Posted by Larry Hoover on August 26, 2004, at 10:01:32
In reply to Re: Emotional colors » JenStar, posted by Dinah on August 23, 2004, at 19:59:29
> No, it's just emotions. :)
>
> It came early in therapy when my therapist would ask me to stop periodically during the day and write down what I was feeling. And I just couldn't do it. I'd come in with entries that read "ok", and he'd say ok wasn't a feeling. I didn't understand why ok wasn't a feeling. I was at a total loss to come up with words, other than obvious ones like nervous or anxious. So he gave me a list of emotion words. And I was still at a loss. My vocabulary was wide enough to understand the meaning of the words, but applying them to myself was totally beyond my abilities.Oh, I understand you perfectly well. I was just the same way, oh, maybe fifteen years back. I had two states. OK. Not OK. I was given a page with very simple line drawings of different emotional states, like "tentative" and so on. I think there were 84 different faces depicted. Without the names, I could identify about 10. And in myself, not even that many.
It's like any other form of learning, I suppose. I needed "Emotional Language 101", plus a number of years of tutoring.
> So I finally came up with the color wheel. It was very detailed and intricate. I used my crayola box, and the list of emotion words, and my memory of feelings. It was a *really* big deal for me in those days. My therapist was *so* excited. I was actually admitting to feelings other than "ok".
Yes, but you were creating your own language for that palette of emotional states. An excellent start, but can you also translate? Are you bilingual?
> I guess the idea came from the way I perceive others, oh.. "auras" or something. Not exactly auras. But I pick up on moods pretty well, and have always tended to assign colors to them in my mind. I don't actually *see* colors, but I... Drat. I can't explain. But like my father often seemed surrounded by a black cloud with bolts of red lightning. Not that I literally saw a cloud, but... And my therapist is usually some shade of blue. Not that I literally *see* blue, but... Oh heck.No, that is very descriptive. My dad was black with red lightning, too. It was his rage that created the family's two-state system. OK was no rage. Not OK was rage present. I get it, totally.
Lar
poster:Larry Hoover
thread:380351
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20040821/msgs/382509.html