Feelings Wheel

Hello Therapy Tools

The ability to experience and express emotion is more important than you might realize. As the felt response to a given situation, emotions play a key part in your reactions. While emotions can have a helpful role in your daily life, they can take a toll on your health and relationships when they start to feel out of control.

Part of taking responsibility of our actions and emotions is being able to properly identify WHAT exactly is going on inside of us. Without that key information we’re just as bad as toddlers running around frustrated because we can’t communicate what we feel and want.

The first wheel right below is the typical feelings wheel you’ll see when you go to therapy or research an emotion wheel. It’s helpful for expanding your emotional vocabulary. Or if you’re working backwards from a specific emotion, what the root feeling behind it is.

After figuring out what you’re feeling there are usually some follow up questions/skills that traditional therapy gives you.

• What happened to make me feel this way?

• Does the situation have a different explanation that might make sense?

• What do I want to do about these feelings?

• Is there a better way of coping with them?

But sometimes when we’re in a mood, the answers to those questions aren’t obvious or the only answer we can come up with is “I don’t know.”

This week I saw the wheel below for the first time. Not only does it portray the same general concept, but it goes on step further to guide you to a place of truth to help you cope with what you are feeling. Teach Sunday School has a lot of good resources! But I’m very impressed with how well this was done and have been able to use it already this week.