- Our emotions, when they are heightened, can feel like a freight train, plowing through and interrupting everything in their tracks.
- Often this is because, like cars on a freight train, emotions and thoughts are pouring in rapid fire one after another with no end in sight.
- An example: you feel angry for a moment, but then, perhaps you feel guilty for feeling angry (or expressing it). Perhaps that can lead to frustration that you feel guilty. So on and so forth.
- Some of us have a hard time identifying what our feelings are, or labeling them into categories like “anger”, “guilt”, or “frustration”. Instead we just feel revved up or activated or (at the other end of the spectrum) numb or flat.
- In the DBT world Marsha Linehan describes primary and secondary emotions to help us begin to make sense of our inner world. Primary emotions are responses to our external world (like events around you or the actions of others). Secondary emotions are responses to our internal world (i.e. emotions in response to our emotions or thoughts).
- For most of us, secondary emotions are the ones that cause the most upheaval and distress.
- That’s because we can have many secondary emotions and they often come in quickly and more powerfully than the primary emotion that preceded it.
- Secondary emotions often have a judgment built into them (i.e. I noticed I’m angry, but I feel like I shouldn’t be angry, so now I feel ashamed about my anger).
- This can leave us in a trap where our emotions are loud, overwhelming, hard to distinguish from one another, and subsequently hard to resolve – even if we’re really trying. Instead we can feel out of control spinning and cycling, often in ways that interfere with our ability to be present in our lives.
For us to manage our emotional world we need to know what we are feeling and how to take care of ourselves in response to that feeling. An essential skill to help us regulate (balance) our emotional world is learning how to feel and process through emotions in a way resolves them.
There are many tools for managing your emotions, but one way to help you through them is to learn how to identify them. Once we’ve identified them, we often feel better because our internal world feels organized and less chaotic by our awareness of what’s happening within it. This is similar to strategic problem solving, usually the first step in a problem solving strategy is identifying what the issue is so you can address what needs resolution. The concept of Primary and Secondary emotions from Dialectical Behavior Therapy gives us a helpful starting point to do this in our emotional world.
Primary emotions are reactions to events in your external environment (being angry at someone for criticizing, feeling happy that a loved one is coming to visit etc). Secondary emotions are are reactions to your internal world (i.e. your thoughts and feelings). For example: feeling guilty when you feel angry or feeling pride in your ability to be happy for someone else.
Secondary emotions tend to cause the most distress for a few reasons:
1. They can be set off in a long overwhelming string (which I call emotional chaining), with numerous thoughts and feelings coming from and leading to one another.
2. They can dilute, overwhelm, and drown out the primary emotion making it difficult to identify and resolve whatever set that off. This overpowering often leaves us confused, potentially upset with ourselves, and overwhelmed.
3. If we have judged ourselves for experiencing our primary emotion (i.e. I got angry, but feel like I shouldn’t have gotten angry), we will both be stuck with our feeling and our belief that we shouldn’t have it; a complete trap to effective resolution of what’s happening.
To increase your ability to manage your emotions, start working to identify “primary” and “secondary” emotions. Look out for the three traps listed above and see notes for more resources.
Notes:
- This post references material from Marsha Linehan’s emotion regulation module in her Dialectical Behavior Therapy treatment manual, specifically pages 86 and 89 of the manual. Full Citation: Linehan, M. (1993). Skills training manual for treating borderline personality disorder. New York: Guilford Press.
- If you struggle with secondary emotion trap number 1 (emotional chaining) and number 2 (secondary emotions overwhelming primary emotions) you want to work to help slow down your internal world so it doesn’t move quite as rapid fire. Working on staying in the present hugely helps here. There will be additional posts to come on this, but see this post on meditation for something you can start today.
- If you struggle with secondary emotion trap number 3, (judgments), see these prior posts for help with tools and concepts to decrease the power of judgments; and this series on identifying, understanding, and challenging judgments.
- Knowing how to manage emotions is a complex skill, sometimes we need to let ourselves ride them out, sometimes we need to pull away from them, sometimes we need to actively manage them. There will be many more posts to come on this topic but these previous posts on controlling our attention and knowing which types of coping skills to use when have helpful content.
- Today’s post assumes you buy in that all feelings are worth having. Perhaps you don’t. This post covers some of the many reasons we want to keep both our positive and our negative emotions around.
- Sometimes our emotions are too big or feel too far away for us to tolerate feeling through them. This happens when we are outside our window of tolerance. If this is the case you want to work towards grounding to help turn the dial down on the intensity (or the numbness) before working on feeling through.
- This is similar, but not to be confused with behavioral chaining, a DBT technique in which you look back at each moment that lead up to a particular behavior to identify the feeling or experience that started the behavior.