Emotion Board

I went through a traumatic life change recently, which ended up being a blessing. Like Mary Oliver says….

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.

“The Uses of Sorrow,” Mary Oliver

In the months (and months!) of therapy that followed, I learned that I was actually pretty terrible at recognizing how I was feeling at any given moment. Sure, there were lots of good reasons I had developed this kind of emotional agnosia, but whatever: I was mostly interested in trying to reverse it.

One of my renters when she moved out left behind a laminated green sheet with a list of primary emotions (fear, joy) and secondary feelings (loneliness, excitement) on it as well as a really helpful list on the reverse of judgments that we sometimes confuse with emotions/feelings: i.e., we don’t *feel* disrespected; that’s a combination of a real feeling (shame or anger) with an evaluation (i.e., this person doesn’t think I am as valuable/important as they are). Anyway, I wanted to come up with a way of visualizing the primary and secondary feelings because I’m a visual learner, and I remembered this stack of cool postcards I’ve accumulated from the Public Domain Review over the years in return for supporting them. From the stack, I selected images that strongly reminded me of the feelings on the green sheet. I already had a ribbon memo board up in the kitchen that I used for bills, receipts, etc. I took those down, and at least once a day, I tried to pause and select from the stack of postcards those that resonated with how I was feeling and make a tableau of cards on the emotion board.

I don’t do it as much anymore–maybe once a week. But it really did help me learn to visualize/verbalize how I was feeling. Just the physical form of the postcards made my emotions real and forced me to validate them in ways I had tended not to before: “No, I’m not angry.” “Sure, that’s okay….” etc. I still tend to hide my emotions from the people around me, but now at least I’m better about not hiding them from myself.