When you're caught in the whirlpool: Creative expression & self-reflection for emotional regulation

It’s summertime in Virginia which means it’s swimming season. Whether it’s tubing on the river, wading in a backyard kiddie pool, diving into a swimming hole, or doing laps at your community pool, these hot days are perfect for cooling off by submerging ourselves in cool, calm waters. However, this summer also continues to heat up politically, and the image that comes to mind may be more raging whirlpool than cooling oasis. 

Amidst all of the judicial and legislative updates, the calls to action, and upheaval, it can be easy to feel pulled under by all of the feelings. The blur of undefined emotions can make everything feel more challenging, making it harder to self-regulate your emotions and show up in your life. This is even more true for neurodivergent folks, who process sensory input, mindset, environmental factors, and threats differently than neurotypical folks. 

Though this is a time when it feels harder than ever to carve out time and energy for self-reflection and awareness, the process of identifying, developing curiosity around, and accepting what emotions you’re feeling can have a transformative effect on how you experience reality, broadening your window of tolerance so that you can experience emotions without getting dysregulated by them. 

Where do I start? Contact with the present moment

Depending on the circumstances, it may sometimes feel impossible to put a name to the emotions or feelings that you’re experiencing on a given day. At any moment throughout the day, you're experiencing thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations in that swirling whirlpool of reality—and things can change in a millisecond. Knowing this, a helpful starting place can be found in the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) process of contact with the present moment. 

Contact with the present moment is the process of focusing your attention on the here and now through techniques like mindful breathing, meditation, or other grounding exercises. These are all methods that offer ways to re-regulate your body when you’re feeling overwhelmed or triggered. They also empower you to connect with your internal experiences—that is, thoughts and emotions—with more clarity and awareness. 

Think of it as a dial on the whirlpool that can lower the speed; everything is still in motion in the world, but you’re experiencing it as a slowed-down spin when you practice contact with the present moment. By slowing down, you can notice parts of the whirlpool that were just a blur at full speed. Some of these parts are the emotions you’re feeling in response to your reality this summer. 

But how do I know which emotions I'm feeling? 

Even once you’ve slowed down and shifted your focus to your internal experiences, it can be tricky to put a name to the specific emotions you’re feeling. There are countless combinations of emotions that we can experience at any given time, and many of these emotions exist outside of the go-to emotions that we learn in childhood, like happy, sad, or angry. 

Using an Emotion Wheel or a Mood Meter can be helpful in identifying the specific emotions you’re feeling as you undertake this work of self-reflection. These tools help you identify a core aspect of your feeling, and then work your way to a more specific component or experience of that emotion. 

For example, using the Mood Meter below, you might start with the knowledge that you feel “bad,” and then reflect on that feeling while doing some box breathing in order to realize that you can describe that feeling as unpleasant and low-energy, which then points you to explore moods within that part of the meter. By reflecting on what options you see there (and looking them up, as needed, if you’re unsure what they mean), you may eventually realize that you actually feel exhausted and discouraged.

By cultivating this level of awareness about your emotions and mood, you can begin to develop a curiosity about them. As you build this curiosity through self-reflection, you may want to engage with specific questions to help you explore more deeply. For example: 

• What are the experiences that contribute to these feelings? 

• How do you physically experience these emotions in my body? 

• What sort of judgment or other associations and cultural bias might you hold about these feelings? 

• If you find this feeling unpleasant, how do you typically try to distract yourself from it or avoid feeling it?

• On a scale of 1-10, how intense does this emotion feel right now, and over time?

• What feelings come up for you as you think about this emotion?

All of these questions can make excellent journal prompts, but sometimes writing about feelings can feel too rational or intellectual. Visual art can also be a powerful way to open up your mind to these questions in a more abstract way, and collage can provide an easy and affordable way to experiment with visually exploring your emotions.

Grab a piece of paper and some magazines, pictures, and stickers, along with scissors, glue, and/or tape. Pick one emotion that you’re feeling now and think about how you would represent this visually: 

• Does this emotion feel like a warm or cool color, light or dark? 

• Is it represented by specific images or a mixture of abstract shapes?

• Does folding or crumpling up the paper feel like part of how you experience the emotion? 

• Does the emotion fill up the full page or is there breathing room and white space around it?

As you’re making a collage about your emotion, take time to return to contact with the present moment through breathing or meditation, reconnecting more deeply with the emotion. Once you feel like your collage is complete, take a few minutes to think about it and how the visualization may or may not change your relationship to the emotion. 

Over time, and repeated exploration and self-reflection, you may come to realize that the visual representation of your emotions—and/or journaling prompts—can help you feel less judgement about how you’re feeling, focusing instead on curiosity about the emotions themselves. And as you begin to get more curious about your emotions, you can begin to more fully accept them in order to improve your window of tolerance, even when you’re looking into a whirlpool of emotions.

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Sarah Lawson

Clinical social work intern

Student therapist at Divergent Path Wellness

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