The Drawing Your Feelings exercise is designed to help younger people explore their emotional experiences.
Offers theory, guidance, and prompts for mental health professionals. Downloads are in Fillable PDF format where appropriate.
Includes client-friendly guidance. Downloads are in Fillable PDF format where appropriate.
An editable Microsoft PowerPoint version of the resource.
Enhancing a child’s vocabulary for their feelings is one way of helping them to understand and learn to manage their internal world. The Drawing Your Feelings exercise was developed for younger people, or for those whom clinicians think would benefit from exploring their emotional experiences.
Drawing Your Feelings is an effective tool for therapists working with children to explore, recognize, and understand their emotions.
Fear or worry about possible future events.
Persistent sadness, emptiness, or loss of interest.
Intense frustration or upset in response to something that seems unfair or wrong.
Introduce the exercise to clients.
Encourage them to draw the emotions linked to specific scenarios.
Use drawings to facilitate dialogue about feelings.
Encourage ongoing recognition and reflection on emotional responses.
Developing emotional literacy is an important skill for a child’s social and emotional development. Steiner (1984) proposes that “To be emotionally literate we need to know both what it is that we are feeling and what the causes for our feelings are. It is not sufficient to know that we are angry, guilty, happy or in love. We must also know the origin of our anger, what causes our guilt, why we are in love, and how angry, guilty or in love we are.” Similarly, Figueroa-Sánchez (2008) defines literacy as “the ability to create meaning and the ability to apply that understanding our own lives” and argues that children’s emotional readiness can be nurtured by engaging them in literacy-focused activities including narrative storytelling and games that express their feelings and emotions.
Enhancing a child’s vocabulary for their feelings is one way of helping them to understand and learn to manage their internal world. The Drawing Your Feelings exercise was developed for younger people, or for those whom clinicians think would benefit from exploring their emotional experiences. This exercise is a non-threatening introduction to an exploration of emotion in which young people are given prompts for a range of situations which might promote a variety of emotional states and are asked to draw how they would feel in these situations. The exercise helps them to imagine, anticipate, and explore emotional states. Blank space is left for the therapist to introduce situations that are especially meaningful or relevant to the client.
