This is the Feelings Wheel.
In sum, it helps to identify emotions. It’s of course, useful with children, but it may also be useful for many of you. You may have already been exposed to it, but if not, it works like this:
First, you identify the strongest, core emotion (understanding that they can be mixed). Many of us would say “Fear” for Death Anxiety. From there, we can go further. Is it fear based on being scared, anxious, insecure, weak, rejected, or threatened?
For many of us, it’s probably a mix of these things. Just going along “scared” shows us Helpless, which is so close to the truth, isn’t it? Death is an impending thing that makes us feel Helpless, because we can’t figure out what to do about it! There’s no stopping it, so what could possibly help?
Well, that’s what we’re working on here.
Creating tools, and identifying things that may help.
On the Anger chart, I find it usually goes Anger-Frustrated-Infuriated! It’s so infuriating that there is nothing that I can do to stop death!
Using this chart, may help you better specify the emotions you feel relating to the death anxiety, and from there, you can look at what to do about that emotion. Identifying it, is always the first step. We can’t do anything if we don’t know the source of the problem!
There are other ways to do this, too. I’m not the best at colored charts like this, because it’s often a bit too simple -- I can acknowledge multiple feelings at once. If that’s the case with you, you may want to try the process of talking (or thinking, or writing) out your feelings, and where they stem from, so you can identify them, their root causes, and determine what you can do from that perspective.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/art-and-science/201801/identifying-your-feelings
Psychology Today discusses a bit more about identifying the emotions, and questions you can ask to figure them out, as well as practices you can begin to use to remain aware of these emotions.
https://www.healthline.com/health/list-of-emotions
Finally, one last setting that helps to break down the emotions even further, so you can have a better idea of how they feel, when you’re just not sure.
I’ll continue to discuss individual emotions here, but in order for that to help, you do have to know how to identify them.