by Jason Pogue, PLPC
Here is the final blog in this series about gaining control over our emotions. So far, we’ve explored the very real experience of relational chaos and trying circumstances and looked at our ability to choose how we want to be in response to them, and we’ve discussed how the first step to stopping the runaway train is slowing down through relaxation exercises like the breathing one we tried together, and the importance of naming our experience. Here we are looking at how to go about naming our experience.
If you’re tired of being pushed around by the runaway train, and you’ve begun implementing regular relaxation exercises in your life, the next step is to really look at and accept the emotional experience present. For some this is easier than others, but for all of us we have a stunted emotional vocabulary so it can be helpful to use a chart of emotion words like the one below.
Take a minute and think of a recent conflict where you remember feeling overwhelmed internally. Think of the details of that situation – recount it in your mind. Are you feeling a bit of what you felt in your body then? Perhaps a tightness in the chest, or a sickness in your stomach, or a warmth in your arms and hands, or feeling like you just want to run out of the room – notice whatever is going on in your body as these are clues to our emotional experience. Now take a look at this chart. Notice we have all the words we typically use for emotion: happy, angry, sad, fearful, bad, surprised, disgusted. Try to identify which of these seems to fit what you’re experiencing, and then take it to the next outer-ring to further define that emotion. If you’re sad, are you lonely, vulnerable, despairing, guilty, depressed, hurt?
It may be more than one and that’s okay – emotions are complex.
You may find one of the more specific words that describe your experience are actually in an entirely different category than you thought. Perhaps you thought you were angry, but as you move through the layers you realize really you feel powerless. This chart certainly isn’t the master formula of all emotion, but it can be a helpful starting point to broaden our vocabulary of our internal world. Often we experience more than one emotion at the same time – and even those seem to contradict one another at times. We are complicated beings! The idea is to put words to what we are experiencing so we fully have a handle on just what’s going on inside us at the moment.
Again, it may seem silly or simple, but naming our emotional experience as precisely as we can is a crucial step in stopping the runaway train. Naming it period is actually a way in which we take back power, by putting boundaries around this experience and defining it rather than letting it define us.
Once we can precisely define our emotional experience, we will then be ready to explore why it’s there, whether it’s helping us or not, and how it may relate to our past wounds that are perhaps still pushing us around to this day.
Source: Russel Tarr, Using Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions to improve the evaluation of sources (Available at: http://www.classtools.net/blog/using-plutchiks-wheel-of-emotions-to-improve-the-evaluation-of-sources/, last accessed February 20, 2017).