Julia Papale, Advanced Clinical Fellow

A couple of months ago I wrote about emotions and how they serve a motivational purpose by alerting us to satisfy our needs. The emotions wheel is one tool to help expand our emotional vocabulary beyond the basic core emotions like sadness and happiness so that we can better identify our feelings. But how do we actually feel them? Take the acronym RULER:

Recognize
Understand
Label
Express
Regulate

As I mentioned in the previous post, emotions originate in our body, and when we are tapped into our physical sensations, we can typically feel that something is off-kilter. Whether it be a tightening of the chest, a queasiness in the stomach, a change in the temperature of our skin, or even our mind beginning to race, we can recognize that something is happening in us, whether we’ve deemed it positive or negative. We then need to investigate to understand its intensity and where this emotion might have come from, what happened that made me feel this way?

Next comes labeling, where 60% of the work occurs. As soon as we can give what’s happening a name, the less out of control we feel. Emotion doesn’t blindly take over us, where we might unconsciously try to avoid what inescapably resurfaces in some other way. Rather, we can give it less power by separating ourselves from it with the knowledge that the only way through is through. It’s surprising how quickly the emotion ends up passing once it’s been named.

The next step is the actual release, the expression of the emotion. This occurs on a fundamental level by aligning our inner experience with our outer experience in a culturally appropriate way, allowing our facial expressions, voice, body language, and/or actions to reflect how we’re feeling.

Lastly, we regulate through productive actions that help us to manage emotion. What this looks like will be specific to each individual and takes some time to explore in terms of what is helpful and what is not. Perhaps it’s reaching for the box of cookies or the bottle of wine, or it’s something more “adaptive” like exercising, journaling, or talking to a friend. Whatever it may be, I encourage you to take some time to explore your strategies – are there any you’d like to leave behind? New ones you’d like to try and incorporate into your toolkit?

The full range of the emotional experience is what makes us human. While there may be some emotions that we hate, we can learn to value them and feel less ashamed or afraid when inevitably they do arise, knowing we are equipped to handle them.