Body Map Infographic - Identifying Emotions

In Pete Walker's Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, there's a section on knowing when you're in an emotional flashback. He advises readers that the most common clue is feeling "small, helpless, hopeless and so ashamed that we are loath to go out or show our face anywhere."

I chronically struggle with identifying my own emotions. I can identify others' emotions but can't label my own. The best I can do is describe a feeling as "bad" or "good". This makes detecting an emotional flashback difficult.

However, I recently came across an infographic from a National Academy of Sciences journal article that shows body activation maps for both simple (fear, sadness, etc.) and complex emotions (anxiety, depression, shame, etc.). It shows where study participants felt increased "activation", i.e., sensations, in their bodies during an emotion, and where they felt less. Here's the link to the infographic in the article: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1321664111#fig02

I look back on this infographic frequently when I can't determine what I'm feeling. Emotional flashbacks can be disorienting when they're not tied to an easily discernible memory. Hopefully, this resource will be helpful to others.