The Three B’s of Feeling Identification
As a mental health clinician, I have had clients from the age of six to seventy ask me how to identify and express their feelings. In many 21st century developed countries, academic and intellectual development has taken precedence over emotional acuity, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the therapist’s office.
While intellectual awareness is certainly important, rationale alone cannot help someone who is highly elevated to emotionally regulate, nor can it be the mainstay of healthy intimate relationships. Ultimately, a balance between reason and emotion is needed for optimal mental health.
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy touts the concept of the Wise Mind to reflect this balance. The chart below (courtesy of Therapist Aid) provides a helpful breakdown of the concept of the Wise Mind, which is essentially a blend between the rational and emotive minds.
The development of the Wise Mind requires accurate feeling identification and expression, a skill which is taken for granted if not neglected in contemporary society. As such, it is more important than ever to become well-versed in the recognition of your feelings.
One way to practice feeling identification is through the three B’s–what messages are your body, your beliefs, and your behaviors sending?
Your Body
Ample research has been done on the mind-body connection, or how our mental and emotional states influence bodily symptoms and vice-versa. I tell my clients that our bodies often leave us breadcrumbs, or clues, about how we are feeling. Panic attacks and other emotional implosions occur when we fail to take note of the breadcrumbs and respond accordingly. Examples of somatic symptoms driven by emotional states include but are not limited to:
Sweating
Trembling
Dizziness
Elevated breathing and heart rate
Numbness or tingling
Headaches and migraines
Stomach aches
Tenseness in the neck and shoulders
Tenseness in the throat and jaw
Recognizing these cues is the first step to tending to your emotional states and preventing further escalation.
Your Beliefs
The concept that our beliefs lead to either positive or negative emotional states is certainly not a novel concept. In fact, this concept is the cornerstone of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and several other therapeutic theories. However, it is less known that we often act on beliefs that are marginally related, if not completely unconnected, to the events that spurred them.
Once we come to recognize our negative thought patterns, the initial triggers almost become inconsequential, because our perception of events shapes our feelings more than the events themselves. I’ll say it again: our perception of events shapes our feelings more than the events themselves.
What’s more, our beliefs are often implicit, which requires us to be more intentional in noticing them. For example, when you forget to do the dishes after your partner asked you three times, you may not explicitly tell yourself you are a failure, but your mind and emotions may begin to operate out of this belief. You may lash out at your partner in defensiveness and shame, believing your forgetfulness makes you inferior.
When learning to pay better attention to your implicit beliefs, you might ask yourself the question: What do I believe [insert event or experience] says about my value or my future?
Your Behaviors
Dysfunctional behaviors are typically the harbinger of challenging emotional states. Ideally, you will learn to recognize your feelings through your body and your beliefs before they take form in your actions. However, it is still valuable to learn to notice how you typically respond when in an emotionally elevated state, as this can provide a guide for alternative actions in the future.
Examples of emotionally-charged behaviors include:
Yelling
Screaming
Crying
Numbness or dissociation
Isolating
Blank stare
Defensiveness
Passive aggression
Verbal or physical attacks
Excessive or insufficient sleep
Excessive eating, screen time, or other addictive behaviors
In learning to identify and replace dysfunctional behaviors, it will be key to recognize the value or feeling you are trying to achieve with the behavior. For example, if you are aiming to achieve a sense of belonging through excessive social media use, it will be important to replace that with a more effective community building activity, such as a rec softball league.
Concluding Thoughts
Learning to recognize your bodily cues, beliefs, and behaviors will set the stage for you to put words to your feelings. While feeling identification can require meticulous attention to detail, it will ultimately become more natural as you familiarize yourself with your own patterns and modes of thinking.
Other Resources:
For more information on how the body stores and re-enacts trauma or emotional difficulty, I highly recommend The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Vander Kolk.
The ABC model of Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy can aid you in drawing connections between life events and resulting beliefs about yourself or your future.
Using variations of this anger cycle can help you to identify the various components of your problematic emotional states.
When all else fails, a good old-fashioned feelings wheel can provide you with language to describe your emotions and expand your EQ when interacting with others.