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How do you learn to recognise and name a feeling

Deleted user
over 1 year ago

Well well.. a very important topic for me.

How to name a feeling is a huge struggle. I could describe myself as a colour blind person who is looking at a very long colour palette. My emotions and feelings are the hundreds of colours in the palette and I'm the person who can't see more than blue, red and yellow and hundreds of shades of grey. Although I'm very sensitive and I know that my emotional landscape is very rich (hundreds of hues in my palette), I can't always name my feeling (recognise the hue for what it is), therefore I don't know how to manage it. An example, although I felt anxious in many situations in my life, I've never knew that this feeling is anxiety until last therapy session when my therapist said "when you feel anxious it's good to think of ...." And I was like "wait a minute, is this what I just described to her now (racing thoughts, restlessness, stomach pain..) is called anxiety? Wow, I finally have a name for this feeling!".. even tho I don't consider names as useful info at all, when it comes to feelings, I think it's important to name them in order to memorize it easily and research how to manage it.

Question here is, is there a book, therapy, technique or anything that would help me recognise and name my feelings? Also, am I now describing Alexithymia? I tend to really relate to others and it sort of feels like I could recognise how others feel more than myself..

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  • over 1 year ago
    Hi Lee
    Below is a post I put on a while ago. Don’t know if it will help. You talk of a long colour palette. I did a visual college where I put a long colour palette on  next to trying to describe emotions. Alexithymia is Greek for no words for emotions. I wonder if there are other ways of explaining. Maybe words don’t fit so we don’t use them. There are 8 different Tibetan words for happiness. My emotions are visual shapes so how can any fit a word exactly. Is it like metaphor. Aristotle said no metaphor fits reality exactly.

    Once upon a time in the 1980s I was in the bath listening to Samuel Barber’s “Adagio For Strings”.  Then I heard my girlfriend come home. She walked in the bathroom and said uurgh! music to die to! I was surprised as I thought it was happy music. On the odd occasion over the years I have though to myself why is it say sad music. I have often wondered about such stuff. It does seem to be true that I find it hard to collect words for some things in the way that a literary person or someone describing music would.
    It has taken a couple of decades but recently I thought about what would a happy piece of music be. I thought about Shiny Happy People by REM and watched the YouTube video. I love the song. It involves people smiling while dancing up and down. Ahh! I can see/hear a difference. This is happy because they are moving up and down at a particular speed and smiling. I can see this visually. But then it is their speed of movement which is a spatial distance and speed from the floor which is with the meaning.  That can’t be the only criteria of happiness though surely. Upwards is from somewhere and in this case it is the floor.  However I see the Adagio as uplifting in which there is the concept of upwards which must be up from somewhere. Up has to be co-dependant on a frame  of reference. Spatially could this be a floor therefore length.
    The Adagio has beauty therefore a nice feeling so what is wrong with saying it is happy. Recently I read however that it is regarded as mournful and played at funerals.  I have been into Buddhism however and there is a notion that things share properties with other things. So maybe it is not so clear cut. But hang on it would be daft to say they are the same wouldn’t it.
    Ok I am beginning to understand something and if you guys want to have a laugh at this then have a laugh on me! I sometimes laugh. It is just finding words for emotions and needing something visual to recognise a difference. Yes I think/feel visually and synaesthetically.  An emotion in me will be seen as a picture with colour but not necessarily figurative (an object or person). An emotion can be a splash of two colours with a gradient between them. Any spot on the continuum between them is a part of change of emotion. Sometimes one of the colours can represent the future and the emotion that it is.
    As well I still believe it is not so simple. Words are hardly ever completely spot on the mark in identifying properties and qualities of feeling states. To me all emotions are images but even symbols are not exact and the taxonomy of words seeks to reduce emotions. Images in my mind/body can be abstract and they are not completely accurate. Also how can science reduce an emotion to a square if it is an image. Could all this let me off the hook or, well people would have a point in correcting me. Well maybe I finally am learning it is not happy music but music to die to sigh!
  • over 1 year ago in reply to Aaron

    This is a great example of my favourite kind of music, which I describe as "sad beautiful music". It makes me feel sort of wistful and longing, not actually sad. It makes me smile and relax. If it had been played at a funeral of someone I loved then it might well make me feel sad. There is music which makes me cry because of the emotions it is linked to from sad times or funerals, but that could probably happen with an otherwise happy song as well as a sad one. If I was dying I guess this music would be a nice soundtrack to go out to, but I think it is harsh to call it that! Though I wouldn't describe it is as happy either.

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  • over 1 year ago in reply to Aaron

    This is a great example of my favourite kind of music, which I describe as "sad beautiful music". It makes me feel sort of wistful and longing, not actually sad. It makes me smile and relax. If it had been played at a funeral of someone I loved then it might well make me feel sad. There is music which makes me cry because of the emotions it is linked to from sad times or funerals, but that could probably happen with an otherwise happy song as well as a sad one. If I was dying I guess this music would be a nice soundtrack to go out to, but I think it is harsh to call it that! Though I wouldn't describe it is as happy either.

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