Primary Feelings: Their Purpose and Benefit

​We’ve taken a look at how feelings are often interpreted as actions and thoughts (read April 2016 - “Woah, woah, woah, feelings). Feelings are messages our bodies give us to navigate relationships, events and make many decisions in the world. Typically though, people utilize their minds, follow their impulses and reactions to make decisions overriding the feeling messages provided. Often the first feeling we identify easily is anger. We might turn red, get hot, yell, or even walk away from situations. Anger is an important feeling when you are in grave danger. It helps to protect. But often anger is used as a defense against primary feelings and looks like judgments and criticisms of ourselves and the world.

What exactly is a “primary” feeling?

Simply, it is the first feeling we have in response to a situation. These are, generally, unthinking responses. The primary feeling is the ‘why’ in why we get angry if we aren’t in grave danger. Let’s use the story from my last installment. As you may remember, I left my apartment and forgot my keys to the office and had to go back to get them calling myself, ‘stupid’. Well, that criticalness is a form of anger. Calling myself stupid is the acting out of anger, rather than feeling it and allowing a primary feeling to surface. Acting out feelings, mainly anger, is a popular dynamic. People act out their anger by blaming, judging other people or themselves, isolating themselves from friends or from social events, raging, drinking, having illicit sex, shopping, the list goes on.  What is being missed is the primary feeling or information the self is trying to tell us in order to navigate the world. What I may have been feeling when I forgot my keys was not ‘stupid’ but perhaps helpless, worthless, scared or powerless. These primary feelings are important to identify. The chances are, if we are ignoring them, then we don’t like feeling these first feelings. Ignoring direct messages from ourselves is like trying to drive through unknown territory without a map. We get lost. If I had stopped after I realized I forgot the keys and been able to identify my helpless feeling I would be more connected to myself and supported my travels to my office without anymore criticisms and more acceptance. I probably wouldn’t have been critical of the people on the train and been able to take actions to support whatever needs I had getting there such as moving from the subway car the people with whom I was annoyed with were sitting at. The benefit is that I align with myself and value the information coming to me rather than malign myself and ignore the information... there's a catchy phrase.. Align, don't malign! Unfortunately, the latter is very popular. Most of us do this unconsciously every day. So, your first task in understanding yourself and your feelings is to:

1. Buy a journal and bring it with you for a week wherever you go.

2. Whenever you find yourself being critical or judgmental of others, write it in the journal.

The point is to understand how often through the day this happens. At the end of each day go over what you have written and begin to look for primary feelings. We can identify anger firstly. This is the judgment and criticalness. Ask yourself, “Why was I so angry? What was going on at the time? How was I feeling this morning?” When you begin to be more curious about how you feel, you are starting to spend more quality time with yourself and build compassion.

The following installment will take these tasks and learn to identify and feel your primary feelings and use them to navigate your life more aligned and supportive of yourself.