What Are Emotions Good For? Why Identifying Primary and Secondary Emotions Is the First Step to Emotion Regulation
Emotions: What are they good for?
By the time clients come to us in DBT, they have generally been experiencing quite a bit of emotional pain and suffering. As a result, they’re often desperate for some relief and ready to do pretty much anything to turn down the emotional intensity or even get rid of their emotions all together.
Spoiler alert: We can’t get rid of your emotions (and we wouldn’t want to if we could). Emotions are actually really important. Why?
There are three main things emotions do for us on a daily basis:
Emotions motivate us to act. If a car comes out of nowhere, it’s fear that makes you jump out of the way before your conscious thoughts can even catch up or register what’s going on. If someone is taking advantage of you, it’s anger that will push you to stand up for yourself. If you’ve done something that crosses your own values, your guilt will push you to correct it. If you have a big test coming up, it’s anxiety that motivates you to study. Without emotions, you’d be apathetic and unmotivated.
Emotions give other people information. Your emotional reactions give the people around you information about your experience and help you get your needs met and collaborate and cooperate with those around you.
Emotions give you information. This one is least intuitive, but extremely important. Emotions (along with sensations, urges, and thoughts) are the building blocks of our experiences. Emotions tell us what we like and don’t like and what we want and don’t want. Emotions help us figure out what direction to go in (i.e., set goals) and determine who we are (i.e., our sense of self) and how we want to be (i.e., our values). Without the ability to identify and experience your emotions, you will very quickly lose information on your own experience and experience what is known as “defusion of self.” In this situation, people often pay more attention to the experiences of those around them, leading to the experience of being a social chameleon or social water (taking the shape of whatever’s going on around you).
Hopefully I’ve convinced you that emotions are extremely important and that learning to work with them is key (vs. having a goal of existing without them).
Emotion identification is emotion management
So, learning to live with your emotions is important… but how do you actually do that? Step 1 is to identify what you’re feeling. This one is a really big deal and it took me a while to fully appreciate why. I didn’t get it until I heard someone explain it by saying that, “emotion identification is emotion management.” Another version of this is, “name it and tame it.” We spend a ton of time and effort learning to identify and label emotions because doing that itself helps us to regulate and can set us up to use other emotion regulation strategies. If you’re unsure what you’re feeling, referencing Emotion Regulation Handout 6 can really help. It lists each of the 10 primary emotions (see below for more on this) and common prompts for feeling them, basically giving you a multiple choice of what you might be feeling. It also provides a list of additional emotion words that fall into that emotion “family.” For example, “frustration,” and “irritation,” are both anger words.
Getting to the “Root” of the Emotional Problem: Primary (and Secondary) Emotions
Primary emotions are the normative, appropriate (i.e., justified) response to the situation at hand. It’s the first, spontaneous (“natural”) reaction. For example, if you have been looking forward to getting an ice cream cone all day, and then soon after getting it, the ice cream falls on the floor, the natural response is disappointment, which is a form of sadness.
Emotion scientists agree there is a set of “core” primary emotions that are common across cultures and form the building blocks of all other emotional experiences. However, there’s a good amount of debate about exactly how many of these core emotions there are. Some say 4, some (including a very famous emotion scientist, Paul Ekman) say 7, in DBT, we have 10: anger, disgust, envy, fear, happiness, jealousy, love, sadness, shame, and guilt. You might think of these primary emotions as categories or emotion “families,” with a wide variety of experiences that can fall into each category.
Secondary emotions are emotions that occur in reaction to primary emotions. To go back to the ice cream example, the natural (i.e., primary) reaction to my ice cream falling on the floor is sadness. However, I might quickly move on to feeling anger at myself for dropping it or embarrassment (a form of shame) if others turn to look. This anger is a secondary reaction to the initial sadness.
In the ice cream example, the primary vs. secondary emotional distinction is relatively clear. However, overtime, we can form habits, wherein our secondary emotional reactions become nearly (or even fully) automatic. For example, if every time I receive interpersonal feedback I move quickly from shame or hurt to anger, I may develop a near instantaneous, automatic anger reaction to receiving feedback. This reaction can be so quick that, at first glance, it seems primary, even though it’s not.
Whereas primary emotions are natural (i.e., innate) and common across people and even cultures (i.e., most people presented with the same situation would share that reaction), secondary emotions may be specific to an individual person and their history and experiences. For example, someone with a history of significant self-hatred may experience significant anger at themselves after dropping the ice cream cone and feeling the initial disappointment.
So, how do we get from that initial primary emotional reaction to the secondary emotion? What causes secondary emotions? There are two main answers: history/learning (i.e., past experiences) and judgments (or as I prefer to call them, “interpretations.”) Of course, these two are related in that past experiences generally influence our interpretations.
Primary emotions are generally a reaction to the situation itself. They reflect reality (e.g., it makes sense to feel fear when you are in danger or disappointed when you lose something you were looking forward to). However, once we start making different interpretations (e.g., I may make the interpretation that I was careless and should have paid more attention to what I was doing), those interpretations may lead to a wide range of secondary emotions (in this case, anger).
Tips for identifying your primary emotion:
Describe the facts of the situation, and ask yourself what an expected reaction to that situation might be for someone in your cultural context
Note: while some (or even all) of the primary emotions may be common across cultures, it is advisable to consider your own cultural context when identifying your primary emotion.
Identify your interpretations (hint: if a jury of your peers wouldn’t agree with it, it’s probably an interpretation, rather than a fact). Once identified, redirect from the interpretations to the facts of the situation.
Look at Emotion Regulation Handout 6, as noted above (or any emotion dictionary/glossary)
Do body scan or a SUN wave: Identify your Sensations, Urges, and then Name the emotion.
Accurate Expression
Accurately identifying your primary emotion sets you up for really effective accurate [emotional] expression. By effective, I mean that other people are most likely to understand and validate you when you clearly express your primary emotion, especially if you can give some context, too. For example, if I yell at my husband for using my cast iron skillet and then scrubbing it like a normal pot, so all the carefully developed seasoning strips off, he’s more likely to be defensive than to validate me. BUT, if I can tell him that I’m bummed because I’ve worked hard to take good care of that pan and build up the seasoning, he’s way more likely to understand where I’m coming from and validate me, and way less likely to get defensive.
To use the ice cream example above, if I drop my ice cream and start telling my friend that I’m a terrible, irresponsible person, they’re likely to be confused. They’re certainly not going to validate that I’m a terrible person. But, if I can express my disappointment effectively (e.g., “ugh! What a bummer! I was so looking forward to that”), my friend is way more likely to give me the validation I’m looking for (e.g., “Oh no! That sucks!”)
TLDR; Emotions are important because they motivate us, get us to act in important ways, and communicate to ourselves and to others. Primary emotions are our natural reactions to the objective facts of a situation. Secondary emotions are emotions about emotions, and they typically result from some type of interpretation about the situation (vs. the descriptive facts of the situation). Identifying your emotion (especially your primary emotion!) is a powerful tool for regulating your emotions and opens up options for you to choose additional skills afterwards. When we identify our primary emotions and express them clearly to others, we maximize the likelihood that others will understand what we’re going through, validate us, and feel connected to us.
Practice: Notice an emotion and identify if it is primary or secondary. Consult Emotion Regulation Handout 6 as needed.