A friend wrote me today and said they were surprised by my last post.

They said they’d never associated the words sad or bitter with me.

I get that.

I am not sure I would have strongly associated those emotions with me either.

Brene Brown on her Rising Strong as a Spiritual Practice audiobook (see chapter five) asks her audience how many emotions the average person can recognize.

Take a guess.

The answer is three – happy, sad, pissed off.

That was the range of my emotional fluency. Sad and mad captured me more often than glad.

And without vocabulary, talking about what I was feeling was hard. Really hard.

Brene says what we really need is the ability to articulate thirty different emotions if we want to deal effectively with what is going on with our inner selves.

My vocabulary is larger now and there is still more work to do.

#happier

I am working on project about happiness, positive psychology, and ways to bring them into your life. You can subscribe for updates here.