I’ve written a lot about primary emotions but little about secondary emotions. Simply put, secondary emotions are the affective response we have to our first feelings. I was speaking about this subject with a client the other day who said she felt helpless, panicky, and distraught in a particular situation and then was ashamed she’d felt these feelings. The first set of feelings were primary and the shame was secondary. Get it?

According to Primary vs. Secondary Emotions: A Deeper Dive, “Primary emotions are instinctive and immediate responses to events. These emotions arise before our brain has had time to analyze or interpret what’s happening. The most recognized primary emotions are: sadness, happiness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. Secondary emotions develop after the initial emotional response. These are shaped by our thoughts and interpretations of what we felt first.”

Often, when we feel piercingly difficult feelings that are hard to cope with, we experience shame afterward, believing we shouldn’t have felt there’s something wrong and abnormal our initial feelings—as in “I should have felt strong instead of weak, why am I sad when I should be happy, and I’m a bad person because I’m happy a misfortune befell someone I dislike.” Notice how judgmental shoulds abound. 

Here judgment is the lens through which you see your emotions rather than being curious about them and simply noting and trying to understand your primary feelings. Make an effort to connect your judgments to how your family reacted to your feelings in childhood. Did they make fun of your sadness? Come down on you hard for feeling happy? Insist you didn’t feel an emotion or tell you that it’s wrong to feel or that you’re too sensitive? Did they judge themselves harshly for feeling certain emotions?

You may also feel anxiety as a secondary emotion. Do you become anxious when you’re happy, waiting for the other shoe to drop and ruin your mood (or your life)? Do you get anxiety when you feel abandoned or neglected because you spent so much time alone in childhood that being alone feels like abandonment? Do you feel guilty when you’re happy as a clam lying on the sofa reading a novel because there’s so much else to do—clean the bathrooms, iron the kids clothes, fix dinner, save the world. 

I hope you now have a better sense of what secondary feelings are and can be more alert to them. Sometimes you can learn from them, but too often they make you feel bad about your first feelings. At the least, use them to understand the broad and complicated spectrum of emotions that all humans experience.

Best,

Karen