Name that Feeling

Feelings.

When I was a kid there was a song that - when it showed up on the radio - made me want to turn the dial.

It was maudlin, sappy and not what a young guy who wanted his rock music fast and driving wanted to hear.

Feelings ... by Morris Albert. Or is it Albert Morris? It has the repetitive chorus - "Feelings... whoa, whoa, whoa…. feelings."

It’s interesting how this word - feeling - is viewed.

The media, the culture often poke fun at talk therapy by pointing at the seemingly overused question - "How does that make you feel." I get it. Perhaps that can be an easy fall back for counselors who don't know where to go.

But the focus on feelings gets a bum rap. The derision may come from just how thorny the experience of "feeling" can be. We are masters of avoiding, masking, distracting from what we feel.

Doing so - however - deprives us of a most basic reference point of the mind.

I think it's not easy for most of us to put our finger on what we feel.

But man, it's an exercise that is worth doing and, more often than we are doing it.

I often say that there is an absolute right to feel what you are feeling. But we also have a responsibility to ourselves to name that feeling. The value of naming emotions and feelings is best described by neuroscientist Dan Siegel, who simply says, “you name it to tame it.”

This might be a good time to mention the difference between emotion and feeling. First, there isn't a definitive answer. I work with the idea that emotions are the raw data of the body and mind. Feelings are the interpretation of that raw data. Emotions can be seen as the subconscious and feelings are more more conscious.

Going back to naming the emotion and the feeling, Siegel says that noticing them deflates the intensity. This give you an ability to integrate the information from the raw emotion; examine the interpretation via the feeling; and respond to the information rather than react.

Feelings can be complex, or more simply put, there could be more than one. Imagine that you are feeling frustrated with a colleague at work who isn't pulling his weight. This can also include feelings of disapproval and perhaps even overwhelm if you are shouldering the load.

Recently I stumbled on a website that called Six Seconds. The creators of the site are working to improve emotional intelligence. They introduce something called the "Wheel of Emotions," which they report was devised by Psychologist Robert Plutchik.

The idea is to give us a wide array of emotions and feelings to help us with naming them. The wheel also shows how emotions are related to one another. For example - fear is the opposite of anger. The former has us wanting to protect. The latter wants us to push through a barrier. It's worth playing around with it.

Here's something else worth doing.

When you find yourself pushing past that gnawing feeling... take a pause... give a moment to check it out.

And the next time you are asked "How does that make you feel?” … don't blow by the question.