For example, suppose you working with a child who you would describe as discouraged or feeling insignificant. Alternatively, you can use it to discover the potential root cause of emotions you might be seeing in a child. You can use a feelings wheel like this one to discover and talk about the nuance to different forms of emotions. Gloria Wilcox who is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in St Petersburg, Florida. The feeling wheel pictured above was found on the Uncompromising blog from Sandy Sandmeyer. We are grateful for those who have taken the time to develop these resources and make them available to those of us who work with kids. We have tried to give credit (and provide a link) to the original resource where we were able to track it down. Many of the resources we share here, and in future posts, were found on the internet.

To help adults who are not as comfortable with a range of emotions by providing them with a vocabulary for helping kids.Īt Hope 4 Hurting Kids, we do not believe in recreating the wheel (pun intended).

As a “cheat sheet” for emotion vocabulary building games like “emotions charades” or “mirroring emotions.” (Both of these will be addressed in more detail in later posts).

To prepare kids ahead of time by exploring different types of emotions.

To help kids experiencing new or unfamiliar emotions to try to find a name for that emotion.

Kids do not have those experiences, as a general rule, in order to be able to understand the emotions they are feeling.įeelings wheels can be used in a number of way: Much of what we learn about emotions is based on our own life experiences. Teaching kids about emotions prior to trauma and pain is an important preventative measure in dealing with the hurts they will experience as they move through childhood and into adulthood. They are also useful for giving any child a more robust emotional vocabulary. These tools are all useful for kids who have been through some sort of traumatic life event. Feelings wheels are a simple and effective tool to increase a child’s “emotion vocabulary,” and many options are available online. The first step in helping any child deal with difficult emotions (regardless of the source of those emotions) will be to help them recognize and name the emotions they are feeling. Your job is to find tools and methods to help them process through those emotions. Either way, they are ill-equipped to deal with those emotions.

Alternatively, they are dealing with an intensity of emotions they have never felt before.

Children dealing with loss and trauma are generally dealing with emotions they have never felt before.

The color wheel of emotions