After our ritual of check in, challenges & successes, and a brief guided meditation (introducing a new online resource each time), we began an exploration of “the feelings wheel.”
A handout was distributed showing a chart of emotions. In an inner ring on a wheel, we considered what we might call our primary emotions, or our most familiar labels for our emotions. Six core emotions on the chart included Fear, Anger, Disgust, Sad, Happy and Surprise (other emotions charts show more primary types; from eight to eleven). We talked about anger a bit, because anxious frustration can give rise to feelings of anger. We realized that if we were simply to say we are “angry” we cannot be sure that others would understand what we are actually feeling.
The emotion wheel that we were using showed us that anger can be subdivided into specific types of anger: mad, hateful, threatened, hurt, aggressive, frustrated, distant, and critical. And each of these subtypes can be further subdivided into at least two more finely refined emotions. In the wheel that we were using, “Frustrated” can be subdivided into irritated and infuriated. So, we agreed, if we tell someone simply that we feel angry, we really aren’t telling them much and we really don’t know how they think we feel. Naming our feelings is important in understanding our feelings, and, as with anything that we want to control, we cannot manage something that we do not understand.
Source: https://www.mindfulcoachingtools.com/free-tools/p/the-feelings-wheel