Feeling All the Feelings: How to Be Human and the Feelings Wheel

This summer, I have been curiously observing all the various ways to be human. While sitting at the beach, dining outdoors at a restaurant, visiting with family, traveling out of state, or gathering around the grill on a Sunday afternoon, I have been struck by how many authentic, individual and unique ways there are to be human.

This breadth is part of what makes life amazing. It turns out, our inner landscapes are more far-reaching than most of us think. And yet, we often feel stuck in our particular pattern: "Why can't I get away from these thoughts?"

I want to propose that the biggest gift we can give ourselves is to learn to explore more of the breadth of what it means to be human. The more we become able to identify, tolerate, embrace and eventually celebrate all of our feelings, the likelier it is we are to lead a rich, fulfilling life. In this view, the #1 thing therapy can help us do is learn to feel all our feelings. And the Feelings Wheel is a great tool in this direction.

Our Limited Range of Emotions

In her recent book Atlas of the Heart, researcher and bestselling author Brené Brown mapped out 87 distinct emotions and experiences. Surprisingly, her team found that most people can only identify three emotions in real-time as they experience them: happy, sad, and angry.  

That's not an exaggeration. That's a real research finding. When asked to ID our emotions, most of us can inly name three.

Widening the Lens

I will never forget my first deep dive into regular therapy as an adult. In my early 20s, having all kinds of strong feelings, unsure where I fit in the world, I was frustrated and perslexed that I was so unhappy. In an early session, my therapist asked me what I was feeling about my situation. Time and again, I returned to descriptions of a particular troubling situation, or cognitive thoughts or analysis of how other people had wronged me. I couldn't pinpoint what I was feeling at all. She elected to give it to me point blank: "You are a smart guy, but you have a very limited emotional vocabulary."

Seems I wasn't alone in that challenge.

Emotional literacy is the ability to recognize, understand, label, and manage your own emotions while empathetically reading and responding to the feelings of others. Yet most of us are not that emotionally literate.

The Feelings Wheel

To bridge the gap of emotional literacy, we often turn to the Feelings Wheel. Originally created nearly 50 years ago by Gloria Willcox, it’s a brilliant tool designed to help us name what’s actually happening inside.

We love expressive arts at the Center for Embodiment Medicine. Wilcox was inspired by Joseph Zinker's ideas of conceiving the therapist as an artist, and Robert Plutchik's comparison of emotions to colors. She rendered an inner wheel of core human emotions and an outer wheel from which more nuanced emotions radiate. Read more of the history here.

For those who like to geek out, here is the original Wilcox paper on the Feelings Wheel. Her central emotions were:

• Mad

• Sad

• Scared

• Peaceful

• Joyful

• Powerful

Dr. Rachel is working on an upcoming book on Eco-therapy that is slated to be published by the American Psychological Association! In the draft of that book, we have updated and modernized our own wheel (shown below) to align with our embodied, clinical approach—helping you trace how core states like Sad or Curious ripple out into more nuanced feelings.  

Applying the Feelings Wheel in Embodied Practice

Let's try a quick experiment. Scan the wheel and pick a word that intrigues you. Maybe it’s Bitter, or perhaps it's Worthy.

Take a few calm breaths, and then ask yourself these questions:

• Where does that word land in your body?

• How does it make your skin feel? Your belly?

• If you imagine the feeling filling your body, what color does it have?

• Is there a scent associated with that feeling?

• If you associated the feeling with a song, what would it be?
  

By moving these words from our analytical minds into our physical, felt experience, we can use them as tools in our own healing, or with our clients.

The Goal of Therapy: Feel All the Feels

Here is our simple POV: the profound goal of therapy is to help you identify, sit with, embrace and eventually celebrate all the feelings of being human.

Positive or negative, exciting or scary, many of us are cut off from our feelings.

In the past, we may have isolated them, suppressed them, over-indulged them, renamed them or internalized them. We may have projected them on others, introjected them into our own psyche, or made ourselves physically sick trying to get away from them. We have stuffed them, fought them, cut them off, and wallowed in them.

There is great healing available with just experiencing things as they are. All the feelings on the wheel are key parts of being human.

Therapy hasn't just succeeded when you feel peaceful or happy; it has succeeded when you can safely feel more of your life.

Accessing the Whole Wheel

But feeling all our feelings can't happen overnight. This may require us to heal old trauma and gently reconnect with parts of ourselves we had to lock away just to survive. There are often good reasons we turned away from uncomfortable feelings.

Our role as therapists is to build a "safe-enough" container with you. We are here to shepherd you into new, sometimes unfamiliar emotional terrain. It is a practice ground. That’s why therapy can feel activating—it’s not just there to soothe us, but to expand our capacity to be fully, vibrantly alive.

The adventure of being human is ongoing. When was the last time you let yourself feel Bitter? Or truly Worthy?

We’d love to hear how you are practicing being human. Feel free to reach out and share your thoughts with us at Rachel@embodimentmedicine.com.