I downloaded an app recently called the Feelings Wheel. It features a pie chart, which at the center has color-coded basic feelings (Happy, Surprised, Bad, Fearful, Angry, Disgusted, Sad). Those seven large slices filter outward to the next level where each primary category branches into more precise terms. And then that level fans out into even more finely tuned descriptors. For example, Happy splits into nine more specific words, one of which is Optimistic, which then divides into the even more concise Inspired and Hopeful.
The stated goal of the app is to help a person identify more accurately what they are feeling and therefore chart their emotional life. I found myself, though, more interested in how a root emotion expresses itself in so many ways. Some of these astonished me. For example, Angry flows out to eight more specific words, including Distant, which then splits further into Withdrawn and Numb. As someone who rarely feels angry, but can cite many occasions of feeling withdrawn, this insight inspired me to look at those situations through a new lens.
It also made me wonder—why do some of us withdraw when we feel angry, while others feel furious or dismissive or resentful or any of the twenty-three other ways to be angry? Suzanne Stabile, author of Journey Toward Wholeness, suggests one answer. In her book, she highlights a fundamental difference between feelings and emotions.
Feelings are triggered by an external event. They are temporary reactions, such as fear, joy, rage and shame. They dissipate rapidly after an incident.
Emotions, while often treated as synonymous with feelings, are different. They are the diverse expressions of those basic responses, which take root in a person’s mind and persist for years. Stabile gives examples of anxiety, happiness, anger and guilt, but I suspect there are many more. In fact, I think my app could more accurately be called the Emotions Wheel. It’s really naming not initial reactions, but the complex emotions that we humans turn feelings into.
Those emotions connect to, and perhaps define, our personalities. Stabile points out that we all have favorite or habitual emotions we transform our initial, transitory feelings into. Hence, my propensity to withdraw when faced with conflict, while someone else’s default might be to get resentful. I suspect this is one way we construct meaning in our lives, but those mental habits sometimes get us stuck in patterns of living which are narrower than necessary.
How we free ourselves from habitual emotions, beyond simply acknowledging and seeing the pattern, is a larger subject than I can tackle here. As a writer, however, I wonder if Stabile’s insights, along with the colorful language of the Feelings Wheel app, can help me portray my characters in deeper, more realistic ways. I want my protagonist to change as she faces challenges. I see now that will mean helping her grow into a wider expression of all her feelings as her journey through the story progresses.
As I go back to edit the rough draft of my new novel, I’ll be paying attention to the Feelings Wheel and the colorful spectrum of emotions we all have access to. That’s probably good advice for me and you as we move through the stories of our lives, as well.
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