Emotional Labeling

In crisis, feelings are often confusing and hard to define. Helping the person label the emotions that he or she is feeling helps them to make sense and gain some control of these emotions. Labeling the emotions also gives the recipient a chance to clarify and corrects the perceptions of the responder.

Crises happen as a result of some loss, real or perceived, in a person's life. The pain felt in a crisis is grief over that loss. The loss may be something you can put your hands on like an automobile, money or a home.
It may also be less tangible, like loss of self-esteem, power, freedom or prestige. The resulting grief is the same. There may be a number of losses present in a single event. For instance, it is not unusual for a widow to lose financial well-being because of her husband's death; thereby she loses security, power, prestige and quite possibly friends and social contact. Two key elements to any crisis are grief/loss and anxiety.

No one can predict what a grieving person will feel like. However, there are stages identified by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross that we can identify in most people experiencing grief. The five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance provides a roadmap of sorts that point out where someone may be in the grief process. Grief doesn't progress through the stages and end. Rather, it seems like a series of loops, traversing the same ground over and over. The person may be at different stages of grief at any given time.