TL/DR;
The book "How Emotions Are Made" by Lisa Feldman Barrett resulted in a paradigm shift in my thinking about emotions and helped me develop a framework for processing emotions.
My New Understanding
We constantly use our senses to understand our environment and what is happening inside our bodies. Our brain creates an "affect" (a sensation or feeling) and then attempts to identify a past matching experience. The "statistically best-matched experience" influences our response. (I'm reminded of the Ellis ABC Model).
This can go wrong if we mistakenly match a wrong experience to the affect. Examples:
- As early newlyweds, we would fight, only later realizing we were hungry.
- When I let early childhood trauma make me feel insecure in social settings.
Learning to distinguish subtle emotional differences is a healthier way to process affect.
My Emotional Diversity Framework
To help create finer emotional granularity, I've considered the many dimensions of the story we assign to affect. The dimensions are like the X, Y, and Z axes. An experience can fall anywhere along these dimensions, resulting in many possibilities.
The Three Poisons
This dimension has to do with the "verb" in the situation. For this, I use a concept from Buddhism called the three poisons. Longing for these poisons creates suffering.
- Desire - Longing or wanting something. This could be food, drink, physical affection, affirmation, peace, safety, etc.
- Aversion - Avoiding something. This could be pain, discomfort, harm, fear, anger, shame, guilt, hatred, etc.
- Ignorance - This could be its own dimension. This relates to not knowing or understanding, either by ourselves or others in our story.
Familiarity
This dimension concerns the "who" in the story and how closely they relate to us. I call it the "Castle Model." A castle surrounded by a city wall defines regions, and our relations with the people in each region vary.
- Your chambers - Only your most intimate relations are allowed
- The Castle - Only trusted people are allowed inside the castle walls
- The City Walls - Inside the city walls is your community. Behaviors are governed by social norms, business norms, and common law.
- Outside the City Walls - There is danger with outlaws and wild beasts.
Where do the people involved in this story reside? Are they friends or enemies?
Group Size
This dimension concerns the size of the "who": an individual, a couple, a family, or the whole world. Be careful with large groups and creating stereotypes, "You men/woman always do X!"
Concreteness
This dimension also relates to the "verb." How concrete is the action in your story? This ranges as follows:
- Actions - A slap, push, embrace, or other more physical behavior
- Verbal - Something was spoken or written (remembering that superlatives carry emotions and are not to be taken literally, e.g., "You never remember to ...").
- Non-verbal sounds - A grunt or moan that carries meaning but can easily be misinterpreted.
- Thought - You only know your own thoughts; don't try to mind read.
Time
Consider the dimension of time.
- Speed - Instant (a surprise) to long (chronic).
- Frequency - Is this a recurring problem resulting in you "waiting for the other shoe to drop?"
- Duration - How long does this event last?
- History - When did it happen? Does a long past experience relate to our current experience?
Health
This dimension looks at the state of the "who." Are they tired, hungry, distracted, or not feeling well physically or emotionally?
Use Case
Someone sends you a message: "We need to talk." You feel a tightening in your chest, and your face feels flush. Time to pause and evaluate.
- The Three Poisons - You are experiencing aversion, including fear, shame, or guilt. However, you are also ignorant as to the subject of the discussion.
- Familiarity - What is your relationship with this person? Do they have power over you?
- Group Size - It appears one-on-one. Will others be present? How will that change your reaction?
- Concreteness - This message is definitely verbal, but there is no information about the subject or the other person's thoughts.
- Time -
- Speed - The message was a surprise.
- Frequency - How many times have you received this message before?
- Duration - You don't know since you haven't had the conversation yet. This is part of your ignorance.
- History - Are you assigning meaning from the distant past when you got a similar message?
- Health
- Are you tired, hungry, or feeling well? How about the person sending the message?
If you talk with the person and they just want to include you on some elaborate project that you are excited about, then it was inappropriate for you to have an aversion or relate it to a scolding you got from a parent when you were a kid.
Conclusion
We can evaluate the stories we associate with affect using the above framework. This can give us finer granularity when identifying the correct experience to match our feelings. Instead of fighting with the love of your life, you can say, "I think I'm hungry. Let's get something to eat." Instead of freezing in a social situation, you can tell yourself, "I'm not a child anymore. I'm an interesting adult."