(Each blog reflects discoveries from the New Science of Mental Health, or combining evidence from clinical experience, scientific research, and natural selection/evolution in determining conditions for our mental health, while promoting effective strategies in brain health, psychological health, and relational health)
In the previous blog, I talked about the four primary emotional responses — joy, anger, fear, and sadness. I emphasized that our primary emotional responses make all of our emotions possible, or they are the primary emotional responses comprising all of the emotions we experience.
As human beings, we know so little about our emotions and our emotional response system. And that gets us into trouble, especially with our mental health. Without knowing or understanding our primary emotional responses, it makes healing from severe emotional experiences more difficult.
But we do know a great deal about our sensations, or our sensory response system. We know there are five basic sensory responses — sight, sound, touch, feel, and taste. We also know those sensations, or the sensory response system, is always on. By that I mean even if we are not consciously aware of smelling things, we are always smelling things. The nose is always working!
The same is true for our eyes, or we’re always seeing things. We are always touching something, mostly our feet on the ground. Our taste buds are always working, even if we are not aware of tasting something.
But our sensory response system will jump us into place at a moment’s notice when something is strong enough to get our attention: a delicious food, a beautiful smelling rose, the prickliness of a cactus, and every other sensation that grabs us.
The key, for instance, is that a sense like sight is always on, always working in the background of our awareness, until something is big enough, so to speak, to get our attention. Like looking around the night sky and not really noticing anything or being aware of anything until a meteorite flies through the dark sky. We suddenly take notice of what we are seeing!
The same holds true for the primary emotional responses. The four primary emotions — or the responses of joy, anger, fear, and sadness — are always on. Those feelings are always with us, and they’re ready to grow at a moment’s notice when need be.
We suddenly respond with joy when we experience a loved one, we suddenly respond with anger if someone rejects us, and we may immediately experience a sad or fearful response when we hear of something tragic happening to somebody we care about. All four of these primary emotional responses are equally important for us to know what is good for us and what is bad for us, or to know positive experiences and negative experiences.
As I’ve stated before in previous blogs, this has enormous consequences in terms of our mental health. It means we should strive for living with a great deal of joy in our lives, and hopefully our lives are mostly joy. But when we respond with anger, fear, or sadness due to life events, we understand those responses to be natural and normal, just like our sensory system is a natural and normal response system to sights, sounds, and so on.
It makes clinical experiences like depression and anxiety so much more understandable, so much more acceptable, and actually so much more treatable, when we understand their basis in primary emotional responses. And we can more genuinely heal from severe emotional experiences when we do this.