“Why aren’t there any negative emotions listed?”

On the very first worksheet, people sometimes ask, “Why there aren’t any negative emotions listed? What if you still feel angry, or what if you now feel embarrassed or ashamed of how you’ve acted?” The reason these emotions aren’t listed is because when you do the worksheet correctly, seeing that they shouldn’t see it your way at this time — not condoning it, but understanding it — always results in a movement towards more positive emotions. Maybe you’re not feeling joyous, but there’s a sense of honesty or clarity. If you’re still feeling angry, you haven’t done Step 5 slowly enough or deeply enough, and that’s okay. It’s your first worksheet, and we’re building our skills. You’ll get to do other worksheets on different topics, and this will get clearer.

If you’re looking for words like ashamed and embarrassed, though, something else happened. You realized that they shouldn’t see it your way at this time, and then your mind moved to a thought like “I shouldn’t have treated them the way I did:’ But that’s not the topic that we’re working on. to for “They shouldn’t see it my way: you probably feel something more like understanding, and the shame and embarrassment come from this other topic, which you would do on a separate worksheet.

You’ll find as you do more worksheets that one can lead to another, and doing it on paper, or online, helps you keep the topics separate so you can focus on just one at a time. So for this worksheet, focus on how you feel when you realize that in reality they shouldn’t see it your way at this time, and that may help you connect to the positive emotions on the screen.