When emotions arise, we can use the moment to connect with each other. On the contrary: emotions are to be savored they are living life fully they are an essential aspect of being human. Most adults have a tendency to want to appease or soothe the emotional event as if it were a problem that needed fixing. I wanted to figure out what to do.Īfter years of study, I found that the problem was mine, not the child’s. The child who sat in his cubby and hissed like a snake every day left me-how would I say it-empty, somehow, because he was in distress. Having Mommy drop you behind a closing door left me in a parallel angst that was hard for me to deal with, too. My motivation in making a list arose from a feeling of helplessness in being a leader of a community of young children whose emotions were never disguised. Feelings are how we attempt to represent those emotions in words or art. Like hunger, an emotion happens it can’t really be described or conveyed. Generally, emotions are the upwellings that we can’t really think about. Neil Katz of Nova Southeastern University in Florida offered the suggestion to use Feelings instead. Feelings, not emotions, TomĪ joy of building this site has been learning from others who share their wisdom. I had four copies up in different places in the classroom. Of course I don’t list every word, but I hoped to generate a comparably sized set in each category, so people in the helping professions, especially teachers of very young children, would be able to glance at a chart on the wall to scan for a word that might match what a child is feeling at the moment. Happiness - Caring - Depression - Inadequacy - Fear - Confusion - Hurt - Anger - Loneliness - Remorse I organized them in column categories and divided them into strong, medium, and light. I spent some time with a dictionary and a thesaurus gathering words for a list of feelings expressed in English with an emphasis upon variety.

List of emotions