Before we get too deep into this exploration of feelings, what is a feeling? There’s a little bit of nuance here since so many different authors define the term differently. For our purposes, “feelings” and “emotions” are going to be somewhat interchangeable words, but both have deep psychological resonance.

For this series, a feeling is an emotional sensation which bubbles up within you in response to your experiences and thoughts, and the feeling’s charge (i.e. negative or positive) and intensity are beyond your control. Your feelings are your feelings. Period. If you’re angry, you’re angry. If you’re happy, you’re happy. However, you do have control over what you do with those feelings, and with a little attention to your feelings, you may be able to soothe them. This is the reason we call it “anger management” instead of “anger elimination.” The feeling is not within your control, but your reaction to the feeling is.

With this in mind, there are some words which we describe as “feelings” which really aren’t. For example, my personal favorite of these is “grief.” Grief is a process of remembrance and release which may involve any or all of the feelings we’ll explore in this series. Grief may encompass anger, sadness, joy, fear, the whole shebang. Similarly, “love” is not a feeling (though it may be accompanied by joy and anxiety and the others); it’s an action driven by feelings, and over time, it becomes a choice we renew each day.

There are also some words we try to label as feelings which could really be any number of feelings. For example, has anyone ever told you they feel “hurt”? That could mean they feel sad or angry or nervous or any sort of way! Also, beware descriptions of feelings that take on the passive voice. “Hurt” implies someone else has acted on me; it doesn’t say anything about my reaction. Another example might be “bored,” which always implies wasted time but could communicate anger or sadness. In fact, different feeling wheels position “bored” all over the place! Of course, there are some exceptions to the passive voice thing. For example, “pissed off” is technically in the passive voice but still pretty effectively communicates anger! It may be helpful to ask the question: Does this word really say how I am feeling internally, or does it only describe the situation happening around me?

With all this in mind, we’re going to focus on Willcox’s six core feelings mentioned in the previous post: sad, mad, scared, joyful, peaceful, powerful. Over the next few weeks, we’ll look at the relationships between sadness and joy, anger and power, and fear and peace. We’ll examine how we sometimes act on these feelings and look at some ways to interact with them healthily. I’ll also provide a few anecdotes here and there to make things a little more concrete. There’s one other big feeling-related concept that merits its own post though, so more on feelings’ “equals and opposites” next time.