Eleventh Exercise: Create Your Personal Emotion Dictionary

I’ve had a bit of time away from writing. First, I got a job – huge relief. That took the pressure off and led to a bout of laziness (delicious). Then, just when I was considering returning  to my laptop, I got quite ill. I’ve now recovered, but it’s been a period of difficult emotions. I started to feel I couldn’t get anything right. Sometimes I got worried by my own destructiveness. I was awash with shame and regret at my own behaviour towards others. Then I woke up one day thinking about a specific part of an abusive relationship, and berated myself for allowing it (all of it, maybe)  to happen. It was something about the trust I’d shown that particularly got to me. As if trust caused the abusive acts. One to ponder.

It’s good, therefore, that I’m back to my project. I’m not particularly looking forward to this exercise as it will require too much honesty on my part, but I guess it will help somehow.

“For this exercise, you’ll create your own “emotion dictionary” by reflecting on how you feel specific emotions. By identifying patterns in the way that you have experienced  certain emotions in the past, you will be able to more easily recognize and name them when you feel them in the future. This exercise could take some time to complete…”

In this exercise (I’m already getting a slight feeling of dread in my stomach) there are grids to fill out for the emotions below –

Sadness

Disgust

Happiness

Fear

Anger

Love

Guilt

Shame

What a fine list.  What strikes me that it’s easy enough to feel all these things, but much harder to reflect on them.

Let’s look at the grid for Sadness  as I’ve been feeling this a lot lately.

“Finally, reflect on what else you can observe and describe about your experience when feeling the emotion, using the questions from the exercise “Observing and Describing Emotions”. Are there certain physical sensations, expressions, behaviours or interpretations that normally accompany this emotion for you?”

WHAT DOES SADNESS FEEL LIKE FOR ME?

Enough of quoting from the book, now I need to do some actual work. These days I can very quickly start to feel sad. A prompting event for sadness can be almost anything – lost friendships, dislocations (I moved around a bit when young, and it didn’t do me much good, though at the time I just got on with it.) And, of course, thinking about lost relationships, bereavements, times I’ve given up when I should have persisted – these can all make me feel sad.  But I don’t have many action urges in relation to sadness. I don’t do much crying as Prozac, which I’ve taken for many years, tends to damp down tears. Which is fine by me as crying rarely makes me feel any better.

I did read somewhere (I forget where) that sad feelings can be best dealt with if we accept them and recognise they will pass. So my action urge for sadness, if I have one, is really not to get too bogged down in the feeling. I’ve been almost destroyed by things in the past and could only cope by taking to my bed for large expanses of time. I don’t seem to need to do this nowadays, but never say never. Also, I now wonder whether these retreats to the relative safety of the duvet weren’t actually about sadness. They may have been more  about feeling exposed and rejected – also difficult emotions for me.

I don’t really want to try another emotion, but I’ll force myself to look at Shame. This is something I often feel. To add to the mix, there have been many times in my life where I know I haven’t felt enough shame. It’s all rather unfortunate.

Prompting event for shame – well, there can be so many,  and I’m sure that my OCD intrusive thought patterns don’t help me here. I often find that shame pounces – I  will wake up, and something I’m ashamed of will be the first thing I think of. It can feel physically unbearable, and I used to get the urge to hurl myself at walls or start banging my head against something. Nowadays I force myself to stay with the feeling until it subsides, whilst knowing it could come back at any time.

I should add that my general view of life is that there’s too much shame and humiliation. I don’t agree with cancel culture. In most cases, I don’t see why people have to resign from their jobs rather than change their approach, if that’s what’s needed.  I don’t even think ruling that any one group is ‘unacceptable” (while the rest of us are alright) gets us very far. If I had a motto for my view of life, it would be that ‘everything needs to be looked at in depth, and it all needs to be unpacked’. Not very catchy, but that’s what I believe. And yet applying this to myself is almost impossible. I may be slowly getting better at bearing the feelings associated with shame, but it’s a slow process and I’m long in the tooth.

Back to our authors – “Naming our emotions can give us self-confidence and power, but it can be very difficult. It requires us to be aware of our emotions and to be knowledgeable about various emotional words and experiences – something we’re (usually) not taught in school, and often not taught at all! Practicing labelling and describing our emotions can help us improve. The more specific we can get about how we’re feeling, the better we can understand ourselves, and the better we can communicate our needs to others.”

This was the most difficult exercise yet. I haven’t looked at the other emotions like love, anger or disgust, as they bother me less. I seem to have at least half a handle on these feelings. But it’s clear I don’t have a grip on shame, and so there’s work to be done here. I checked online, and there are workbooks and resources specifically for this emotion. An example is below –