The Motion has been Adopted
The motion received 87% approval. There were 31 votes – Yes: 27, No: 4
A working group to explore the content and layout of an updated Feelings slide will be able to convene. All interested members are invited to participate.
This proposal is being offered by Cat.
Issue: I move that interested members of our meeting update the Feelings slide, used during Friday’s Self-Care, creating a different visual to assist members in connecting to their feelings.
Background: During the Friday “self-care” part of the meeting, room hosts share a feelings checklist entitled “How am I feeling right now?” to assist members to explore their feelings.
The present checklist is grouped into categories, such as angry, fearful, sad, affection, etc. This is a very helpful prompt, but it is not very nuanced. (See our current slide linked below)
Appendix D of the ACA Loving Parent Guidebook is entitled Feelings, Needs & Physical Sensations Sheet. It is divided into four categories (feelings when needs are met, feelings when needs are not met, universal human needs, and physical sensations). This may be more useful and instructive for members. As an added benefit, a new slide reflecting this information will be resourcing approved ACA literature.
There are plenty of other feelings wheels or feelings checklists online and in use at other meetings. One that I find particularly helpful for myself is the Vocabulary of Emotions/Feelings from the website of Tom Drummond, a retired early childhood educator, who provides free resources in the public domain for anyone to use. It groups feelings into general columns and each column is divided into three groups of intensity of that theme (e.g., under the “anger” column, one example of an intense feeling could be infuriated (strong feeling), exasperated (medium) and dismayed (light).
In addition to updating our slide, the members focused on this task could also suggest updating the associated resources that are on our website, perhaps offering fuller descriptions of the information touched on in the new Friday slide.
I hope the group together can explore this topic fully, so that our connection with our feelings can deepen and evolve. I believe that regularly updating our tools and slides can help in this regard.
Thank you for considering this!
References and Resources:
From our SMR meeting – the current ‘Feelings’ slide:
https://staging.acamorning.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/SMRslidesFri1-22.001.jpeg
From the Loving Parent Guidebook of the ACA World Service Organization – a listing of feelings / needs / physical sensations:
From Tom Drummond – an organized list of emotions and feelings:
https://tomdrummond.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Emotion-Feelings.pdf