Talking about your feelings can prevent drastic action

I’ve been reading these extreme stories on social media of people who throw relatives out of their houses or out of their lives or say hateful things. It all seems like an exaggeration, or like a movie, but I also feel the pain. They don’t know what else to do.

What I have come to see is that they don’t talk about their feelings when they first occur, so they fester and get larger and larger until they feel compelled to take an extreme action. There’s nothing left.

Talking about emotions is tough. It’s especially tough if you are surrounded by people who also don’t talk about emotions. I’ve been in repeated arguments with someone in my life just because we didn’t talk about our feelings. I’ve been getting better at it, both identifying my own emotions and others. I’ve found that when I name an emotion, either my own or someone else’s, it takes the sting out of the situation. It doesn’t change the facts of the situation, but just makes it easier to handle.

A tool that I used was the book by Brene Brown called Atlas of the Heart. There are also a lot of resources of graphics that depict emotions in a wheel. Both of these tools help give us a richer emotional vocabulary.

Here’s a link to a post I wrote sometime ago about listening for emotions. Let me know if you try it.