Emotions: Not Bad or Good

Activity type: drawing + reflecting Time: 15-20min Materials: paper, pen/pencil

It's time for a reframe! Instead of thinking about your emotions as either "good" or "bad", "right" or "wrong" or any other dichotomous trap you tend to fall into when thinking about the emotions you experience and how you feel about them (before, during, and after). Instead, take a moment to consider your emotions as existing on a spectrum: not one thing or another, but a varying mixture of two disparate ideas. Today, those two disparate ideas are going to be represented by the words "challenging" and "effortless". Take a sheet of paper and draw a line going from one side to the other (I recommend a landscape orientation for this exercise). On one side, write the word "effortless" and on the other, write the word "challenging". Place the following list of emotions wherever on the spectrum feels most right to you:

Joy

Anxiety

Pride

Fear

Love

Anger

Excitement

Shame

Hope

Disappointment However, before you start placing every positive emotion somewhere on the "effortless" side and every negative emotion on the "challenging" side, really stop and give yourself a moment to consider the ways in which you might struggle with each emotion. If experiencing "excitement" also produces a panic-like response in your body, then that emotion isn't exactly "effortless" even if you might still consider it "desirable". Perhaps, sadness, although "undesirable" is an emotion that you've made peace with already and now find yourself easily feeling your way through it and making it out the other side unscathed, in which case, it may be a far less "challenging" emotion than you may initially think. Recognizing the emotions you struggle with and the ways in which you uniquely struggle with each can greatly help you understand what work still needs to be done on your healing journey and where your time and energy are best spent.

**Lastly, place any emotion you actively avoid feeling (either by numbing, distracting, or repressing) outside of the spectrum entirely. When you finish, place all of these emotions in a circle directly above the spectrum.