Last week, I introduced the idea of primary emotions, or the emotional families of joy, anger, fear, and sadness. This week, it’s about understanding those primary emotions as emotional responses.
Emotional responses are responses to what’s going on either around us or inside us. When something happens, we have an emotional response, in one of those four categories.
It’s just like any one of our sensory responses, of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Our sensory systems respond to what’s happening around us. When there is a hot apple pie in front of us, we both see it and smell it. We taste it when we take a bite, and we feel it as it travels down to our stomach. It’s a total sensory experience.
The same is true for our emotional response system. When we sit down to eat that apple pie with someone we love, we feel the joy response of spending time with them. If someone were to stop by and take the apple pie from us, we may feel the anger response. If we lose that person we love, we would feel the sadness response from the loss. If that someone we love fell ill, we would feel the fear response that something could harm them.
The major point here is that all emotions that we feel are not only in the four categories of joy, anger, fear, and sadness, but they are always a response to what’s happening around us or inside us.
Inherent to this understanding is that emotions are not states of being, but always responses. Clinically speaking, that means anxiety is not a state of being, but a high or consuming fear response. Depression is not a state of being, but a high or consuming sadness response. I will spend a lot of time on this channel explaining all of this, or clinical experiences of anxiety and depression.
The next four episodes on this channel will be further explorations of each major emotional response, what that is like, and our typical experience of it. That will form the backbone of understanding not only our emotions, but also our relational experiences, and our clinically defined experiences, like anxiety and depression, which are remarkably treatable from this perspective.