Understanding Your Feelings About Your Feelings
Emotional intelligence begins with accurately identifying your feelings.
Emotions are complex, layered, and at times difficult to feel or understand. Anyone who has ever felt an overwhelming or unpleasant feeling like anger, shame, guilt, sadness, or fear has likely felt the urge to push away from the feeling (or the situation that triggered it) and shift their focus to more enjoyable, comfortable, or at the very least neutral things. In moments like that, we often think getting rid of the feeling is the only way to deal with it. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but avoidance is unfortunately not an effective way to deal with emotions. In fact, engaging with and moving through emotional experiences actually give us way more power and control than avoidance ever could. The more we engage with our emotions, the better we’re able to understand ourselves and our needs.
Primary vs. Secondary Emotions
Being able to accurately identify your emotions is a crucial first step in this process of moving through and making sense of your emotions. While this may sound straightforward, remember that emotions are complex and layered. Sometimes, our feelings get lost underneath our feelings about our feelings. Have you ever felt upset, and then felt embarrassed that you even got upset in the first place? Then you’ve felt a feeling (embarrassment) about another feeling (sadness).
The initial emotional response that you feel to a stimulus is called a primary emotion. In the example above, your primary emotion would be sadness, which you felt first. The emotional response you then have towards your primary emotion is called a secondary emotion. Just like the embarrassment above, these secondary emotions are usually more critical and judgmental. What usually happens in situations like this is that our initial emotional response (i.e. sadness) gets lost and forgotten underneath the cloud of embarrassment that tends to take over. Instead of processing and understanding the initial feeling that probably needs some attention and care, our focus gets shifted to our feeling about our feeling.
Understanding how important processing primary emotions are doesn’t mean we should discount our secondary emotions altogether — these emotions also give us important information and are worth exploring. For example, understanding why you might have felt embarrassed would be worthwhile in a situation like this. However, we need to pay special attention to the primary emotions that we tend to overlook. We can’t fully process our emotions until we acknowledge and understand the needs and information that our primary emotions are also giving us. Instead of viewing emotions as good or bad or right or wrong, think about them like signals. Even emotions that are unpleasant or uncomfortable to feel give us important information about our needs, wants, values, relationships, decisions, etc.
Understanding How You Actually Feel
Now that you know to be aware of both primary and secondary emotions, hopefully it will be easier to distinguish both of these the next time you experience them. But being able to accurately label exactly what these feelings are is also an important part of increasing emotional awareness and intelligence.
When you experience an emotion, you might notice a few different things occur simultaneously in and around you. Let’s take the emotion of anger for example. Physically, when you feel angry you might experience certain sensations in your body like your chest tightening, feeling tense, and feeling hot. Cognitively, you would label this experience as “anger” and might endorse certain beliefs about yourself, others, or the world such as “I’m going to lose it,” or “people always piss me off.” Behaviourally, you may also feel an urge to act in response to this feeling. For example, if you’re holding something you might throw it across the room or if you become angry in a heated discussion with your partner, you might feel the need to yell at them.
In order to accurately label your emotions, try asking yourself the following questions:
- What stimulus triggered this feeling for me in this moment?
- What physical sensations am I experiencing right now?
- What feeling word can I use to label this experience? Have I ever felt this way before? (If you feel stuck coming up with an emotion word here I would recommend using an emotion wheel like this one)
- What, if any, urges am I experiencing to act? Will these actions be helpful for me?
At this point, I would encourage taking a few moments to pause. Allow yourself to label and feel whatever you’re feeling, making sure to repeat this process for both your primary and any secondary emotions you may be experiencing. Resist the urge to act immediately — an emotional response is not always the best one. Take your time processing your feelings before deciding how you would intentionally like to respond to them.
I find a lot of uncomfortable emotions get the inaccurate and unfair reputation of being “bad” feelings because the feeling itself is often confused with the reaction to that feeling. Remember that anger is not the same as the angry response of yelling at a loved one, and this goes for any other emotion too. Feelings themselves are always valid, important, and informational. While you can’t choose how you feel, what you do with those feelings is totally up to you.
