Introduction
The foundational skills you need to bring awareness to and become responsive to emotions, both yours and another's, are noticing the sensations in your body, identifying or labeling the feeling, and finally naming the emotions.
Developing your emotion and sensation vocabulary will help you to grow these skills. To be able to clearly communicate what you are feeling you need to have a language and the words to describe it. You need an emotional vocabulary.
In the same way you need words and a vocabulary to be able to describe the interior of a room, words such as carpet, chair, window, white, brown, and plant; you need words to be able to describe your interior world. Words which can describe what is going on inside of you. If you do not have these words you will not be able to effectively communicate to yourself or others about your emotional state or your needs.