By: Naiara Perin-Darim, M.Psy
Feeling and emotion are two terms often used interchangeably – but the first step to understanding the way we feel is to separate them. Feelings are made of body sensations, emotions and thoughts combined, they affect each other very closely forming just one feeling that we can notice. That is why it is so much easier to answer the question “How are you feeling?” than the question “What emotion are you feeling?”. The first question might be answered with an emotion, body sensation or a thought.
Many theories target the relation between our feelings (thoughts, sensations, and emotions) and actions, as a way to address our Mental Health. It is simple to say that how we feel impacts how we act, and how we act impacts how we feel because our brain is always creating, evaluating, and reprogramming patterns to keep us safe. Most of us behave based on waves of feelings, without really having a hold on what those patterns are. We evolved to have those patterns and to play them automatically without our awareness. Developing that awareness is very useful but it usually doesn’t happen naturally and looks different for each person.
One other automatic mechanism of defence comes to mind when thinking about awareness of our feelings – primary and secondary emotions. Emotions are a huge moving force for action, and they may be naturally more intense for a few people. All of us have a more difficult time dealing with some of our emotions because learn to categorize emotions that are positive or acceptable and other that aren’t. That judgement leads our brain to numb a few emotions and cover them up with others as soon as they arise. The most popular example of that is a few men learn that they can’t cry, which leads them to think they shouldn’t feel sadness, they also learn that feeling angry is acceptable, which may lead them to cover up feelings of sadness with anger. In that scenario when something makes them sad, they don’t even become aware of the primary emotion of sadness, all they feel is the secondary emotion which is anger.
The familiar thoughts “why am I feeling this way?”, and “It makes no sense that I feel like this.” come from a need we have to combine our thoughts (reason) with our emotions. As mentioned previously that would only be possible if we are aware of our primary emotion and give up judging emotions by acceptable and not acceptable. The attempt to understand a feeling has the power to make us move away from being in the moment and take us towards trying to control, change and rationalize what we feel. That movement may feel harmless, but there is a very intense expectation that everything we feel will make sense, even though a lot of emotions may be propelled by our most automatic thoughts. Automatic thoughts are quick judgements that we are mostly unaware of, they are learned by our observation of our environment and what is socially acceptable around us – we evolved to do this to keep us alive and support quick responses to our environment.
I have always been very sensitive, which has led me to not only question my feelings but also receive many questions about why I feel the way that I feel. All the questions from others have led me to mistrust my emotional reactions, and, therefore, push them away. As a result, I am a very rational person, only welcoming my emotions to my awareness to prove to myself why they are wrong. It takes a lot of mindfulness to not fall into my patterns sometimes.
One useful tool to develop more awareness is to recognize emotions and behavioural urges in yourself. The list below may be helpful for that task:
- Guilt and Shame
- Both protect us from being expelled from a social group
- Guilt means “I did something bad, I made a mistake that may get me kicked out of my group”, and urges us to change our behaviour and repair the transgression.
- Shame means “I am something bad, I don’t belong in this group”, urges us to change our identity, cover up the transgression, be silent, and self-judge.
- Checking which one of these emotions makes sense in a certain situation would support us to follow the appropriate urge and be effective.
- Sadness
- Urges to withdraw to avoid further losses, conserve what we have, secure the lost item/person back, and look for reminders of what we lost.
- Physical demonstrations of sadness trigger others to offer us support.
- Anger
- Gives us enough energy to attack or defend ourselves
- Physical demonstrations cause fear or anger in others
- Fear and Anxiety
- Fear protects us from imminent danger and usually generates freezing
- Anxiety protects us from a danger that can still be avoided by motivating movement and problem-solving
- Envy and Jealousy
- Envy aims at keeping a balance, so no one has more resources than we do. It gives us the urge to get the resource for ourselves or make sure others don’t have them
- Jealousy is the fear of people taking something precious we have, our urge is to guard and protect the precious item
- Joy
- Triggered by noticing something that benefits us, it gives us the urge to have that happen again
- Disgust
- Generated by a need to avoid contamination through recoiling from certain items
- Applies to people who are part of social groups that can cause our exclusion
Look up Mindfulness of Current Emotions and the Opposite Action DBT Skill for more information.