Thread by @vishnu_agni

1/ I have been thinking about this comment of @docbhooshan in a @Genwise_ adda on developing socio-emotional maturity in children. It made sense intuitively but I did not fully understand why not being able to give a specific word for an emotion would ‘freeze’ someone.

https://twitter.com/GenWise_/status/1326512170650136577

2/ Some things are becoming clearer as I read about the topic. A child who clubs irritated, frustrated & annoyed- as ‘angry’, can’t acknowledge what they are going through and their emotions may escalate to ‘enraged’ and they may end up beating another child or cry hysterically

3/ A granular emotional vocabulary also helps us to perceive others’ emotions more accurately. Looking at this image though I realized how poor my current vocabulary is. In fact I recently confused indigestion (a sensation) for feeling stressed about work.

Source: @marcbrackett

4/ This reminded me of a condition called alexithymia in which people have difficulty experiencing emotion. They are more likely to experience a stomach ache instead of ‘anger’.

All of us do this to some extent... create a reality of our own influenced by our physical state.

5/ Thus even as we try to help our children to develop a richer vocabulary of emotions, we need to work on developing our own. Learning many new words & inventing your emotion concepts are some suggestions @LFeldmanBarrett shares in this article- ideas.ted.com/try-these-two-…

6/ I just installed the mood meter app which looks promising- hoping that it will improve my emotional vocabulary- moodmeterapp.com

7/ I am also reading this book by @BreneBrown Each chapter provides clarity on a group of emotions e.g. Chap #5 looks into 'Places we go when we’re hurting- Anguish, hopelessness, despair, sadness, grief..' brenebrown.com/book/atlas-of-…

8a/ To end this thread, a quote from this book by @marcbrackett, founder of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence
amazon.in/Permission-Fee…

"Children’s emotional lives are often a mystery to us precisely because they haven’t yet learned to process & express what they feel..

8b/ ..The more words that children can use, the better able we’ll be to support them. When we use a wide variety of terms to describe emotions, our children learn the words, but they also absorb the lesson that describing their feelings is a natural, positive thing to do….

8c/ If we assume wrongly that our child is feeling anxious, we’ll fail to address the actual emotion-perhaps embarrassment, maybe fear, both of which can look like anxiety from the outside. Imprecise Labeling can lead us astray as we search for ways to resolve negative emotions

9/ And here's @docbhooshan talking about the importance of recognizing different shades of emotion-

@docbhooshan unroll @threadreaderapp