I want to talk about levels of emotions this week. This is a pretty profound concept. The majority of people tend to express emotions on one level: anger or some derivative of it: frustration, irritation, etc. Would you agree? I see all kinds of requests for anger management, I am angry all the time, etc. But, what I want to explain is that this is just the way we have LEARNED in society that is acceptable to express feelings. It masks the deeper more painful feelings. It is most certainly NOT the only thing that we are feeling. Imagine an iceberg. The portion that stands out above the water level is the angry feelings. What is UNDER the water line? Well, I propose that there are TWO levels of emotions under there…….the very bottom one being
FEAR…….Human beings are capable of feeling only TWO different fundamental emotions…….LOVE or FEAR. So, we (hopefully) have some experience of what love feels like. We’ll table that one for the time being. I want to focus on FEAR. We have all types of fears: fear of failure, fear of abandonment, or something that falls somewhere w/in that realm. That is the BASE emotion at the CORE of the iceberg of our feelings. The next level up (the one right under the waterline) is PAIN/HURT. So……lets look at this for a moment. If we say “you are making me angry”……..that is a lot easier to say, to face and to get someone to react to or back away from than it is to OWN what WE are feeling underneath it, isn’t it? It just isn’t common (and we haven’t
learned how) for us to say “You are making me angry, but really I can see and acknowledge that it is my ‘hurt’ feelings that cause me to feel ‘fear’ from what you just said/did.” This type of statement (which in some form or another is MUCH closer to the truth) makes us FEEL vulnerable to the exact thing that the anger is supposed to keep us from having to deal with, isn’t it? We use our protective mechanism of anger to keep the hurt away, but the hurt has already really been felt, hasn’t it? So, being honest about it would be really helpful to not add more internal pressure to our pressure cookers, wouldn’t it? HOPE that makes
sense, helps you have something to ponder this week……!! If not, email or comment, and I will explain more/better!