emotions... what are they?

This is kind of weird but, I just don't know what emotions are. Which makes it hard to talk to therapists. Any suggestions on how to talk about the emotions that I cant put into words?

Draw them maybe?

I may have to try that one.

I struggle with this one too. T just gets me to describe any physical sensations I experience and sometimes we use fantasy,i.e. if it had a colour, shape, texture what would it be.

I looked at your status update: "is sitting under the trees, enjoying life " That is a good way to describe emotions if you feel that labels mean nothing. You may be more visual than verbal.

When I learned words for emotions I still felt that they diminish the experience. To call "sittingness-under-the-trees-enjoying-lifeness" merely "contentment" is just not full enough. It's like contentment, but it also connectedness to nature feeling, and it holds in the summers past. And contentment is also a feeling of just having finished cleaning the kitchen, which is entirely a different thing, and that one is not just contentment, but also satisfaction and self-approval and twinges and shades of things past and future.

On the other side of the spectrum I had my father, who had no emotions, so he said. All the knew about emotions was the stuff women got, akin to cooties, which was in opposition to reason and logic and nothing he would ever want to experience. He was lying to himself, of course. He would fly into anger at a slightest excuse, he felt grief, he felt happiness, hope, contentment, satisfaction, jelousy, love, it was clear as a nose on his face, but if you pressed him. Nope. No emotions. None whatsoever, why are you bugging me? (annoyance too, lol!)

Best wishes to you in your seeking.

See i'm the opposite, the only thing i can use to describe how i feel.. is words, i cant draw it, say how it feels in terms of texture or colours or anything like that.
I can literally just categorise into textbook words.

I am trying to learn how to navigate through the response to threads and posts. Did I do it right by putting my response to the question, 'What are emotions?'

As I struggle with words and drawing and fantasy, I am really interested in how when people use words, they know it is the right word and what it is the word is describing?

I was the same, did not experience emotions up until last year (when I was 29). All I can say is, the world is a LOT simpler and easier to handle without emotions! But ofcourse, you also can't experience good emotions (as well as bad), so yeah that is the downside. My therapist tried to get me to turn them back on again - she said first I will experience the bad ones, and then come the good ones. So the bad ones got turned back on, and then she put me in the too hard basket and stopped my therapy, so I'm stuck like this - aaargh! But I would really love to experience the good ones that everyone is always ranting and raving on. That would be great!

I dunno if it helps or not but I would describe the closest thing I could come up with to the emotion. Like for instance, I would say "it feels like acid is going through my veins and leeching out of my pores" and I dont know how but she came up with some ideas about what emotion that could be. I think she said that one was frustration? Or anxiety or something. And some of them were kinda obvious when we verbalised it, like I said "I have the urge to make someone bleed" and ofcourse that was anger. The positive ones would be harder though, I would expect.

how about instead of trying to use a word to explain an emotion u describe the way the emotion feels to u explain it like describing an object or an event

instead of saying your mad or angry try explaining you feel like you could punch a workout bag a thousand times or if your happy you could describe feeling like a million bucks or the sun shining thru the clouds.

just use your own words to try to explain the T will pick up on your cue.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...t-are-emotions
http://cogsci.uwaterloo.ca/Articles/...agard.2008.pdf

We're all different, and we should all embrace our uniqueness in being able to describe what we are feeling. If you can't draw it, write about it. I wrote poetry a very long time ago to help me get out what I was feeling. It also gave me a sense of accomplishment as I wanted to be a writer, so completing a poem actually helped in more ways than one.