Emotions 101
Here’s an idea to consider: emotions are tools. They show up when a job needs to be done, and they go away once the job is over. Imagine you’re hanging a painting on your wall, and as you pick up the nail, a hammer magically appears in your hand. Once you hammer the nails into the wall, the hammer’s job is done, and it disappears.
That would be pretty cool if reality worked that way. This is how reality works when it comes to emotions.
You’ve got four core emotions: fear, anger, sadness and joy. Every other emotion is some variation on those four core emotions. So let’s look more closely at what these four core emotions are, and how they work as tools.
Fear: I like to think of fear as an alarm bell going off, signaling that there is some sort of threat or danger in the environment. The purpose of fear is to alert us to a threat to our safety. So we can think of fear as a kind of safety tool. It shows up when we perceive that our safety is at risk in some way, and it goes away once we have a sense that safety has been restored. For a lot of people, unfortunately, that fear alarm rings constantly, and never turns off, because they haven’t learned how to create safety for themselves. This is one way of understanding chronic anxiety. As soon as we are able to create a sense of safety for ourselves, the fear and anxiety disappears.
How do we create safety? That brings us to the second of the four core emotions: Anger!
Anger is another safety tool. Whereas fear is the signal that we feel unsafe, anger is the tool we use to restore safety. It’s the energy that protects and defends. Imagine Mama bear with her cubs in the forest, and a mountain lion approaches the cubs. Immediately all the bears experience fear, signaling that there is danger in the environment. Mama bear confronts the mountain lion, bears her teeth, and roars. “Don’t fuck with my cubs. I will kill you.” This is anger doing its job: protecting us from a threat.
As the mountain lion retreats, Mama bear’s aggression disappears, and all the bears relax again, the cubs returning to their joyful, playful state. Anger showed up to deal with a threat in the environment, and it disappeared as soon as the threat was dealt with. It’s pretty cool how that works. Again, if we don’t know how to use anger to protect ourselves, we end up vulnerable to all sorts of threats in our internal and external environments. These threats may look like a critical internal voice that won’t leave us alone and that hurts our self esteem. Or the threat may be a person in our life who seeks to take advantage of us because they know we aren’t comfortable saying no. Anger is another necessary safety tool to stand up for ourselves and protect us from danger.
Sadness: the job that sadness does for us is pretty simple - it helps us hurt. Whenever we have a loss of any kind, there is pain. Losses lead to pain. The death of a loved one, the ending of a relationship, a physical injury, the end of a season, a stage of life, etc are all events that create a loss. Whenever there is loss, there is pain, and we need a tool that will help us deal with the pain. Sadness is that tool. We use sadness to do the hurting we need to do in order to feel the pain of the loss and begin to heal and move on. Without sadness, the pain would remain stuck, and we would not be able to move on and heal. This is another scenario that can lead to chronic depression. If we are unable to cry, we end up holding onto our losses and they accumulate into big reservoirs of pain that we cannot heal from because we haven’t learned how to properly do the hurting that’s required to process that pain. Again, when we don’t know how to use our emotional tools, it’s usually because our parents didn’t know how to use them either, and they got triggered whenever we expressed those emotions. In many families that haven’t mastered their emotions, sadness feels overwhelming and is avoided at all costs. Children who cry are told to stop crying, to suck it up, etc, and this send the message to the child that sadness is not okay. We then grow up without learning how to use the tool of sadness, and we become unable to heal from loss. Chronic depression is almost always inevitable in this scenario.
Joy: the final of the four core emotions is joy. Joy is the reward we get for allowing ourselves to let go of control, to do the hurting we need to do when we experience a loss. It is our reward for protecting ourselves from threats. When we use our emotional tools properly and learn how to keep ourselves safe and feel our pain, we learn the skill of letting go of control. When we let go of control, we are capable of experiencing joy. When we feel joy and playfulness, our bodies are in a state of replenishment and healing, or “homeostasis”. Our nervous systems relax, and our cells regenerate. The healthy neural connections in our brains strengthen and multiply. This is like the process of a plant growing when it is watered. Joy is that state of mind that is like watering the plant of health inside of us. Our immune system also benefits from joy, using the period of relaxation and calm to strengthen itself.
We cannot thrive without feeling joy on a regular basis. It is critical for our growth and vitality as human beings. Joy is only possible when we learn how to use our other emotions effectively. If we don’t know how to use anger to protect ourselves or sadness to feel the pain of loss, then we will not be able to truly experience joy.
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Let’s also assume that these four core emotions happen in a particular order. Let’s imagine that your default emotional state is one of joy. Imagine the 9 months you spent in your mother’s womb. That must have been a pretty blissful time. Many of us wish we could go back there once we become adults and realize how hard life can be. Hanging out in warm water in our mother’s belly, getting fed through a tube sounds pretty alright.
So we start our life in joy. Then what happens? We’re born. Birth is probably a pretty terrifying experience. You’re torn out of your safe haven inside your mother’s belly and thrust into the scary world of the hospital delivery room, full of weird looking objects and fluorescent lights and big humans crowding around you.
Most babies, as they are being born, are in full protest. They are screaming and crying. This is an example of the baby using anger to protect itself from the terrifying experience of being forced into the world. Sadness naturally follows from this, as there is a major, major loss for an infant when they leave the womb. Life will never be so safe and easy again.
As the infant expresses all the frustration and protest and pain of the birthing process, and as she expresses all the sadness and shock of the loss, the soothing contact with the mother will eventually lead the infant to settle down and rest. On the other side of this, joy returns.
We can imagine that this cycle of emotions, Joy —> fear —> anger —> sadness —> joy represents the general order in which we experience our emotions. It’s helpful to understand the order of our emotions so we can be prepared to use our emotional tools to get to where we want to go. If we’re anxious and we want to feel joyful, we know that first we have to use anger to eliminate the threat, and we have to allow ourselves to experience sadness if there is any kind of loss. Then joy naturally arises.
The more we practice using our emotions as tools in this way, the more skillful we become. Then, emotions really do become those magical devices that show up when you need them, and disappear when their job is done. Just as it should be.
