Posted by turtle on January 4, 2009, at 12:50:35
In reply to Describing feelings: shape, color, smell, taste..., posted by workinprogress on January 2, 2009, at 12:57:36
My therapist asks those questions of me too. I can't say that I'm very good at it. I'm not always very good at understanding my emotions or telling them apart. My tendency is to ignore what is going on inside me. When with another person, I tend to stay intellectual and focused on managing the other person.
When my T asks these questions in session I rarely can answer very well and it does feel awkward. It feels like I'm forcing myself to grasp for an answer that I'm not sure of. The questions did catch my attention though. I've been listening to some guided meditations before I go to sleep and to my surprise those answers are starting to pop up. It's only after I'm relaxed, alone, and guided along to notice different emotions and body sensations that I can think in terms of color, smell, or shape. I am starting to notice that different emotions, and different expressions of the same emotion, will show up in my body in different ways.
The goal of those questions is to help you pay attention to what is going on inside and to learn subtleties that can help you distinguish differences. If those questions don't work well for you maybe something else would be more helpful? How do you tend to think of emotions? If you don't have a color, start with what you do have maybe in image, or an urge, or a body sensation, or something else and build on it from there.
I tend to think more in images. A few weeks ago I came home from therapy and when I lay down I immediately thought "I feel like a whale!" I literally had the sensation of throwing myself onto the shore. Cold, exposed, stuck, battered on the rocks, very alone. After each session I find myself back out in the water, but I'm drowning in it and stunned in what should be my home waters. Lately after my sessions I'd been telling myself to slow down next time, listen more, look where I'm going and be careful, but it wasn't happening. As soon as I would start to swim again, I'd run right back onto the shore during therapy in some unexplainable upside down mystery. I really needed to slow down but didn't know how.
From that image of the whale, I was able to start working out my emotions lonely, too exposed, vulnerable, uncomfortable, reckless, out of control And after I figured out what I was feeling I started working on why. I needed my T to interact with me more and give me the feedback I needed to feel safe as we went along. I shared these things with T the next session. We had a good discussion about how my T tends to interact and direct more when initiating therapy with a client, and less once the work moves into deeper material. We worked on changing this together and now it feels more like we are "swimming together".
It would have been great if I could have been aware enough of my emotions during the sessions to just speak up and address the issue at the moment, but instead I had to get there in a way that seems to me a little backwards starting with an image, noting how it feels, working out the emotions, then figuring out why. But at least I'm paying more attention now! I'm pretty sure your therapist won't be disappointed if you never come up with a color as long as you pay attention to what is going on inside you, however you do it.
Turtle
poster:turtle
thread:871936
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20081219/msgs/872235.html