The feelings wheel

The Feelings Wheel is a therapist’s favorite tool when helping folks learn to identify, tolerate, and express various emotions. Expanding our emotional vocabulary and our emotional illiteracy is an important fundamental goal in therapy.

My favorite Feelings Wheel to use is based on Dr. Rosenberg’s work on nonviolent communication. When reviewing the handout, you will notice some key differences from other wheels. First, the wheel is divided into sections of feelings you may experience when your needs are met and those you may experience when your needs are not met. The same colored sections diagonally represent opposite emotions. For example, if you feel sadness (yellow) you are experiencing a loss and your needs have not been met. Looking across the wheel to joyful (also yellow), you are experiencing a gain and your needs have been satisfied.

The wheel has three circles with the innermost circle being the umbrella emotion, and as you move to the outermost circle, the feelings become more specific. Sadness can become more nuanced into depression or sorrow, and then more specific ‘flavors’ of sadness like hopelessness, fatigue, despair, and heartbreak are at the furthest edge.

The most important section at the bottom of the page clarifies the difference between feelings and thoughts. Any words that follow “I feel like you …” are probably thoughts masquerading as emotions. If someone says “I feel disrespected”, disrespect is not an emotion; however, the true meaning of the above statement is “You have disrespected me.” In teasing apart these nuances, we can become more familiar with our rich emotional lives as well as better identify emotional regulation skills for coping with our feelings.

You can carry this link around on your phone to help you in difficult moments, or you can impress your therapist by pulling it out during session!