I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news but what kind of counselor would I be if I didn’t tell you feelings are very important? From a biological level, they give us information about how to navigate the world. There’s a reason all of us humans experience emotions, and why our emotions across the board are very similar to each others- there’s a universality about it. Shying away from our emotions cuts us off from understanding ourselves and what happens to us.
Emotion means “to move.” Movement is a part of being a healthy human, right down to the cellular level of existence. The more that we feel our emotions and let them pass through, the healthier we are.
With my clients, primary and secondary emotions are a concept that I share fairly frequently. Primary feelings are the raw ones. But they’re transient. They’re the ones you experience and eventually pass. We can compare it to a fire- the fire is there, it’s intense, but it will eventually die out if you let it be. Feeling those emotions is intense but it is the healthiest way to do it.
Secondary emotions are those that can be experienced for long periods of time. If we continue to use the fire analogy, secondary emotions don’t normally die down on their own because this type of emotion interacts with our thinking- our thoughts are like the oxygen and logs we throw on our emotional fire. It’s like they control us rather than us controlling them and it can be really hard to understand where they’re coming from. These emotions become patterns of how we relate to the world instead of transient states.
Let’s do a quick example of thoughts that would trigger continual emotions. Say that you are driving and someone cuts in front of you. There are so many responses to this situation but I am going to give examples that would bring you to your primary emotion and one that would bring you to your secondary emotion.
Thought: “oh my gosh!!!!! I have no idea why that person just cut me off like that.”
Primary emotion: fear, frightened, terrified, startled
Thought: “That person doesn’t care where they’re going!”
Secondary emotion: anger, aggressive, frustrated, provoked, enraged
Can you see the difference here? One of the biggest differences in these responses is the tolerance for uncertainty. This definitely impacts how we attribute others actions toward us. In either case we don’t actually have the information we need, but if we attribute that others are callous, uncaring, or stupid, we tend to have different feeling responses.
The most common secondary emotions are anger and anxiety. With both of these there is often a primary emotion underneath that is blocked from being felt, the secondary emotion is like a protective defense against it, as primary emotions tend to be a little more vulnerable. There is typically a belief about oneself that perpetuates it, and it becomes a cycle.
Here’s how the cycle goes. I am going to use anxiety, but it is the same for all secondary emotions. With anxiety, we don’t like the symptoms we experience, which are typically fear, worry, racing thoughts, sweating, racing heart, feeling of pressure on the chest, etc, etc.. The thoughts that motivate us to keep finding logs for the fire are honestly very painful, and we would like to stop feeling this anxiety. What we do is find a way to avoid it. Common avoidance behaviors are:
- scrolling through our phones
- procrastinating
- drinking and/or drugs
- codependency (Yes, focusing on others feelings so that we don’t have to feel our own is a type of avoidance)
- binge eating
- playing video games
or just doing anything in excess that effectively helps us run away from the feeling. This numbs it for some time and we have temporary relief. And notice here again we see the deeper theme rear its head- dealing with uncertainty. All of these things give us a level of comfort against the unknown. Scrolling through our phones makes us feel like we can know everything, are powerful, that we have so much of humanity at our fingertips. Drinking, drugs, and binge eating give us control over uncertainty through our state of being, we can consume them to control how we feel. Codependency focuses our energy outward and protects us from the unknown within ourselves, otherwise we’d have to look inward, etc, etc etc.
It would be great if we could just run away from our emotions. But what ends up happening is that the next time a similar situation or experience comes around, our brains have learned that this thing is scary and that we have to avoid it! So our anxiety or whatever the triggered secondary emotion is actually grows long term with this type of coping mechanism.
Letting ourselves actually experience those raw emotions is scary- but doing so can bring us to a place where we let ourselves feel what is actually going on in our lives, and where we can live more in the moment. In accepting our emotions we come to a place where we can experience gratitude instead of always searching for what is wrong, we can start to dream of things that are possible instead of looking for certainty, and best of all, connect to others, instead of looking for validation that what we’re doing is “correct.” Big or small, processing our feelings is a very special gift we each have access to, and helping people through this process is one of my favorite things.
For further reading:
Psychoimmunologist Candace Pert: The Molecules of Emotion
Psychologist Dan Goleman: Emotional Intelligence