How to recognise your feelings more fully?

For some time now, a theory has been asking me to check out. "Tell me about me!" It's called somewhere in the back of my head. 

It is a theory about the four kinds of feelings that are possible for every human being. This knowledge of the different human feelings came to me in the Family Systemic Alignment training, and opened up a new way of looking at the world of human feelings and emotions. It also helped me to understand more about not only my own feelings, but also other people's feelings, and why I react to other people's emotional expressions the way I do. For example, why one person's crying evokes compassion and another's annoyance.

Piesakot - Bert Helinger (Bert Hellinger), German psychotherapist, creator of the family systemic method, has defined four types of feelings: primary feelings, secondary feelings, systemic feelings and meta-feelings. Let us briefly look at each of them.

Primary feelings. The first type of feelings

They are feelings that arise as an immediate, natural response to emotional turmoil, and are reacted to in the moment. They are wonderful to observe in children. If a child falls and bumps his knee, he is in pain and cries - instantly. The moment the pain and crying have passed and the child has received the comfort he needs, he smiles again and experiences the world as if nothing had happened.

The discharge of primary feelings is rapid - usually lasting no more than a few minutes. The process is emotionally vivid, intense and uncontrollable by the mind. The feelings are simply there and they come out. And after the discharge of primary feelings, the person is no longer emotionally concerned with the event that triggered the discharge - the event has passed and is over. Everything is resolved.

Secondary feelings. Second type of feelings

Secondary feelings are primary feelings that are stuck. 

How can primary feelings get stuck? By blocking the primary impulse - by not allowing the primary feelings to come out. Unfortunately, however, in a society where the expression of feelings is not always viewed positively, this is quite common. 

At a young age, it is formed, for example, through phrases such as "Stop squealing, people are watching!" or "What are you angry about? It's not nice!" etc. And in adult life, you don't have to look far to find situations where what the other person has said has, for example, offended or angered you, but instead of expressing the true emotion, you react with a defensive smile, laughter or just silence.

These are the feelings that underlie psychological trauma. In fact, psychological counselling and psychotherapy deal mostly with secondary feelings. And one of the aims of therapy is to create a safe enough environment for the client to be able to access and respond to the primary feelings that are stuck.

Secondary feelings and their manifestations

In most cases, one is not aware of being in secondary feelings. How to recognise them? These are the feelings that torment us for months or years, pulling us into "barriers" and emotional pits. These are the feelings that cause us to create drama, exaggerate, react to triggers, take victim positions, blame others, complain about how bad life is, and manipulate ourselves and others in all sorts of other ways.

Being under the power of secondary feelings makes a person feel weak, and therefore makes others feel that this person needs to be helped. In essence, the function of these feelings is to convince others that the person is incapable of acting effectively, resulting in the recruitment of helpers to take responsibility.

How to recognise these feelings in another person? One sign might be an emotional urge to help, to pity. But people who are in good contact with their inner world are more likely to sense that "something is not clean here" - that these feelings are not real. It is as if they are getting double information - as if they can see that the other person is having a hard time, but they do not feel compassion. Perhaps even the opposite - rather irritation and a desire to turn away.

What is the main difference between primary and secondary feelings?

Primary feelings support the development of constructive behaviour. For example, fear triggers the need to flee or fight when attacked. If fear has entered the phase of secondary feelings, it blocks the person from achieving his or her own goals. Getting in touch with primary anger can help to define one's attitude. Getting in touch with the primary pain can help one to react to it once and for all and to stop demanding its soothing from others. Recognising and letting go of primary guilt can encourage you to act differently, to make amends, to take responsibility for your actions, to come to terms with the consequences and to find ways to improve broken relationships.

Essential! A person with a higher level of awareness stops using their feelings and emotions in a manipulative way. He is no longer concerned with convincing others that he should be pitied and consoled, or that others should act in his place. He becomes more attentive to his primary feelings, which help him and actually encourage him to act more authentically and appropriately to the situation. 

The stronger a person's connection to their primary feelings, the clearer their role in life becomes - to guide themselves and others to effective action. If feelings do not guide a person to effective action, it is likely that secondary feelings dominate his or her life.

But constantly expressing and repeating secondary feelings makes things worse, not better. By echoing each other's secondary feelings, we weaken rather than strengthen them - we foster dependency rather than liberate.

Systemic feelings. The third type of feelings

In cases where the family or another group (e.g. work team) does not express the primary feelings, someone else may take over. In the case of a family, this may be a person several generations ahead. In the case of a work team, it may be a new colleague, for example. In other words, in a group that forms a system, there is someone who unconsciously takes over and reacts to feelings that are present in the system.

This may seem strange, because how can you react to someone else's feelings? However, the systems approach theorises that it is possible.

These feelings are experienced as one's own, but they have been taken over from a larger system. How to recognise them? Usually it is a feeling that seems to drive us to do something bigger that is not really about us personally; to change processes, to change the way things are done. These feelings are very vivid and very haunting, and this identification creates the feeling that these feelings are authentic. But sometimes they make me ask questions: why am I doing this and why do I need this? Moreover, because it is about being under the power of a larger system, these attempts to change things usually fail.

When a person tries to express what is in the system, he is actually depriving someone of the ability to experience his primary feelings and become effective in his life. The solution is to learn to let go of the systemic feelings and return them to the person to whom they belong. The method of systemic alignments can be helpful in this process.

Meta feelings. The fourth type of feelings

Meta-feelings are feelings of a completely different quality from the first three. They are feelings without emotion - pure, concentrated energy. Courage, humility (or willingness to accept the world as it is), gratitude, serenity, wisdom, genuine repentance, deep contentment, and others.

They are feelings or sensations that are expressed without the involvement of emotions. According to Helinger, there is also meta-love and meta-aggression. 

Meta-feelings are experienced as a gift, as a blessing, as a reward for the experience of life - as ripe fruit. They are feelings that help us to discern what is truly important in life and what is not.

I would say that the moments of meta-feelings are those that come with spiritual maturity.

How can this information help?

This knowledge can help:

• pay attention to your primary feelings and find space for their effective outlet. Being in touch with your primary feelings creates a favourable environment for feeling and cultivating your authentic self;
• Recognising secondary feelings and not giving in to their temptation in ourselves and others. Stopping secondary feelings and looking into their causes can lead to the primary feelings, the entrapment of which has given rise to secondary feelings;
• understand which feelings belong to me and which might belong to someone else. Recognising and letting go of systemic feelings can help to reduce taking responsibility for other people's actions and internal processes;
• to understand the feelings that bring fulfilment to life and the messages and insights that flow from them.

This free content is produced in my spare time without pay. If you see value in what I do, I'd be happy to make you a coffee! It's like a spur to create new content! 🙂

Source:

Megged, A. (2021, Feb 22). Different Kinds Of Emotions. Worthiness Based Psychotherapy. https://worthinesspsychotherapy.com/?p=181#