Why is Emotional Vocabulary Important? All human beings are different because we all have been brought up and fed with information differently. Not only your parents but even the place you stay, your neighbours, your culture, your food, your schooling, etc make and leave an impact, thus creating your personality as it is today. But some things are meant for all of us. Remember how we all were expected to start crawling, walking, talking, waving, etc by a certain age i.e. developmental milestones? Not meeting these milestones led to consequences and the hunt for causes known or unknown.
Let’s take the most common milestone, that of talking. A common advice is to put your child in a pre-school if he hasn’t started speaking by the age of 3 years. It is said that many kids start speaking when they are surrounded by people who talk. They may grasp words when they hear their fellow mates talk. Also, I have often noticed as a school counsellor, that when a child is not able to speak or express what he wants, people are unable to understand him. And this causes a lot of frustration in the child.
I am giving you this background to make you understand, how important ‘expressing’ is and how important it is to build our ’emotional vocabulary’. When we talk about expressing, we are also talking about words. Which means that if you have more words in your vocabulary, you will be able to comprehend your statement well. And when you comprehend it well, there is better chance of communication and understand of what you mean.
I believe no emotion is good or bad. The intensity of each emotion makes it what it is. For e.g.: When you are only a little angry, you should be using the word ‘irritated’ or ‘annoyed’ but if you do not have a good vocabulary of emotions and feelings, you may end up saying you are ‘Angry’. This may give the opposite person a wrong idea of what may have happened to make you feel so. Understanding the difference between these words makes communication flow smooth and well understood. You will be able to get your point across effectively.
That is one of the reasons why my e-book ‘I Feel Better’, has a word search game to help build your emotional vocabulary.
Most children do not know words beyond the simple words of happy, sad and angry. Explaining the vocabulary helps them attach words to what they are actually feeling. Their frustration levels and other disturbing emotions decrease and are well under control when people understand them more often. Such is also the case with us adults.
A broader and bigger emotional vocabulary would indirectly help us build positive emotions.
Infact, identifying with your emotions is a part of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) which we shall be talking about in the later posts.
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