The Need To Strengthen Our Emotional Vocabulary

Strengthening our emotional vocabulary is essential to improving the quality of our relationships. It implies knowing how to express yourself, defend yourself; it is attuning to one’s own and others’ needs, translating feelings into words, generating empathy and creating bridges based on respect and assertiveness. Few skills are so essential in our daily lives.

Often, when we talk about this dimension, it is common to focus the interest on children. Today, both families and teachers understand the importance of teaching this skill from an early age. Emotional literacy and its relationship to language, in fact, is an area of ​​great interest that has yielded very interesting results.

Thus, studies – such as the one carried out by psychologists Luna Beck and Irina Kumschick, from the University of Minnesotta, in the United States – demonstrate how to improve children’s linguistic competence when we teach them to recognize and express their emotions in the first years of school life.

Therefore, there are many benefits that can be found in favoring this type of competence in children. But what about adults? What happens, for example, to those people who are unable to express their fears, needs or frustrations to their partner?

Not all individuals who are now into adulthood have had the opportunity to experience successful socio-emotional development. In turn, not all of us have regulatory mechanisms or the communicative fluidity that allows us to translate into words our “we” and labyrinths in which emotions are kept.

How can we strengthen our emotional vocabulary?

By strengthening our emotional vocabulary, our overall vulnerability also diminishes. Because putting an emotion into words is giving visibility to ourselves. It’s validating us, for ourselves and for others. It’s shaping sensations and sharing them. It is untangling internal skeins, harmonizing chaos in simple words to be understood and to understand.

In fact, there is a certain magic to this process. For example, we all live daily realities that we don’t quite know how to convey to others. And we can’t because our language often doesn’t allow us to. In the Tagalog language, a dialect spoken in the Philippines, there is a beautiful word: kilig . It expresses the sense of joy we feel when we talk to someone we care about.

In turn, in Dutch, there is a term, uitwaaien , which describes the experience of appreciating the wind and the sensations that this phenomenon causes us. Having adequate words that allow us to integrate these realities is exceptional and even cathartic. However, the opposite is often the case.

Many of us not only don’t find the right words to classify what we’re feeling, but we also don’t know exactly what we’re feeling. Lack of emotional literacy leads us to states in which we end up repressing feelings because we don’t know what to do with them.

So let’s see the secrets to strengthening our emotional language.

Emotion awareness and facial recognition

Charles Darwin spoke in his time about “emotional expression” , defending it as an internal state that feels and, at the same time, expresses itself. Therefore, the first step is awareness: connecting with that bodily state in which the emotion leaves its first imprint, which in many cases is neither comfortable nor gratifying. This is the case of emotions such as fear, sadness, anger, disillusionment, etc.

Every emotion has a physiological correspondence; first we must accept it, then understand its message, and finally give it a name (what I feel is anger, envy, etc.). Therefore, there is no point in repressing or hiding.

On the other hand, to strengthen our emotional language, it is also important to know how to recognize the needs of others. Be receptive and empathetic. Be sensitive to the emotions of others in order to adjust to your reality and thus be able to communicate better.

Emotional vocabulary and verbal fluidity

One thing many experts in this field recommend is becoming literate in emotional vocabulary. We must make use of the so-called “emotional verbs”. It is a very effective mechanism to convey feelings, to demonstrate honesty and openness. An example of this resource are verbs like I feel, I want, I love, I’m afraid, I want to, it bothers me, I’m envious of, etc.

On the other hand, in addition to using this strategy, it is necessary to train our verbal fluency. There are people who have a great skill in public speaking, are great communicators and conversationalists who, however, lack verbal fluidity in emotional matters. What does that mean?

Basically, these people do not know how to put into words how they feel, what they need, nor are they competent to maintain a dialogue with other people about sentimental and personal aspects. It is this kind of fluidity that we must take care of in order to strengthen our emotional vocabulary.

the emotional narrative

Each of us creates different types of narratives. We narrate ourselves as we integrate our experiences and experiences. We are all a story, our story. Doing this in the best possible way will allow us to respect ourselves even more, take care of ourselves and value ourselves as we deserve.

One way to accomplish this is through emotional intelligence. Knowing ourselves, offering us what we need, practicing self-compassion, assertiveness and empathy will allow us to create a more respectful and, at the same time, integral narrative of our history. All of this will become our self-concept to communicate better with others.

We are all emotional beings who, at a given moment, have learned to reason. Dealing with this inner universe in a better way will make things easier, hence the importance of strengthening our emotional vocabulary.