Throughout this series on feelings, I’m going to talk about each feeling having an “equal and opposite.” For this to make sense, we need just a little history.

For some time in the mid-20th Century, psychologists considered four main emotional categories: sad, mad, scared, and glad. You may notice“glad” is doing a lot of heavy lifting on that list! First of all, it’s the only feeling on the list with a positive charge, and “glad” is a feeling which encompasses countless other feelings. In designing the Feeling Wheel, psychotherapist Gloria Willcox tweaked the conventional wisdom of her day by subdividing “glad” into three core feelings: joyful, peaceful, and powerful. Willcox chose these three specifically because they paralleled the negatively charged feelings of scared, mad, and sad, resulting in three core feeling pairs:

Sadness and Joy
Anger and Powerfulness
Fear and Peacefulness

While there’s some nuance, these pairs tend to function like poles with a spectrum in between. A higher concentration of any one feeling typically indicates a diminished amount of its opposite. Fearful people feel less peace, while peaceful people feel less fear, and so on. That being said, it is possible for these pairs to exist at the same time, and balance between the two can be a very healthy thing. In fact, when experiencing an undesired amount of any one feeling, introducing its opposite may help to soothe it.

In chaplaincy, I encounter these feeling pairs constantly. Hospitals in particular tend to bring out a lot of fear, anger, and sadness. Whether it’s scary diagnoses, frustrating wait times, or despair surrounding loss, I see the negatively charged emotions every single day. My first mission is to sit with people in these feelings and affirm them.

It’s okay to be sad. Your sadness has a place here.
It’s okay to be scared. Your fear has a place here.
It’s okay to be mad. Your anger has a place here.

But some situations call for a little bit of emotional mediation. Some anger and sadness and fear are intense enough to cause significant dysfunction, and in those situations, I sometimes introduce the opposite feeling.

For example, to prevent someone’s anger from boiling over and causing an incident, I might introduce a feeling of power. To do this, I first need to be tuned into my own feelings so that I can meet the angry person with an attitude of confidence and empathy. As we’ll see later, anger often stems from feeling threatened or disempowered, so I need to feel comfortable that I myself am not under threat. I might help the angry person reclaim some power over the situation by identifying things still within their control and then creating a game plan with them for the next steps.

I should clarify that I’ve spent years learning how to do this, and I still don’t have it down to a science. In fact, I’m currently in the process of going back to school for more training! Bringing in equal and opposite feelings is not something to be done lightly, and if done too quickly or haphazardly (like trying to bring joy into a situation of deep sadness), it can make things worse. I mention it here only because it will become significant as we explore our own feelings in the posts ahead. With each feeling we explore, we will also consider its equal and opposite, and hopefully spending time in each of these three pairs will help us when we feel these feelings ourselves.