The emotion wheel and emotional dyads were created by a psychologist named Robert Plutchik in the 1980's.

The emotion wheel shows degrees of feelings, such as anger's lowest level being annoyance and the highest level of anger being rage.  This allows for people to name their emotions and to see what is going on in a higher resolution and greater detail.  The emotional dyads present combined emotions that make up something greater; for example in the emotional dyads, Love is defined as Joy plus trust.  So if I love someone and do not trust them, is it really love, is a question I might ask.

The first part of exploring this is to identify what I am feeling, but another useful way to use the tool is to look for the things I want to be feeling, but are missing in my life.


What if I am angry, yet I hold a firm belief that "Good mom's don't get angry."
So perhaps I add guilt to my current situation, it starts to add clarity.....

I was thinking we talked about drawing a triangle and using the emotion wheel and emotional dyads to write out the emotions that you currently feel towards, 1) yourself, 2) the other person and 3) the situation?  Once the emotions are in, then I can write the thoughts about all three, and then looking at only my thoughts and feelings about myself, I can start to sort it out.  I  can also ask does it really matter?


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Another idea is where am I existing emotionally in some real sense.  Like if I am too far on one side of all the negative emotions, then my existence is like being lost, on foot, in Death Valley in July with no water....

One way that I like to think about emotions are the idea of opposites.....emotions that are connected in some ways.
The list is:
love/hate
happiness/sadness
pride/shame
hope/ regret
faith/fear
joy/anger
empathy/guilt

So if I have shame then I might have trouble in valuing myself or someone might have toxic shame, and an inflated false persona of perfection, and these do seem to connect to each other in important ways...

Regret ties up energy in the past and in effect takes away from my hope for the future in the most basic impression.

If I have too much guilt that might leave me so focused on myself that I am blocked from empathy towards others......

Not sure I buy into this 100% but as a structure it makes sense to sort things out.

Taking responsibility for something (instead of sharing the responsibility) leaves me lost in the FOGs (fear obligation guilt shame).....
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Delving deeper...
So if we take the idea that pride/shame exist in a relationship with each other and someone has say an inflated ego while at the same time rejecting themselves (toxic shame)...

This of course means that dialog with them in regards to any issues or problems is going to be seen as an "attack", just as "suggesting" they have to follow rules/agreements in the relationship, or be ever accountable.

The problem with this is very much they cannot hold the idea of being loved/accepted at the same moment they might be told something that breaks the facade of perfection...So any feedback given will go no where (they are unable/unwilling to hear it).

This is often referred to as having or not having distress tolerance (or the ability to hold both truths in mind at the same time).

So when the person finds themselves in distress they readily identify the "problem" the fault/blame source of their distress and that is typically whomever is attempting to engage them in a meaningful way.  The distress is outside of them as far as they are concerned, rather than existing within (where it actually is).
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So I ask this person to try and be more proactive (take initiative) or take leadership role in the relationship.

Even if they "try" and agree to do something simple, for example read a relationship book....very likely the content of the book is going to hit the very same "wall" inside that person and the information will be rejected and you may still get the blame, though likely the "stupid" book/writer will get the blame and they might try another book eventually...

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Where am I? What do I feel?
Expansion or contraction?
Joy or fear?
Excitement or dread?
Liberation or suffocation?

I found this to be a bit more nuanced than fixed or growth; scarcity or abundance or those other false dicotomy that are popular.

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An emotional journey
One reason adolescence is such a hard time is that many things are going on at the same time, and many have to make hard emotional journeys (not all look the same and it is hard to generalize)...but this is the simpiliest example of what one journey might look like and understand people can get "stuck" along the way.

Assuming I get enough courage to start approaching the people I hope to date...
I will start with
fear/terror
likely I will experience pain/shame
If I get too much of that I might get to rage/contempt
Maybe even to hopelessness/despair
Eventually I might get to "emotional indifference"
Meaning rejection is just basically information, does impact my value, does not "hurt" and not even necessarily even be a permanent condition....


I should clarify this a bit more.  If I believe in my value and nothing anyone else does or says actually impacts my value/worth.
I do not allow others to devalue me against my will.
Meaning that I believe I am good enough, and have no negative core beliefs about myself; encountering rejection is only neutral information, not a reflection of my personal value in any sense.   So rejection is just rejection, from one person about one thing, and they should provide specific feedback or I am free to ignore that non-specific "useless opinion" that they are presenting to me.
Even if someone directly states some negative one word opinion, it requires me to buy into or to believe it is valid.

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This reminds me very much of a thing called a WRAP (wellness recovery action plan) I like to think of it as having the parts, when I am at my best I am......(your list); the other lists are when I need help I can tell because.........; the next one is about when I cannot help myself, I need.......the last one is after I get well, I need these things to get back to being/living my life.......
The WRAP is actually an advanced directive for people with serious mental illnesses to be hospitalized, but I like the outline as useful for anyone who struggles with anything chronic, for example me struggling with managing diabetes......

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Regrets
I have been thinking about the idea of regrets and what those look like and how they play out and if and when people do something about a regret....  One of those things I was trying to sort out, like the idea that everyone has regrets, and maybe not all of them are bad, and the what to do about it..   I have decided it is impossible not to have a regret, because they are often caused in times when we encountered chaos/evil and our house of cards was blown over and by the time it gets sorted out, the moment has passed and now I am not happy about the events....Or something like that?

A real life example might be someone saying those 3 magic words to you....
"I love you" and somehow you end up hesitating just a little too long, or you respond with "I know" or "Thank you" or "I love me too."
What happens if I would have liked to respond to an unexpected situation in the way that I would have preferred to do so, and I may be overthinking it again and again, and get a regret.

I thought about if I had ever seen a fictional version of someone not falling into the regret in the situation of a partial collapse of their world view and coming into the "right choice"....It was in the Matrix when Neo found out that he was not the first/only "The one" and he was told that he was just a cog in the machine that would start the cycle over again....Ha! fiction...

Then I thought about repairing a regret, and that was from Guardians of the Galaxy...the young Peter ran away from his dying mother, and near the end he did follow through and make the choice over again, when his mother said, "Peter take my hand."

So I was still thinking about this in terms of a kid who grew up with a dog, and comes home from college to an elderly and ill dog, it seems unlikely that the young person will take the pet to the vet and make the difficult choice for the dog's end of life care, instead the persons parents will likely do it; and the kid will actually (likely) regret it later on in life.....

In terms of no regrets perhaps truly horrible people may have that ability.  Stalin justified his car running over and killing a child as the business of the state being more important than a life, or that a life was inconsequential to the state...not someone I want to be...


One person's regret or thought of a regret might be another person's resentment, or possibly your own resentment in the case you do not get to realize your idea that is something you may want.......

Creating/crafting new regrets, does not seem to be a good idea; it is like asking your mind "bad" questions, rather than well formulated ones.

In terms of forming regret there is a good visual of that from the end of Schlindler's List
Universal Pictures put it on YouTube in a clip called "I didn't do enough".
Where although he saved a lot of lives, he started counting what he had and how many lives it could have saved....it was literally the first moment he got a chance to think about it.  Instead of celebrating a win, it became a defeat.  His life after that was not much better.....If there might have been a person in history entitled to accept the win and "rest on the laurels" and feel great about it from that point forward, it seems like it would have been him?

A realistic way to process regrets has to do with realizing what the 3 parts are and not getting stuck in part one and part 2 and moving instead into part three.
I typically say it is like figuring out what I did and why I regret it (1), then clarifying my values/truths/integrity (2), and sorting out what to do in the future (3) (when this comes up again).  I need a new map to navigate this territory, rather than to beat myself up for not being perfect (good enough/an idiot) from the get go.
If that makes sense?

Amor fati is a Latin phrase that may be translated as "love of fate" or "love of one's fate". It is used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one's life, including suffering and loss, as good or, at the very least, necessary.
Amor Fati the practice of accepting and embracing everything that has happened, is happening, and is yet to happen.
 It is also an interesting lens to view regret(s) through.
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I often say that there is a very short distance between confusion/frustration and full on rage.  My favorite picture of that comes from a kid who refused to answer the question on the algebra test, instead he drew the head of the spartan warrior from the movie 300 and the guy was obviously screaming...in the movie it would have been "this is sparta", but the kid drew the bubble to read "This is confusing!!!!"....the face was full  rage, but the text said confusion.....
I think it is useful to keep track of when we start to feel that way.
This message was last edited by the GM at 15:04, Mon 15 Apr.