Topic: People. Feelings and emotions

Topic: People. Feelings and emotions

Emotions are an essential part of who you are, but they can be messy, complicated, and downright confusing at times. Knowing how to name your emotions and talk about them — with both yourself and others — is a key part of developing emotional health.

You don’t have to navigate the process of identifying your emotions alone.

Paul Ekman, a psychologist and leading researcher on emotions, surveyed more than 100 scientists and used their input to develop what’s known as the Atlas of Emotions. This online interactive tool breaks down emotions into five main categories:

• 
  anger
  
• 
  fear
  
• 
  sadness
  
• 
  disgust
  
• 
  enjoyment
  

Keep in mind that this is just one way of categorizing emotions. For example, a 2017 study suggests there are 27 categories of emotion.
But Ekman’s concept of five main types of emotion offers a good framework for breaking down the complexity of all the feels. Here’s a look at what each of these five categories involves.
ATLAS OF EMOTIONS

Notice how the same trigger can lead to a different response, depending on the emotion we feel.

Other People’s Feelings

It seems like many of us have a default way of relating in which we feel responsible for how other people feel. A major alternative to this that has been put forward is the idea of ‘owning’ our emotions. This is the notion that people are only responsible for what they, themselves, feel.
I’m going to argue that both of these ways of seeing the situation are limited. An alternative would be to practice being with our own feelings and those of others (without trying to deny, avoid or escape them, or taking all the responsibility for them). This involves recognising that we are not completely separate selves, but rather that we are intrinsically connected with others.
‘You made me feel…’
It seems that a common taken-for-granted way of understanding feelings is that we cause other people to feel things and that we should take complete responsibility for this. People often say ‘you made me feel angry/scared/good/happy, etc.’ and we rarely question the truth of this.

A common extension of this is that if somebody expresses a feeling in relation to something that we are involved with we feel entirely responsible for them having that feeling. Given that we tend, also, to divide feelings into purely positive and purely negative emotions we may then approach the world in a way which attempts to create only positive feelings in others and no negative feelings. We may feel wonderful if those around us are happy (to the extent that we put pressure on them to be so) and distraught if they are not.


Owning our emotions

Perhaps in response to the problems with this common way of viewing other people’s feelings, several authors on topics like assertiveness, relationships and conflict management put forward the alternative approach that we are not at all responsible for other people’s emotions. The idea of owning our emotions suggests that nobody makes us feel anything except ourselves. We can choose how to make sense of other people’s behaviours, and thus we are in control of any emotional response we have: it belongs to us. An extension of this idea is that we would certainly reject any accusation that we had made anybody feel anything.

Sources: https://www.healthline.com/health/list-of-emotions
http://rewriting-the-rules.com