MORE FEELINGS
MORE Feelings
The way to control your emotions…is to let them flow and let go.
You are on a journey of fulfillment and discovery through accessing, experiencing, and expressing your emotions—a journey to discover the gift of your feelings. You are learning foundational skills for improving your relationship with your emotions to help you live a rich, abundant, nourishing, fulfilling life. Remember, the proper function of emotions is to regulate our pleasure and pain—our feelings lead us toward more pleasure and away from unnecessary pain. As we restore our emotions to their proper function, we discover a treasure trove of information about ourselves, our values, what we care about, and our deeper yearning, and we open ourselves to a rich experience of our deepest and most authentic selves.
In the last lesson, you became an emotional detective, discovering and exploring the primary emotions in the relationships and in the world around you. You also focused on expanding your Window of Tolerance and noticing your states of hypo- and hyper-arousal. You build on this foundation as you explore the next level of your feelings.
The ABC’s of Emotional Literacy: Primary Emotions
Primary emotions have a basic purpose: to lead us from pain to pleasure. Often, what we label as a feeling is a combination of emotions. We call these secondary emotions. Fear, hurt, anger, sadness, and joy, the five primary emotions, are those most immediately related to pleasure and pain.
These five primary emotions are the building blocks of the innumerable secondary emotions just like recipes for food are made of primary ingredients. As you learn to distinguish primary feelings, you can then see how they combine to form secondary feelings. For example, feeling discouraged is usually a combination of sadness, hurt, anger, and sometimes fear. Guilt can be a bundle of primary emotions—fear of reprisal, inward-directed repressed anger, and hurt. Un-bundling emotions helps you recognize them and deal with them more effectively.
Sometimes we use other vocabulary that indicates that we are having a primary feeling. We may say that we are frustrated, and the primary emotion is anger. Or if we say that we have butterflies in our stomach, we are most likely feeling the primary emotion of fear. Pay attention to the words you say to describe your felt sense. Your descriptions may be indicating that you are feeling a primary feeling. It helps to know how the primary feelings can show up or be experienced.
Too often, we watch the world and seek to manage the state of things around us rather than focusing on our internal satisfaction… It is more likely that we learned to live to avoid pain rather than follow pleasure.
Too often, we look outside of ourselves and to other people to try to gauge what is going on or how we should be feeling or reacting, rather than looking inside ourselves for clues to our emotions. This results in uncertainty about what we are feeling and what will fulfill our deeper yearning. This week’s activities lead us to go inside to sense, acknowledge, name, and begin to express feelings more fully.
Name It to Tame It—Label Your Affect
Knowing what you are feeling and being able to label your emotions are powerful skills. You become more in touch with yourself, more present, more aware of your internal state—which provides important information for effective living. Not only do you experience yourself more deeply when you access and name your feelings, but neuroscientists have discovered amazing things happen when you put your feelings into words.
Talking about our feelings activates a part of our brain that is responsible for impulse control. By naming our feelings, we are more able to heed the information our feelings are sending to us and to act in response to them—to express them more responsibly. Putting our feelings into words also makes our sadness and anger less intense. We are more likely to act to “complete” the emotion––for it to fulfill its function, to bring us more pleasure and avoid unnecessary pain. Think of sadness as a need for comfort, hurt as a need to be healed or soothed, fear as a need for safety, anger as a need to escape pain or attain a desired pleasure, and joy as pure desire to express and share.
You might have thought that talking about feelings leads to insight, and that doing so automatically makes you feel better. While it may be true, the power of labeling feelings doesn’t require that you want to feel better or ensure that you will feel better. Labeling your affect calms your brain and brings more clarity and purpose, which can then help you to respond as these emotions emerge.
The limbic system of our brain reacts very quickly to perceived threats—it automatically activates our fight/fight/freeze/attach/submit response. The amygdala within the limbic system responds 100 times faster than our frontal lobe or neocortex when it perceives a threat. The amygdala sends a rush of adrenaline and cortisol that signals fight, flight, or freeze. This release of chemicals into the brain reduces our working memory and stops complex thought. Our limbic system doesn’t want you to take the time to think—it just wants you to run! (Or any of the other automatic responses.) This survival mechanism lets us react to things before the rational brain has time to mull things over.
While its function is important, the hair trigger amygdala can be sloppy and distort things in this quick reaction. Your amygdala “hijacks” your thinking mind and triggers default behaviors—the behaviors programmed in your matrix from your early attachment experiences. You have “flipped your lid”—you are acting out of your implicit memory and mistaken beliefs of your wiring from your attachment schema. You have lost access to the executive control center of your more highly evolved frontal lobe (your “lid”).
The purpose this week is to be able to label an emotion as it is happening and to get in touch with the emotional current that flows through you. You may be surprised at what’s brewing inside!
When you label your feelings, the response in your amygdala—which handles fear, panic, and other strong emotions—decreases. Your prefrontal cortex, which controls impulses, lights up and diminishes the response of other limbic regions. Labeling your emotions calms the brain and brings clarity and purpose, and you become more likely to assess the threat objectively. If you speak the feeling out loud, it involves the speech centers and brings even more higher-level processes on board. When you increase your awareness of your emotions, become more conscious of your internal experience, and are more present to your feelings, there is widespread activation in your prefrontal cortex, which can improve your mood and even your health.
Practice labeling your affect and experience the power of “Name it to tame it”—the emotional awareness that helps you be more centered, aware, mindful, clear, and in touch with yourself. Learn to restore your emotions to their proper function—to lead you to experience more pleasure and avoid unnecessary pain. Last week, you scanned for indicators of your emotions—bodily sensations, moods, states, stinking thinking, and soft addictions. This week, tune in even more fully to see what is going on inside of you, to discern the emotion that you are feeling, and to label your primary emotions.
Name Your Emotions: Pleasure, Pain, and
Hard to Explain
Main Assignment
This week, you are learning to turn your attention to your internal state, to touch your feelings, and use the language of emotions. You are learning what the neuroscientists call, “labeling your affect.” The purpose of the assignment this week is to increase the speed and depth of your emotional awareness and your facility at naming your emotions. Use the cues you practiced last week—your thoughts, states, bodily sensations, moods, and soft addictions that indicate underlying emotions. Then, tune into yourself more fully to name what you are feeling. Close your eyes, tune in, and connect to your inner being, removed from external cues, and name the feeling(s). The purpose this week is to be able to label an emotion as it is happening and to get in touch with the emotional current that flows through you. You may be surprised at what’s brewing inside!
Update your Purposeful Leadership Process with your insights, beliefs, visions, and more to keep your momentum moving.
Remember, as you begin to parse more of the feelings that are swirling inside of you, you have more capacity to give yourself the true, deep nourishment of tending to yourself. Enjoy this journey into yourself.
Very-Able Assignments
Pleasure and Pain: Ow and Awe
Identify as many instances of pleasure and pain as possible during the day. Scan the day to see when you feel pleasure and when you feel pain. Keep a “tick” list with two columns: pleasure and pain.
Primary-Secondary: Emotional Stew
Now, look under the pleasure and pain you’ve been identifying and name the primary emotions of fear, hurt, anger, sadness, and joy. Pick a moment when you are aware of experiencing either pleasure or pain and name the primary emotions. When you recognize a secondary emotion, or when you feel a complicated or confusing emotion that seems like a bundle or combination of emotions, break it down into its primary components and identify the predominant primary emotion(s) for that period. Use the Feelings List to help you name the feelings.
We know too much and feel too little. At least, we feel too little of those creative emotions from which good life springs.
- Bertrand Russell
Alternatively, you may discover that your emotion is not actually a secondary emotion at all, but a shade or variation on a primary emotion. Use the worksheet called “Primary Feelings (& Indicators You May Be Having One)” to see other words that may describe primary emotions.
A Feeling an Hour
Set a watch or timer to go off every hour. When you hear the timer, close your eyes, then immediately write down the feeling you are having at that moment. Do this for a day or throughout the whole week. Record both primary and secondary emotions.
Try drawing or coloring the expression of the emotion each hour as a way of beginning to express them.
Virtual Empath
Watch other people and mentally label (or check off on the Feelings List) their feelings. Keep the Feelings List near you while you watch a movie and put tick marks next to the feelings you identify in the characters. You can even create a code and write down the feelings you observe at a business meeting, acting as if you are taking notes.
Watch the Documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”
Use the documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” as further practice in observing and labeling feelings. This inspiring documentary shares the story of PBS Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood icon Fred Rogers, who considered his job to be to help children figure out how to express and understand their emotions. While you are watching the documentary, think through the skills you have learned from the quarter so far and see what you observe in the film.
The Blindfold
Remove outside stimuli by putting on a blindfold for at least half an hour and then name the feelings you are having out loud. Do this while talking on the phone, watching a show, sitting at home, or with family or friends. If you are feeling particularly adventuresome, try wearing the blindfold during a family dinner, a meeting, or gathering. Don’t participate in the conversation; only monitor your feelings as the conversation goes on. You can enlist support or even encourage others at a gathering to alternate with you. Do it at different times and situations during the week.
You’ll be amazed at what you are feeling when you are quiet, and your only job is to attune to your feelings inside. As odd as this assignment may sound, our students report tremendous benefit from doing it.
Take Off Your Glasses and Feel
If you wear glasses or contact lenses, remove them for periods of time this week and name the feelings you have. Taking off your glasses helps you focus your attention inside yourself, which can be hard to do when you are focusing on outside cues. Many people report better internal rapport with their feelings when they have their glasses off.
Try it. If you are having an argument, or want to express yourself fully from your heart, take off your glasses. You are more likely to stay in tune with what’s going on inside of you rather than regulating your words and behaviors based on what the other person is feeling or doing. Alternatively, close your eyes and tune into yourself.
Creative Expression
Develop visual images in a collage. Use images or photos in a creative piece representing your emotions—whether on your computer, phone, poster board, a canvas, a PowerPoint, a Prezi, a vision board, or a Pinterest board. You could use a range of magazines and cut out at least ten photos and words or phrases for each primary emotion and then build them into a collage. Or you might wish to divide the blank poster board or paper into emotional zones and put images in each zone or find some other organizing principle.
Other creative alternatives:
Draw, paint, or color each emotion
Collect photos of yourself that reflect the expression of different emotions and arrange them
Write poetry to express each of the primary emotions
Make a feelings playlist: pick out music that reflects the primary emotions
Hypo or Hyper? Continue to Map Your Window of Tolerance
Continue to map your Window of Tolerance that you began in the last lesson. Our goal throughout the quarter
I Know I’m Feeling Something, But What Is It? Using the Feelings Lists
Continue to map your Window of Tolerance that you began in the last lesson. Our goal is to widen the window of the feelings that you can tolerate and integrate, creating a greater ability to feel and think at the same time, to be more aware of what is going on inside of you, and to be with yourself and your feelings more freely.
Notice when you are hypo-aroused—when you are in your frozen reptilian state. What words would describe that state? Some possibilities are: numb, frozen, shut down, disconnected, foggy, flat, not present, detached, slowed down thinking, confused, lack of motivation, feeling drowsy, dizzy, fuzzy, out of touch with your body, slow motion, hopeless/helpless, trapped, feeling shame, hard to think…Add the words, or symbols, that describe you in this state to the hypo-aroused section of your Window of Tolerance map.
Notice the signs of when you are hyper-aroused such as racing thoughts, anxious, obsessive thinking, over-eating, impulsive, overindulging in soft addictions, overwhelmed, chaotic, aggressive, outbursts, restless, shaking, sweating, breathing quickly, shallow breathing, higher heart rate, can’t concentrate, uneasy, edgy, stressed, panic, easily frustrated… Add the words or symbols that describe you in this state to the hyper-aroused section of your Window of Tolerance map.
Expand your awareness to notice the results of as many automatic responses as you can—fight, flight, freeze, attach, and submit—and whether they put you into hypo- or hyper-arousal.
Remember, no new learning can take place in these states, which means there is no nourishment available.
Meaningful Conversations
You have been working on developing more nourishing contact by greeting five people every day, greeting and exchanging at least two conversational “volleys” with a minimum of three people every day, and making eye contact with people as you are talking to them.
This week, greet a new person every day and find out one thing about them. Keep track of the number of people you greet and what you found out about them. (And you can keep greeting people, exchanging volleys, and make eye contact!)
Measuring Your Mastery: The 30 Feelings
Use the 30 Feelings Test to assess your journey of recognizing, feeling, and labeling your emotions. In an hour, name 30 distinct feelings you are experiencing. (These aren’t 30 unique feelings, but rather sensing 30 distinct instances of feelings within an hour.
Close your eyes or use the blindfold for assistance. This test can be more challenging than some earlier exercises, in that people often aren’t aware of their range of feelings.
This test helps you focus on and identify a startling variety of emotions. No matter how many feelings you were aware of within the hour, you will have learned more about your level of emotional awareness.
Share Your Feelings and What You Are Learning
Remember, when you say your feelings out loud, you activate the speech centers and access even more higher-level functioning. Share your feelings with others this week. Take more risks in being more real with naming your feelings with family, friends, coworkers, etc.
Teach others the power of emotions. Invite them on the journey with you so that they can experience the feelings exercises and develop even more of their emotional intelligence.
BY THE END OF THIS , YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO:
Increasingly recognize pleasure and pain as you are experiencing it
Label the primary feelings you are having in the moment related to pain and pleasure
Label secondary emotions and the primary emotions that comprise them
Name feelings in the moment you are having them by tuning into yourself
Close your eyes and name the feeling(s) you are having
Increasingly be aware of what you are feeling in the moment and throughout your days
WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED THIS MONTH AND HOW HAVE YOU GROWN?
MORE Happiness Begins with Self-Care.
You’ve discovered the Myth of Victimhood and how it sabotages true self care.
You’ve begun the journey to real nourishment by improving your relationship with your emotions.
You may have realized that the very act of tuning into yourself and accessing your emotions leads you to more peace because you know what’s going on inside of you, rather than just numbing feelings or skating on the surface.
Touching your feelings feeds your deeper yearning—knowing that you exist, being seen and touched, experiencing life fully.
As you develop your self-awareness, you can more fully chart your own course in life toward more nourishment, intimacy, satisfaction, and purpose.
