I didn't have a word for it
Growing up in a family that didn't talk about mental health — and what happened when I finally found the language.
Ziv Vosberg
5/18/20264 min read
I ended up in the emergency room more than once as an adult, convinced something was seriously wrong with me physically. The pain was real — sharp, physical, undeniable. I thought my appendix had burst. The doctors ran their tests, found nothing, sent me home. And I went back to carrying whatever it was that had no name.
Nobody in my family talked about mental health. Not because they were unkind or indifferent — they simply didn't have the language. The generation I grew up in didn't, either. Anxiety wasn't something people named or discussed or treated. You were stressed, maybe. You were sensitive. You needed to toughen up, calm down, think about something else.
So that's what I tried to do. And my body kept screaming back.
What anxiety felt like before I had words for it
It felt like dread that arrived without warning. Like my body was preparing for something terrible that never quite materialized. It felt like the inside of my chest was too small for everything trying to happen in it. It felt like being the only person in a room who could hear an alarm that no one else seemed to notice.
I didn't call it anxiety. I didn't call it anything. It was just the way I was. Something was wrong with my body — that was the best explanation available to me. Which is how I ended up in the ER, more than once, convinced that what I was feeling had to have a physical explanation, because the only other option was that something was wrong with me in a way nobody talked about.
I want to pause here, because I know I'm not alone in this. I've heard versions of this story from so many clients — people who spent their childhoods and early adulthoods carrying something very real, in bodies that were trying to communicate something important, without the words to understand what they were experiencing.
The family that didn't talk about it
I want to be careful here, because this isn't a story about blame. My family wasn't withholding something they had. They simply didn't have it either. Mental health wasn't discussed because it existed outside the vocabulary of the world they grew up in — a world where you handled things, pushed through, didn't make a fuss about feelings, they didn't have the time they were busy surviving.
That's not cruelty. That's a generation doing what generations do: passing on what they know, shaped by what they were given. The silence around mental health wasn't malicious. It was inherited.
But inherited silence still has consequences. When the adults around you don't have language for emotional experience, you don't either. And when you're a child carrying something big and real with no name for it and no framework for it — you do the only thing available: you find other explanations. Your stomach hurts. Your appendix might be bursting. Something is physically wrong.
The body is not lying. It's translating. It's doing it's best to make legible something that has no other available language.
The moment everything changed
It wasn't until graduate school that I finally had the aha moment.
I was studying clinical psychology — learning to give names to things, to understand the architecture of human experience. And somewhere in that process, I encountered the actual description of anxiety. The physiological symptoms. The cognitive patterns. The nervous system response.
And I thought: oh. That's what that was.
I can't fully describe what it felt like to have language for something I'd been carrying for so long without words. There was relief —in finally knowing what I was dealing with. There was also something more complicated: a grief, maybe, for the years of not knowing. And a clarity that made the next step possible.
I got help. I got on medication when I needed it. I built skills. I did the work.
And years later — genuinely, fully — I have no anxiety symptoms. I'm off medication. I have the coping skills and the self-understanding that make it possible to live without the alarm that used to define my inner life.
I'm telling you this not as a promise that your story will look exactly like mine. But as evidence that the other side exists. That having the words is the beginning — not the end — of something that can genuinely change.
What I hear from my clients
I've lost count of how many clients have sat across from me and described some version of this experience. The stomach aches that nobody could explain. The trips to urgent care for symptoms that turned out to have no physical cause. The years of thinking they were just 'a worrier,' just 'too sensitive,' just constitutionally different from people who seemed to move through the world more easily.
They didn't have the words. Their families didn't have the words. The culture they grew up in didn't have the words. And so they carried it — unnamed, untreated, sometimes for decades.
What I want them to know — what I want you to know, if you're reading this and recognizing yourself — is this:
Not having the words didn't mean nothing was wrong. It meant you were carrying something real, alone, without a map. That is not weakness. That is an enormous amount of resilience applied to a problem you deserved more support for.
The moral of the story
You can't name what you've never been taught to name.
And not having the language for your experience doesn't mean nothing was happening. It means you were living inside something real without the framework to understand it — which is one of the loneliest things a person can do.
Getting the words matters. Because once you can name it, you can work with it. Once you can see it clearly, you can make choices about it. Once you know what you're dealing with, you're no longer at its mercy in the same way.
I was in the ER, convinced something was physically wrong, because I had no other way to understand what my body was trying to tell me. Years later, I became a therapist in part because I know what it's like to carry something without language — and I know what it means to finally find it.
If you're reading this and something is resonating — if you grew up in a family that didn't talk about these things, if you've spent years managing something you couldn't name, if you're only now starting to wonder whether there are words for what you've been carrying — I want you to know:
There are words. And there is help. And the other side is real.
Ready to find the words for what you've been carrying? Book a free 15-minute consultation at— no commitment, just a conversation.
ABOUT
Ziv Vosberg, LMFT #130319
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist
Telehealth across California
(408) 831-8804
zivlmft.com
GOOD TO KNOW
This website is for informational purposes only and does not constitute a therapeutic relationship.
If you are experiencing a mental health emergency please call 988 or go to your nearest emergency room.