Emotional Intelligence and Feeling Words

Words cannot explain how I feel. This sentence is much overused in our daily lives. This is not good emotional intelligence modelling to our children if we are telling them we are not smart enough to explain how we feel .We have words to assist us explain how we feel. What we are deficit in is the uses of those words to adequately capture our feelings. Emotional descriptions are neither prized nor welcomed in many situations so as a group we have trained ourselves not to use emotional words in fear we are neurotic, girlie or silly: outcasts in a world that values non-emotional language.

The English language has over two thousand words to describe feelings. Typically, any of us will use only six words in our entire repertoire of descriptive feeling words. Of those six words, they fall into three sets of opposites, for example happy/sad, upset/calm, scared/peaceful.

Emotional intelligence includes being able to clearly articulate how we are feeling. Emotional intelligence, in part, is the ability to express our deep grief, fear, sickness, disillusionment and bewilderment over any of the dreadful world occurrences that assault us on the news nightly or the soul attacks that we live with on any given day. Emotional intelligence involves pinpointing how we feel and giving those feelings a voice.

Without a voice, the feelings grow and take us over. The feelings prevent us from doing certain things because we may be scared, confused and emotionally impoverished. Likewise, without a voice to say how they are feeling prior to bad things happening, our children may be at grave risk of harm.

Do not allow your children to develop a monotone, “words cannot explain how I feel,” dialogue. Give children the tools to identify and articulate the feelings inside of them. Teach them the subtle differences between feeling layers. Teach them a multitude of words so that they can adequately explain to you how they feel about the behaviours of another person. The more emotional language children have, the more their messages of concern have positive action impact prior to bad things happening. Emotional language is a preventative tool that every child needs to be gifted with.

To manage personal risk to another person, we require knowledge of how that person is feeling. We can only definitely know how others (our children) are feeling if they can clearly communicate what is going on in the space that nobody else can see: their emotional self.

The formula for clear communication is:

A (affect): I feel (insert a feeling word, not a thought)

B (behaviour): when you/I (state the behaviour of the other person)

C (cognitions):  because (your thoughts on the way you see the situation).

I feel desolate when I hear that others have inadequate words to describe their feelings because emotional intelligence can help to keep people (particularly our children) safe.

Emotional intelligence is a tool we can gift our children to offer them control from emotional perpetrators in an out of control world. To learn more about how to do this, practice the suggestions in Teaching Emotional Intelligence for Personal Safety and Clear Communication.

Right at this moment, can you name ten emotions that you have felt today? No….you are not alone, few people can. Print off the list of feeling faces (in our Parent Resources section – see the tabs at the top of the posts – under Emotional Intelligence) and practice identifying how you feel at any given time. Once you know what it is you are feeling, you will be helping your child to develop a  type of intelligence that will act to keep them safe.