Identifying emotions key to coping

One of the cornerstones of good mental health is the ability to stay in touch with your emotions and accurately label these emotions and your responses to them.

Because they are unable to accurately identify the emotions they are feeling – anger, apathy or indifference, for example – some people have problems making the necessary adjustments to everyday problems.

I frequently ask clients and patients to describe their reactions to certain frequently encountered events. After 20 years, I still am surprised at how many people cannot describe their feelings.

In marital counseling it is extremely important to educate each member of the marital unit on keeping in touch with the feelings, emotions and signals of their spouse. There are people who are very sensitive to the cues and verbal nuances of their bosses or employees, but their turn this sensitivity off when they get home. By doing so, they lose the benefit of one of the important parts of communication. If you don’t try to understand the responses of other people, you will end up confused and your relationship will suffer.

To get in touch with your feelings, try asking yourself these questions:

• How do you feel when you walk out into the sunshine on a sparkling spring day which has followed days of cloudy, overcast and cold weather? Most of us would describe our feelings as happy, exhilarated, and filled with gratitude. Put more simply, glad to be alive and a part of this great planet.

• What are your responses to a beautiful sunset? A full moon coming up over the horizon on a fall night? The quiet and majestic beauty of fresh fallen snow? Let yourself feel and experience these emotions and then correctly label them.

• What makes you angry? Get in touch with your feelings when you hear or see an unpleasant situation.

At an early age, talk to your children about feelings. Get them to express their responses to daily situations in life, such as disappointment and hurt.

Learn to identify grief. Most mental health professionals agreed that talking over the feelings of the recent astronaut tragedy was a key element in learning to deal with the event. They urged parents and educators to listen to children express their feelings after witnessing the explosion on film.

Because I feel all adults should periodically check themselves and see if their feeling responses are appropriate to life events, I check on myself. Next week I will share with you some of these tests.

Harold H. LeCrone, Jr., Ph.D. Copyright 1986