Thanks for coming, all who did.

We talked about Emotion Regulation. I presented a model for describing emotions, which I didn't thinik was online, but I did find a good explanation for it:

http://www.dbtselfhelp.com/html/describing1.html

Also, there are probably only about eight primary emotions (anger, sorrow, joy, surprise, fear, disgust, guilt/shame, and interest), but there are many complex emotions which are learned or are combinations of these or maybe emotions plus some kind of action.

Primary and Secondary Emotions


There are primary and secondary emotions. The secondary emotion is the one that follows the primary or first emotion, for example, feeling shame because you got angry. Anger is the primary emotion, and shame is the secondary emotion. A person can get angry for being angry, or depressed for being depressed, or angry for feeling fear. In these three cases, anger, depression and anger are the secondary emotions.

It's really important to be able to tell which emotions are the primary emotions and which are the secondary emotions.

Neither the primary nor the secondary emotions are good or bad, but to get back to the original problem and work on solving it, it is necessary usually to deal with the primary emotions.

Try to think of a situation where you experienced a primary and then a secondary emotion. For example: A close relative died. I first feel grief. That is my primary emotion. Then I feel ashamed because I feel so sad. Shame is the secondary emotion.

This can be hard, because the switch often happens very fast. If you feel an emotion, look at your emotion and see if there is a primary emotion behind it. We will come back to this later.


Exercises


There are two Kinds of emotional experiences
Reactions to events in one's environment
(being criticized, having a loved one call on the phone, losing a game, etc.) Inner reactions, primarily reactions to one's own thoughts
(guilt about feeling angry, shame about not doing well at something, fear about something anticipated or thought about)
How have emotions acted in your lives? Helpful? Hurtful?