Natalie Moore, LMFT, teaches how to identify and name your emotions, a foundational therapy skill. She covers seven basic emotions and how they scale in intensity, from irritation to rage. She recommends using a Feelings Wheel or Nonviolent Communication needs list to get specific about what you're actually feeling.
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Feelings! You have them, and I'm going to talk about how you can start to identify them. Hi there, Natalie Moore, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist here. Welcome to day 7 of this series I'm doing about the techniques that I teach clients early on in our work together. So if you haven't checked out videos 1 through 6, definitely check those out. And today on day 7, I'm going to be talking about identifying your feelings. Whether you like it or not, you have feelings. You are a human. Even if you have been denying your feelings for a very long time, trust me, they're there and they want to come out. Let's talk about why you should identify and express your feelings. In order to have really good mental health and really good relationships, we have to get good at identifying and naming our emotions and expressing those to other people. In order to work through difficult emotions, we have to first know what's bothering us, and we have to know what we're feeling so that we can start to move through that emotion. I will start with the basic emotions. So these are anger, happiness, surprise, disgust, sadness, fear, and shame. So these are the basic emotions, and all other emotions are combinations of these or different gradations of these in terms of their intensity. So for example, for something like anger, it might start with irritation and annoyance. It might move to frustration, which might move to anger, and then the more intense version might be rage or explosiveness. In therapy, one thing that you're going to hear me, if you work with me, or another therapist ask you a lot is, "What are you feeling right now?" We do this because we want you to get better at identifying and naming your own emotions so that you can help yourself work through them and not have to experience them as intensely moving forward. So if you can get really acquainted with yourself and notice anger when it starts as irritation or annoyance, you can do something to address that before it turns into anger or rage. Also, if in therapy you're working through past experiences that happened to you, maybe they were childhood experiences or traumas that you went through, being able to name and identify your emotions is a really healthy way of releasing up pent-up emotion that for whatever reason didn't have a chance to get expressed at that time when you were feeling it. I hope that this video was helpful for you. I have a really great tool that can help you get started, actually a couple of them. I'm going to link them down below. The first one is part of the Nonviolent Communication training course. There's a needs and feelings list that I'm going to attach, and then also there's something that's really helpful called a Feelings Wheel. That's really great for people who are more visual and, and might connect more to seeing all the different emotions written out on a wheel. And what's cool is it kind of starts in the— starts in the middle with the basic emotions and then goes out and describes, you know, gives the word for each of the emotions that are related to that one as well. Again, I hope that you found this video helpful. If you resonated with anything that I said, please share your comments in the comment section below. If you have any video requests, please leave them there as well. I'm always happy to do video requests. And stay tuned for the next video. The next one is, is very much related to this, and it has to do with identifying your needs. Stay tuned. If you like this video, please hit like, subscribe, share with a friend, share on your social channels. I so appreciate you helping me get the word out about holistic mental health. Lastly, I am a licensed therapist in California, and I provide telehealth therapy to the entire state of California. So if you are a Californian and you want therapy, you can request a free 15-minute phone consultation at my website, which you will see on the screen, and I'll provide a link below as well. Thanks so much. Until next time, be well. Bye!
