What am I Really Feeling?

Parenting can be a huge shake up to your emotional landscape. Our connection to our children and wanting to be the best version of ourselves, creates pressure and sometimes strong emotional reactions. What If I told you that the emotion you think is driving your reaction is most often secondary to a deeper more primal emotion. Our first response to an event is called the primary emotion. Then we have secondary emotional reaction to that emotion. Figuring out which emotion is at the core can be complicated but is an important skill to be effective at knowing how you feel accurately and expressing yourself to others.

 Let’s look at a parenting example of where anger is triggered. Your child is hanging over a high balcony or standing in the middle of a busy street. From a safety perspective it makes sense that your first response is to yell to get their attention in an attempt to protect them from harm. Your next response will be influenced by what body sensations are firing and your own childhood experiences. Responding angrily to your child’s behaviour is an unconscious learned behaviour. When we do this, we are letting our secondary emotion – Anger, cloud the deeper primary response of fear. Connecting with fear will allow you to move towards engaging with your child and showing them how much you love them and that you were worried about their safety.  When you eventually calm down from anger, you may feel shame about your angry response and on goes this unhelpful cycle.

 Another common emotion felt by parents is anxiety. It is almost always secondary to fear of something or someone. Or not being good enough or afraid something bad is going to happen. New mums often express their worries about keeping their baby safe from harm or question if they are a good enough mum. Tapping into the fear beneath it and expressing it out loud, takes away its power. You can then process it by checking the facts of how the fear is true or not. 

 The good news is that by practising naming your emotions you can get better at recognising your feelings and what the core emotion is. Once it is processed and understood the intensity dials down so you can get on with enjoying your life.

 It is easy to get carried away with emotions if we don’t put strategies in place to catch them and process them.