Unconstructive Emotions: how they help us to feel better?

Personal feelings - we hold it within our heart :)

We use terms emotions or feelings in different circumstances.  If we happy, if we feel offended, if we even cant call the name of feeling - still we say - I feel something...


But do you know that we have different types of feelings? And what is the most important - depending on the type we should use different ways of managing it. And only if we use appropriate way - we can really help ouselves.


So, we have two main groups of feelings: our personal feelings - are the feelings which come to us becouse of ourselves - they appear as the result of the events happed with us. So simply we can say that we are the reason for that feelings.

But also we have taken feelings which we take from external world. I will tell you about it in later posts.

And now lets look at the first  group.

Personal feelings.  
As you already know - personal feeling appears becouse of us. Something happens in our life and we start feel something. And first type here is Primary Emotions. These are emotons which appears immidiatly after something has happened and you cant control it anyhow. We have them as a heritage after animals and they serve us to help us survive.
Basically we have 4 primary Emotions: Anger, Fear, Joy and Sadness. All other are coming mostly from these 4. And if we have some stimuls from external world - one of these 4 emotions comes first as an answer.


And if Joy we consider as positive emotion and we feel it with the pleasure, the Anger or Fear or sadness usually bring us unplesant sensations and we have tendency to suppress it. Trying not to feel or to substitute it with Secondary Emotions (SE).


They come (or its better say we bring it ) to help us NOT to feel primary emotions. Such feeling as Offense, Guilt, Envy and a lot of others - they come and hide primary and help us "to feel better". For example, its easier to feel Offense than to follow Anger and fight with those who make us feel pain. And we "prepfer" (of course unconsciously - we dont really make thiss choce)  to feel offended.


The trick with SE is that they can lasting for very long time (inthe next post i will tell you why) even for years, and Primary Emotions they have limited time "to live" within us. Only difference is that PE could be (and usuallythey are) very intensive. And often they bring strong pain to us. They have a lot of energy within them. And often people prefer to feel something else (SE) with low intensiveness but for longer time than to feel strong emotion. They have fear that this strong emotions willlast for a long time, but its not true. 


The main advice is not to block primary emotions come to you, feel it and let it go very quickly.


Task to  develop EI:  next time you are in the situation which couses emotions, ask your self: what of the primary emotion i feel now? and notice what Secondary Emotion comes to hide it. Do it at least 5 times and send me your otes about it :) God Luck!