Phosphor [&]

(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.

more thoughts:

usually, when we're Really Fucked Up and trying to unfuck ourselves, we kind of go down that list as the first step of unfucking ourselves, because a lot of the time we* don't realize how fucked up we are until we stop and take stock. so we start with how the body and brain feels, since those are the easiest things to Quantify, and we match sensations that are Happening to our mental database of sensations-to-emotionsituations. ("Oh, our neck is all cramped up. That means the thing we're engaging with is causing significant stress somehow.") and from there, we consult past instances of Being This Specific Kind Of Scrungled, which includes data on things that helped and things that didn't help (where a big heuristic is "did this thing we did make us feel shittier after the fact? if yes, maybe don't do it again")

this was, I think, part of why our mental health improved quite a bit post-surgeries - before, it was absolutely unbearable to exist in our body, which made it notably hard to connect to it in order to begin the unfuckening process

*(me especially)

I think ultimately this boils down to "we realized that it was most helpful to connect feelings to quantifiable and readily observed measurements than to words, which are significantly more ambiguous and therefore harder to act on, particularly during times when our reasoning is already impaired." which is probably a very autistic take tbh

also "the ultimate goal of being able to identify feelings is not figuring out which words are the Right ones but rather to steer ourselves away from doing shit we'll regret later," which is pretty in line with how we approach Identification Of Things in general