Guidelines for Expressing Your Feelings
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Select a current interpersonal situation that brings up some very strong
emotions that are troubling you.
If you are currently not in such a situation, choose such a situation
that you recently experienced.
1. Describe the situation in terms of who, what, where, when, how and with what
result to you. Mainly, give as much background as you can so that your reader
can clearly understand what happened and why it caused you suffering.
2. Recognizing your emotional feelings, write down the first emotional feeling you
experienced that comes to your mind
3. The feeling that you express isn’t the only one you may be experiencing.
Expand your emotional vocabulary by looking at the Table of Common Human
Emotions. Select 5 other emotions from the table and list them as complete
statements, ie, “I feel puzzled.”
4. For each emotional feeling that you listed, describe a physical reaction that
you experienced. “I feel puzzled and my head was a little dizzy.”
5. Accept responsibility for each feeling by saying something like, “I feel puzzled
and my head gets dizzy when you ask me to meet you for coffee and then you
are busy with someone else.”
6. Be mindful of your communication channels and describe what might be
happening to you nonverbally. Please write about one of these behaviors,
including anything that might be happening unintentionally.
7. Rule out each of the Fallacies that lead to Debilitative Emotions. For each of
the following, briefly describe why that fallacy is or is not a cause for your
debilitating emotion.
a. The Fallacy of Perfection
b. The Fallacy of Approval
c. The Fallacy of Shoulds
d. The Fallacy of Overgeneralization
e. The Fallacy of Causation
f. The Fallacy of Helplessness
g. The Fallacy of Catastrophic Expectations
8. List the FOUR steps to minimize Debilitative Emotions.
a. Monitor Your Emotional Reactions. Indicate when you first noticed this
emotional reaction. What were the first physical reactions you noticed?
b. Note the Activating Event. After your awareness of the reaction,
describe the Activating Event. In some cases, instead of one event, there
might have been a series of events each building to the next.
c. Record Your Self-Talk. Analyze your thoughts that link your activating
event and your emotion.
d. Reappraise Your Irrational Beliefs. Replace the self-defeating self-talk
with constructive thinking.