Understanding Your Root Emotions

Very few people can accurately express what they feel. The reason people struggle to express their feelings is because they don’t understand them. Understanding your root emotions opens the door to fully understanding why you feel certain emotions. This proves especially helpful when your emotions seem out of control.

If you feel like your emotions are out of control, it’s a sign that you struggle to identify the source of your emotions. When this happens, you cannot clearly identify the best way to manage and take control of how you feel. Remember, emotions are not rational but are driven by thought patterns. This can create a “disconnect” when you experience multiple feelings at once. Understanding your root emotions reveals the connection between all of your emotions.

“Emotional Intelligence is when you finally realize it’s not all about you.” ~Peter Stark

Emotional Intelligence

According to Psychology Today, emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and manage your own emotions. They add to this the ability to identify and manage others’ emotions. We can’t effectively help others until we are healthy emotionally. So as you read through this post, keep your focus on how you can better understand your own emotions.

There is no test to measure emotional intelligence. You can determine the level of emotional intelligence by the presence of particular skills. In general, those skills are identifying and verbalizing emotions, using them constructively and managing them. The ability to truly exercise these skills involves a level of conscious awareness and understanding your root emotions.

Emotional ignorance

If we were honest, I think most of us would agree that we are emotionally ignorant. We do not correctly identify what we are actually feeling. Often, we play hide and seek with our emotions. We deny them by hiding, or we “intellectualize” them. For instance, if someone says something nasty to me, I might describe what I feel as “upset”, “fit to be tied” or “depressed”. The problem here is I haven’t identified or verbalized an emotion.

• “Upset” is not an emotion, it’s an idea.
• “Fit to be tied” is not an emotion, it’s a metaphor.
• “Depressed” is not an emotion, it’s a category of symptoms describing a mental illness.

Hiding, denying or intellectualizing emotions is a defense mechanism to avoid painful feelings. You cannot manage or use effectively something you refuse to identify.

understanding primary emotions

There are various schools of thought on primary and secondary emotions. Some lists include eight primary emotions while others include six. The most I have seen is ten. The number of primary emotions is not important. Primary emotions are your “root” emotions. All other emotions come from those deeper emotions. Understanding your root emotions helps you sort out the secondary emotions that drive your behaviors.

I tried a few different types of Emotion Wheels, but I like this one from Psych Point the best. It is a simple, visual showing how the primary and secondary emotions work together. This wheel lists six primary emotions; shame, surprise, anger, fear, joy and sadness. These are your “root” emotions. These six root emotions lead to 48 secondary emotions.

understanding secondary emotions

As you can see from the Emotions Wheel, each primary emotion has spokes from it to eight secondary emotions. Sometimes you feel multiple secondary emotions at the same time. Secondary emotions are hard to nail down. For example, if I feel “disappointed”, without understanding root emotions, I’m not clear on what exactly I feel. Looking at the Emotions Wheel, I can trace that back to “anger” as the root emotion. Now I can address the real issue and manage my response and behavior.

Let’s follow the above example out. I verbalize feeling “disappointed”. What does that mean? It means things did not go the way I expected. The outcome I determined ahead of time did not happen. Disappointment is an expression of anger. Anger is an intense feeling of displeasure. Disappointment is a mild form of displeasure. When I only verbalized disappointment, I couldn’t fully express the emotion. I didn’t really know what to do about it. Seeing it as a secondary response of anger, I now know what to do. That’s how secondary emotions work.

using the wheel of emotions

Hopefully you read the post on journaling your emotions; if not please do that. I gave some helpful journaling exercises to begin to identify emotions and emotional patterns in your life. You can now take what you have noticed and start to examine your default emotions with the Emotions Wheel. You may be surprised to find which root emotion is driving the majority of your secondary emotions.

If you only look at the secondary emotions you will continually feel “disconnected”. You will constantly be wondering “why” you feel that way. Sometimes you feel multiple secondary emotions at once. This makes it difficult to determine the source problem. The Emotions Wheel can help you see which root emotions you struggle with the most.

Emotion exploration

Take some time to explore the emotions you feel most often, comparing to the Emotions Wheel. If you noticed any patterns in your journaling exercises, see if you can see a connection with root emotions. Do you continually struggle with the same root category? Most people have at least two areas of root emotions that they often recognize.

See if you can notice corresponding behaviors with your secondary emotions. If you struggle with secondary emotions from anger, note specific reactions. For instance, if you are often disappointed, do you complain? Sulk? If you struggle with anxiety, that is the secondary emotion for fear. Do you worry? Do you think the worst? How does knowing fear is the root emotion help you make a better connection?

emotion regulation

Once you review your default emotions, comparing them to their roots, you will better understand them. Understanding your root emotions gives you the ability to manage your reactions and behaviors when you experience those emotions. Instead of wondering why you feel a certain emotion, now you have a clear connection.

Understanding your root emotions can also help you correct poor thought patterns. As I mentioned before, thoughts create emotions, emotions create actions and actions create results. Knowing the root emotion makes it easier to recognize the thoughts contributing to that emotion and its secondary emotions. Rather than feeling emotionally out of control, you can now regulate those emotions in a healthy way.

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Feature Image Photo by Robert Katzki on Unsplash