Читать книгу Sometimes feelings are monsters - Lilli Höch-Corona - Страница 15

Basic theses

• Feelings are the language of our body and soul. Through mindfulness we can learn to understand them better.

• Simultaneously they easily get in our way and become monster-like if we don’t recognize them. So they tempt us to say or do things we wouldn’t have said or done in a calm state.

• Every experience is stored along with the feeling we experienced at that time.

• These feelings resurface during similar experiences or triggers and have more to do with ourselves than with our counterpart.

• Our thoughts generate our feelings.

• Feelings are contagious.

There are many different constellations of basic emotions by individual authors. With Paul Ekman⁹ the basic emotions are sadness and despair, anger and rage, surprise and fear, and joy. In the movie Inside Out they are anger, disgust, joy, fear, and sadness. Marshall Rosenberg¹⁰ looks at feelings we have when our needs are met and those when our needs are not met.

From the models I am familiar with, I find Vivian Dittmar’s¹¹ list of the varieties of feelings the most helpful. So in the first chapter I present her feelings as social forces (anger, sadness, fear, shame, joy) to you.

For the Gefühlsmonsters we have agreed on 25 feeling representations, based on the use of the cards and the user feedback. No descriptions are associated with these cards, because the application has shown that it is much more helpful for mutual understanding to find your own words when looking at the cards.

If you prefer other models of feelings I encourage you to look at the illustrations in this book without bias and take with you what is useful to you.

9 Paul Ekman: Reading Feelings, Spektrum Taschenbuch, 2nd edition 2011

10 Marshall Rosenberg: Gewaltfreie Kommunikation, p. 57/58

11 Vivian Dittmar: Gefühle und Emotionen, pp. 19-71