Understanding your emotions: Do you have the words to describe how you are feeling?

In counselling sessions, I often speak with my clients about what they are feeling and/or where in their body they can sense these emotions. The tricky part of this is finding the right words to describe sensations or feelings.

I use two main tools to help with this:

1. The emotion wheel

I find this to be a great go to visual aid for expanding your emotions vocabulary. It can be used in a variety of ways, either simply to find a new word to describe whats going on for you, or may be to explore something that is sitting behind the word that you already know.

For example, you may recognise the feeling of anger, but when we sit with it and explore the alternative words, you may identify with bitter and then consider what it is to be violated. This can open up conversations around boundaries that you have made and that have been ignored or disrespected.

2. Mood Cards for understanding emotions and feelings

I love working with mood cards as they offer a physical focus to clients whilst they look for the words, phrase or picture on the card that matches what they are sensing in themselves.

With mood cards, there are also lots of different ways of working.

You may pick a random card as a conversation starter. Alternatively you may pick out multiple cards to explore the complexity of emotions from one experience or can also use them to identify movement through feelings.

It can sometimes feel a little strange at first to use tools to start exploring the language of emotions. Sometimes we have to take that leap and try something different to see if it is something that will work for us.

If you would like to explore and understand yourself from a different perspective, feel free to get in touch. I offer online, phone and in person counselling sessions.