Me Cat:
I had the most underwhelming past life that was ordinary and very boring.
Therapist Cat:
I thought past lives were EXTRA-ordinary
Me Cat:
Sometimes.
Old Therapist Cat:
What is it really about?
Me Cat:
Patterns.
Old Therapist Cat:
Patterns?
A Me Cat:
You know, finding the dots your conscious mind never connected.
My last QHHT (Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique) session was with Valerie Taylor who was a social worker now died this work for a living. I can’t make this stuff up, but in my past life last week, I was just an ordinary housewife who inherited her dead husband’s company—and turned it around!
Me Cat:
I’ve spent a month teaching AI how things connect.
Therapist Cat:
How’s that going?
Me Cat:
Pretty good.
Therapist Cat:
Excellent.
Me Cat:
Now I just need to teach myself.
Therapist Cat:
Did it work?
Me Cat:
Mostly.
Therapist Cat:
What’s missing?
Me Cat:
One relationship.
Therapist Cat:
Which one?
Me Cat:
The one between what I know and what I believe.
One of the most useful tools I’ve ever encountered in therapy is the Feelings Wheel.
Many of us can identify three emotions:
Fine
Stressed
Angry
The wheel helps expand emotional vocabulary by showing how broader feelings branch into more specific experiences. My dad was very simple this way. He was almost always mad, happy, and sometimes bummed out.
But, we don’t want to blow through life like me belated & beloved pop.
So, let’s build on the top three:
Angry → frustrated → resentful
Sad → lonely → abandoned
Fearful → insecure → inadequate
Happy → hopeful → encouraged
Sometimes the hardest part of healing is naming it correctly. Brene Brown talks about that in The Atlas of the Heart. In her latest, Atlas of the Heart, researched and organized dozens of emotions, experiences, and emotional states, arguing that language shapes our ability to understand and navigate emotions.
When we can name an experience more precisely, we often gain more choice in how we respond to it.
This week, I sent a Feelings Wheel to one of my coaching clients. It reminded me that clarity isn’t always about finding answers. Maybe because we’re not taught to express our feelings. So, beyond identifying it, it’s also about finding better language.
Check it, before you wreck it
The next time someone asks how you’re doing, don’t stop at “fine.” Don’t explain. Really color those feelings.
See if you can identify a feeling one or two layers deeper. You may surprise yourself.
But, she’d say, “If you can’t name it, you can’t tame it.”
Rationale
As both a Semantic Interaction Architecture consultant, a coach and a former public librarian, I’m fascinated by language. The moment we have a word for something, we can begin to work with it.
My Favorites
Insight Timer Feelings Wheel
https://insighttimer.com/blog/feelings-wheel/
The classic Feelings Wheel
https://feelingswheel.com
DEEPER THAN CONNECTING THE DOTS: WHY AI NEEDS TRANSLATORS
One of the things I’ve learned from therapy is that healing often comes from recognizing relationships we couldn’t see before. Like: The relationship between a memory and a feeling. A belief and a behavior. A wound versus a coping mechanism.
Lately, I’ve been exploring a similar idea in my professional work.
As an information architect and metadata specialist, I’m developing a practice called Semantic Interaction Architecture (SIA) — helping AI systems understand not just information, but the relationships between information.
In other words:
Semantic Interaction Architecture is about how people, ideas, projects, organizations, publications, and experiences connect.
Because meaning rarely lives in isolated facts. Meaning lives in relationships.
If you’re curious about that work, you can find my ongoing series, The Translation Layer, in The Curiosity Archive on LinkedIn.
The cats may be talking about therapy.
But lately, I’ve begun to suspect they’re also talking about knowledge graphs too:
That’s one, big massive ontology! Most recently, I’ve been experimenting with Simple Knowledge Graphs (SKGs). These are lightweight relationship maps that help AI systems understand how people, projects, publications, businesses, and ideas connect.
You can read more about that work here.
I’m currently completing my certification studies through the Jung Platform while continuing to develop Red Thread Intuitive (which is my Jungian Coaching and Astrology practice). Recently I completed my Jungian coaching midterm, where I found myself returning to a familiar theme:
Most transformation—for me—happens when the dots between things we already know solidify.
That said, I’m also building the RTI Network, which is a directory of practitioners, therapists, coaches, healers, artists, and thoughtful humans I trust enough to recommend.
If you’d like to be considered for inclusion, reach out!
My newest poetry project is NEW MORNINGS: Instructions for the Dead.
The collection explores grief, memory, continuation, and the strange ways our relationships persist after loss. Forget about my other MorningPoems projects like “Ladies of the Lake,” and “In Radical, Open Territory,” and “Mornings.”
This new batch of poems were written after the death of friends, mentors, and loved ones, and ask a simple question:
How do we continue loving people after they’re gone?
Selections appear periodically through MorningPoems at tessmccarthy.substack.com
VISUAL LIQUID MEGAZINE is a feminist forward lifestyle & poetry/art/photography publication. Its mission is to elucidate the work of the world’s most creative outliers. We celebrate rebels, renaissance women/femmes, BIPOC, Queer/LGBTQIA, disabled & aged creative forces
THEM CATS & THEMCATS.COM - The therapeutic comic about two nameless, non-binary cats in therapy sessions. Born from a strange dream in April 2020, these pointy-eared, fat-nosed cats transformed into the visual language millions didn’t know they needed to process their deepest pain and healing. Until now.
The cats are out every Thursday at 6 a.m. PST in the THEM CATS section on Visual Liquid Megazine barring a Void Course of the Moon.
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