8 Basic Emotions – Sadness and Fear – Part I of IV

Emotions!  What are they exactly?  We aren’t provided with an education on them.  With all the years we spend at school or otherwise, unless you are in the psychological, philosophical or social science disciplines, there isn’t an introduction to ‘sadness’ or ‘fear’ or ‘joy’.  They impact us greatly both in a positive sense when we feel “good” and in a supposedly negative sense when we feel “bad”.  And emotions are intrinsically linked to our thoughts and our behaviours.  When one wakes up with anxiety, for example, the pervading thought might be “something is wrong” or “I have to get moving”.  Similarly our thoughts can drive our emotions, for example when one thinks about a person whom they care about deeply, the imminent emotion might be love.  People go to great lengths to avoid certain emotions such as shame or anger.  Perfectionistic behaviour is often driven by an underlying avoidance of the feeling of shame and a belief or thought that “we aren’t enough as we are”.  And when we go out and do something that we thoroughly enjoy, that activity or behaviour brings us an immense feeling of joy!  Emotions, thoughts and behaviours are intertwined and one of the greatest gifts we can afford ourselves is to disentangle them into an understanding of how they operate in our day to day existence.

Philosophers have long postulated on different theories of emotion.  Each conceiving them in varying degrees of complexity with descriptions that are hard to understand without being highly educated or of the more fortunate class.  In the 1960s Clinical Psychologist, Dr Paul Eckman, whom devoted much of his working life to understanding emotions, simplified things and found that irrespective of culture, people express 6 basic emotions.  For the purposes of this discussion however I am going to alter Eckman’s 6 and talk about 8 basic emotions, a group of emotions I have worked with people on, in coming to understand their emotional landscape and the ways in which their thoughts and behaviours are related.  

What is your understanding of sadness or fear, of joy or anger, of the much sought after love, or shame and pride and the seemingly unavoidable, loneliness?  When do you feel these, that is, what triggers them?  Where in your body do you feel them?  What thoughts do you find come in response to them?  Or as a precursor to their arrival? What actions or behaviours occur when you feel these emotions?   Answers to these questions help us come to understand what has felt like the inseparable or indeterminable. 

Let’s start with sadness.  There’s been paintings and poems and songs and plays and dances and photos and skies and seas and snow filled mountains and black rivers that have all played homage to this well worn and what seems like well understood emotion.  Sorrow, sadness, dejection, melancholy, the blues, depression, oppression, heaviness, despondence.  It is one of the more poetic of our emotions, strangely enough.  For some, there’s a romance to it.  For others, it is to be avoided at all costs.  For those, if it enters into the mind and body if feels like there might not be an end point to the insurgence of pain.  Sadness is often triggered by a loss of some kind, be it a person, a pet, a job, or a lover.  It can be triggered by old memories or it can lie underneath a visceral outpouring of anger.  Deep sadness, enduring sadness, is hard.  We feel it mostly in the heart but it can start in the stomach and move its way up to our throat and be felt in our heads.  The thoughts associated with sadness are many and varied, it depends on what has triggered it and what memory or person it is linked to.  “I can’t do this”, “They don’t love me”, “What’s wrong with me?”, “How can I keep going without them?”; are but some of the messages that people can find in their minds when sadness is upon them.  One of the most beautiful things that we can do in this life is to cry.  The letting go.  The rawness of the tears and the twisting in the body that is released.  The expression of sadness is paramount, it helps us understand and honour our losses and our pain.  Name it, feel it, let it out.  I find when people fight it or deny it, they end up in more pain.  Name it, feel it, let it out.  Writing helps with any emotion.  Write about it.  What behaviours are linked to sadness? Some isolate, others go into a mindset of being helpless, and the more avoidant types get busy to try and minimise it.  Find good people to share your sadness with, talk about the feeling in your body, the thoughts that are coming up with it.  Be with it and be with others in doing so.  Sadness passes, sometimes quickly and sometimes not.  But it does.  In the seeing it, the feeling it, and in the actions of letting it out, such as talking, writing or crying.

Fear.  What is it that you fear?  Not being accepted, not being loveable?  Or more direct fears relating to physical safety when around animals or in the ocean or oncoming traffic swerving onto your side of the road?  It is arguably one of the oldest of the emotions given its association with survival.  And I find in its more subtle forms, to be one that lies beneath the surface of people’s behaviour, somewhat undetectable, yet its avoidance is a driver of a lot of what we do with ourselves day to day.  The Stone Roses singer, Ian Brown, dedicated a song to the subject and the first verse contains lyrics that speak to the acronym F.E.A.R.  I quite liked ‘For everything a reason’ and ‘Forgive everybody and remember’.  The things that can trigger fear are when we make mistakes, when someone is untoward, when we are going through changes in life, financial fears are very real for a lot of people and relationships, be they romantic or otherwise, can be the source of fear.  Like sadness, fear, at times, can sit underneath anger.  Does yours?  We feel fear most acutely in our chest but it resonates from low down in the stomach region and spreads up across our torso, it is felt strongly across the shoulders and neck and then slightly up into our head.  I advocate exploring the beliefs associated with fear.  These beliefs tell us a lot about a person and how they engage with their world.  And are the focus of deep interventions with people that find themselves stuck in unwanted behaviours, patterns of thought and unhealthy relationships.  “I am not safe”, “I am not loveable as I am”, “People don’t like me”, “I must succeed to matter”, “I must not parent like my parents”, “I am not ok”.  Even more narcissistic or ego based thoughts are fear based “I am better than them” or “They are intimidated by me”.  Fear of being less than.  There’s two sets of behaviours that I’ll talk about here.  What we do when we have fear come up for us quickly.  And what we do to avoid the feeling of fear, the more proactive type of behaviour.  What do you do in each realm?  Run from a situation provoking fear, find safety.  Flight.  Or do you charge into the source of your fear?  Fight.  Often with the behaviours that enable the avoidance of fear we need to explore what beliefs a person has that are fear based.  A fear of mistakes, criticism and the associated shame will have people behaving in a perfectionistic manner or a fear of confrontation will have people keeping the peace or avoiding certain conversations, which often leads to crippling resentment.  We all feel fear.  Everybody is subject to its existence.  People say that the solution to fear is faith, and on a lot of levels I think that is true.  But I wonder if the greatest antidote to fear is actually getting to know it on a deeper level, see it,  hear it, acknowledge it and where it comes from, soothe it by letting it know that you are there.