Table 1.

Levels of Emotional Awareness.

Level 1—Somatic sensations/visceromotor activity: Emotional experience at this level consists of bodily sensations. Individuals describe somatic sensations or are unable to provide a description of their experience.

Level 2—Action tendencies/somatomotor activity: Emotional experience at this level consists of actions or action tendencies (approach or avoidance, self-injurious behavior, etc.) and is described similarly. These action tendencies have an associated valence (feeling globally good or bad) that is undifferentiated.

Level 3—Individual feelings: At this level individuals experience emotion as a discrete and specific emotional feeling state. The description of emotion is one-dimensional and often stereotyped (“I feel angry”).

Level 4—Blends of feeling: This level is characterized by the capacity to have feelings that are opposed to or clearly different from each other, e.g., feeling sad yet hopeful.

Level 5—Blends of blends of feeling: At this level the individual has the capacity to appreciate complexity in the experiences of self and other simultaneously. The individual at this level is also able to appreciate the multi-dimensionality and nuance of the other’s feelings by imagining oneself in the other’s situation, unbiased by one’s own emotional state. Comparing the combination of feelings a given person might feel in one situation versus another is another example of level 5 functioning.