Personifying Emotions

I’ve come across a coping skill that resonates with clients and myself and has unlocked a greater depth of understanding and appreciation of our inherent emotional fluctuation. And that is to personify our emotions.

Personifying your emotions means taking particular emotions and giving them human characteristics. A lot of really powerful processing can come from engaging in this coping skill.

Choose a particular emotion to lean into. You can lean into one you enjoy feeling or maybe an emotion you’ve been struggling to understand and accept lately.

What does your emotion look like? Is it you? Is it you currently or is it you at a younger/older age? Is the emotion someone else? If it is someone else, why do you think that emotion is them? What facial expressions does your emotion have? What is the demeanor of your emotion? How is your emotion acting?

After personifying your emotion, maybe take some time to interact with it.

How do you feel interacting with your emotion this way? Are you able to sit with your emotion and talk with it? How does your emotion interact with you?

Does anything in particular surprise you about your emotion?

Through engaging with this coping skill I’ve found that I can much more easily lean into acceptance of my emotional experience. No longer am I interacting with an abstract, intangible thing. But, I’m dealing with a person. And, along with acceptance, I have much more empathy for that particular emotion.

Maybe you realize your anger is actually much smaller than you initially felt it was, and maybe that anger is actually full of fear. Or perhaps your anxiety is equally as exhausted as it makes you feel. Maybe your sadness just wants a conversation with you and it will no longer feel so all-consuming.

There are a lot of different directions personifying emotions can go. So, which emotion do you feel like getting to know better today?