This is why feeling truly sad or lonely for 2 minutes is so healing

Emotions come about based on your interpretation of a situation. You observe something and the interpretation surfaces based on your own frame of reference. The emergence of emotions is a consequence of your interpretation. Stick another label on an event, and you’ll immediately experience a different emotion and thus another outcome. What’s particularly reassuring, is that you can influence this yourself, right? Emotions are often a mish-mash of moments from the past, present and the future and are healing or burdensome. Why the primary emotions are so necessary to experience if you want to live according to your true potential? Imagine, your father never phones you to ask you how you are (observation). Your interpretation is that your father doesn’t find you important. The effect, and with it the emotion, is that you will possibly become angry with him and subsequently start avoiding him. Beneath this anger is actually sadness, loneliness or doubt about whether you are good enough. You can also interpret that your father is socially awkward because he never calls you. This makes the emotion less intense for you. Of course, you are disappointed now and again, but you also realise that it’s not unwillingness, but inability. 

 

Primary emotions are connected to an event or a wound. Your sweetheart surprises you with something, for instance, which probably makes you happy and feel touched. Or you were bullied in the past, and so the accompanying primary emotions are that you felt rejected or powerless. Sometimes, you can only feel these emotions years, if not decades later, because a survival mechanism ensures you don’t yet have the access to them. If you’re able to feel them at any moment, then they remain the primary emotions. Primary emotions are brief and intense. Often only lasting between 10 seconds and 2 minutes. In addition, they cleanse you within, they ‘heal’ you. By not pushing the emotions away, but really feeling them, you can in turn make them ‘dissolve’. Maybe handy to add here that I’m not saying this is fun to do, but I am saying it’s useful. And I’m sure the ‘most recent version of yourself’ can handle those 2 minutes.

 

If for whatever reason, you don’t want to feel your primary emotions, two things can happen (or both, alternately). Number one, you become a ‘wandering head’. You shut your head off from your body meaning that you do everything based on rationale. Which results in you feeling your emotions less. You turn down the volume of your ability to feel, as it were. Making emotions less loud. Unfortunately though, this also means that positive emotions are turned down too. Leading you to often need adrenaline, endorphins, alcohol or sugar to feel alive, because you’ve levelled yourself off. Number two, if you don’t want to feel your primary emotions, you can turn them into secondary emotions. Secondary emotions cover up the primary emotions that are too big and painful. So, it’s easier to be angry than to feel rejected and hurt. Other common secondary emotions include: outrage, complaining, victim-behaviour, permanently feeling insecure, feelings of depression etc. These emotions are long-term. Secondary emotions can last for hours, evenings, weeks, months or even years. The reason for this is because they do not cleanse, because you can’t access the healing layer. Sometimes, people are complimented for being so good at accessing their emotions. Comments are made, ‘Wow, I wish that I could be so angry and sad’. It seems as if this drama-like behaviour is a reflection of how good a person is in touch with his feelings, but this isn’t the case at all. Generally speaking, it’s easy to recognise the difference between the emotions in someone else; it’s often more difficult to see this in yourself. Someone stuck in secondary emotions can cause you to run empty. If someone has primary emotions, although we may be affected, we’re not subsequently sucked dry.

 

Instead of pushing the emotions away, denying them or rationalising them, you ‘live through’ your primary emotions. In doing so, you break them down bit by bit, meaning that eventually you’ll become ‘clean’. There may be a scar, but a scar is not ‘dangerous’. A scar that is not rinsed clean is though. Only when you have cleansed yourself and healed, can something new come about. Otherwise, the patterns simply repeat themselves. See also my earlier article about “Letting go of what isn’t yours, how do you do it?’.

 

Søren Kierkegaard, a 19th century Danish philosopher, said: ‘Letting go means temporarily losing your grip. Not letting go means losing your grip for all time’. When you let go, you must irrevocably face your primary emotions.
 

By checking with yourself that you’re not trapped in secondary emotions, or that you’ve become a ‘wandering head’. You can scan your body for heavy, dark and/or cramped spots. You’ll localise where the emotions are and direct your breathing to that place. So instead of walking away from these emotions, you go looking for them. You’ll be able to cope with those 2 short minutes… By the way, I consciously say ‘localise’ and not analyse, because this would mean going back to your head. Someone in the army who had to carry out stressful operations once said: ‘You need to own fear, not obstruct it’. That is thus a good emotion. Breathing towards it and bringing the level of fear to a tolerable level, is much healthier than denying it.

 

If you suffer from secondary emotions a lot, you’ve probably still got something to face in your family system, the inseparable bond between your family members. In my book, ‘The Fountain, find your place’ I describe the effect of not being in your place in the family. If you reject your mother or take over responsibility that isn’t yours, you’re less able to connect and relationships will become complicated. If you reject your father, you will feel the need to prove yourself, thus rejecting yourself too. This creates a kind of short-circuit in your body. On the one hand, there’s the deep love for your parents and on the other hand, the pain, the false hope, the disappointment, shame etc. This can be so confusing that it’s often easier not to feel. This will make you inhabit your body inadequately. You inhabit your body when it’s safe to face your primary emotions, something you have to go into your body for. Which is not the same as taking good care of your body, living a healthy life and exercising a lot. With burdensome emotions, people often keep their eyes closed. Returning to a traumatic event in the past or a future disaster scenario. They lose contact with the here and now. If you keep your eyes open, situations are manageable in the here and now, and everything is less scary than with the eyes closed.

 

The trailer of the film ‘YOUTH’ includes a wonderful quote by actor Harvey Keitel: " Emotions are all we have got." While in many spiritual traditions, people are actually trying to get of their emotional rollercoaster... Here you see that there are different interpretations of emotions. So, there’s much to be said about the frame of reference someone is using to think and act. I believe in the ‘two side of the coin’. Not only in good, positive feelings: we live in a world of duality. The harder you shout that the unwelcome feelings need to go away, and only positive feelings are allowed to stay, the harder the negative emotions bounce back. As a human being, you can learn to deal with emotions from both sides of the coin. You ‘must’ be able to also tolerate displeasure, guilt, shame etc. Remain honest with yourself. The art is to teach yourself to feel uncomfortable while still staying connected to  yourself (and the other person). This is something however that many people can’t bear to do, literally or figuratively turning away from negative emotions. By doing this, they actually cause pain - a result of their unwillingness to acknowledge their own pain. I hope that both adults and young children learn to deal with their emotional roller coaster. To a certain extent, it’s present in everyone. Whether visible or not to the outside world. It’s there. I believe in 'saying yes' to what is there and facing it, in order to become free. To stop being your own puppet.