(fallen london stamps by (thoughts on figuring out feelings, copied from a post I made elsewhere)
If you're looking for advice: mine is to not worry too much at first about which exact word to use. Focus instead on:
- How your body feels in the moment. Are your muscles tense? Do you feel nauseous? Are there tears burning behind your eyes?
- What your thoughts are like. Is there a specific thought repeating over and over? Are there a lot of thoughts running through your head, too fast to keep up with? Is there nothing at all?
- What you feel compelled to do. Do you feel an urge to cry? Scream? Run and hide?
- What your behavior in the moment is. Do you want to cry, but you're holding it back? Do you want to stand up for yourself, but instead you can't seem to speak or move? Why?
- What you think about it all after the fact. Like "wow, I shouldn't have yelled at that person, it only made things worse." Or "I feel bad about how that went, but I'm not sure what the correct way to handle it was."
I think part of the complexity of identifying emotions is that we're trying to apply discrete labels to what is a very complicated and messy continuum - we rarely feel just one thing at a time, and the word "anger" can be used to describe two very different reactions in two very different situations. It may be easier to start by learning to identify sensations and reactions as they appear in the moment (as well as ways of handling them that help or don't help), and then pattern-match them to the feeling-word that most clearly communicates what you're going through to other people, rather than trying to do it all at once.
