that 10th reunion,

Every single one of them said how miserable they felt their high school years were.

These were the ones and their boyfriends that we all admired, but they didn’t have any better idea of who they were than I did.

This is how we know we are doing the teenage years correctly, when we are as confused as everyone else.

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You Take Risks Because Your Brain Is Built for It Right Now

Another element of teenage years that doesn’t make sense to so many of us, then or now. Our risks we take – I have a couple of friends from those days, I still contact them periodically, and have other friends my age who grew up in the same timeframe many years ago… We wonder all the time, how are we still alive because of all of the brainless risks we took. I have broken fingers from thinking I could jump from a roof to a tree and could have easily landed on my head; a friend who has scars in his hands and luckily still has eyesight from thinking he could safely light gunpowder with a Bic lighter.

Here’s the thing - we’re wired to explore, test boundaries, and try new things. That’s how we learn independence and confidence, but this doesn’t mean every risk is good. What it does mean is your urge to try things isn’t because you’re reckless—it’s because your brain is pushing you to grow. And this is why we truly do need those boundaries we are given by our caretakers.

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Adults Don’t Always Get It (And That’s Not Your Fault)

Adults look at you through a fully developed brain, but you’re living with one that’s still building itself.

Adults can think:
“Why didn’t you think that through?”
You can feel:
“I didn’t have time to think—I just felt it.”
Adults think:
“Why do you care so much about what your friends think?”
You feel:
“My social world is my survival.” (Even though we might not want to admit it out loud)
Adults think:
“You’re overreacting.”
You feel:
“This is one of the biggest things that will happen in my life.”

Your emotional logic makes sense – to you. Even if adults don’t always see it; in fact, in your adult years, there will be countless events you will look back at and say, “What were we thinking?”

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You’re Allowed to Feel What You Feel

Let’s face it – a lot of the time during our teenage years, we don’t like experiencing the emotions we feel. Even though we don’t like having them, we still don’t like having our adults or caretakers diminish those emotions, because they are ours. This is a key point, you must remind yourself and your caretakers that you’re allowed to:
• be confused
• be overwhelmed
• care about things adults don’t understand
• want independence
• want belonging
• want space
• want connection
• not know who you are yet, and have multiple conflicting emotions without understanding why, all at the same time.

You’re not supposed to have it all figured out – how could you? You are in the midst of learning about yourself.

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A Few Things You Deserve to Hear And Know

You’re not too emotional.
You’re not too sensitive.
You’re not behind.
You’re not failing.
You’re not alone.
You’re not supposed to be perfect.
You’re allowed to grow at your own pace.
You’re becoming someone new and that process is going to feel intense.

An Important Thing I Want You To Know

The enemy of understanding yourself is hiding from your fears. Adults do this all the time and you’ve probably been taught to do the same already. But that fear causes a tremendous amount of pain in the adults who continue to hide from it for their lifetime. So, I’m going to teach you something I wish someone had taught me many, many, years ago:

The essence of fear is: Frequent Exposure to Analysis and Rejection. This explains the origin of every one of your fears, my fears and the fears of every human being. Any human being who tells you they’ve never had fears is lying to you – therefore, if you tell yourself you have no fears you are lying to yourself and setting yourself up for pain.

How often (Frequency) others judged us (Exposure and Analysis) determined within our unconscious emotional mind whether or not we would be safe by “fitting in” or Rejected. Therefore, every single negative emotion we ever have contains fear – because it’s not just you as a teenager that wants to “fit in” – we did when we were 2 years old and adults still want to; it’s just a matter as to whether we are willing to be who someone else wants us to be rather than being who we want to be that determines whether we allow the FEAR to control us.

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Reflection Questions (Just for You)

What do I wish adults understood about me?
What situations make me feel judged or misunderstood?
What emotions feel the strongest for me right now?
What part of myself am I trying to figure out?
What scares me the most about growing up?
What helps me feel safe when I’m overwhelmed?
What do I need from the adults in my life that I don’t know how to ask for?


A Final Message to You

You’re not hard to love.
You’re not hard to understand.
You’re not “too much.”
You’re not behind.
You’re not broken.
You’re becoming you – and in the process, becoming is messy, emotional, confusing, beautiful, and absolutely necessary.

You’re doing better than you think.


David A. Jones
Founder, CAPTIVE Coaching and Empowerment, llc
info@captivecoachingandempowerment.com