Episode #195

Secondary Emotions & CBT

Often there are feelings layered beneath our feelings that contribute to our thoughts. These can help explain why we experience more emotional distress than a situation might seem to suggest.

Why is it helpful to identify your secondary emotions?

How can you identify them?

How can you use CBT tools to understand & be more gentle with yourself?

Join me, Dr Julie Osborn, as we discuss the fascinating topic of secondary emotions and how you can use CBT tools to understand yourself better.

Click to listen now!

Full Episode Transcript

Hi, welcome to my CBT podcast. This is Dr. Julie. I'm a Doctor of Psychology and a Licensed Clinical Social Worker specializing in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. I'm here to help you bring the power of CBT into your own life.

So thanks for being with me. I hope everybody's doing well.

Getting up to the holidays, I know people can be a little stressed, can have a lot of feelings about things coming up. So I wanted to talk to you guys about something. I think it'll be kind of fun to explore together and understand, and it may even help you with anything going on in your life today, especially with, like I said, if you're feeling a little stressed with the holidays and all the things that can come with that.

I want to talk about what we call secondary emotions and how CBT can help you with that. So we want to understand the feelings beneath the feelings. So I know in CBT I talk to you guys all the time about what am I thinking, what am I thinking? Because I do want you to feel better, right? So the goal is to feel better, and our feelings are important, just like our thoughts are.

And secondary emotions are really fascinating because they can really help explain why we sometimes experience more emotional distress than a situation initially creates, right? We might be thinking, why am I so upset about what's going on? And what's really the underlying issues of why I'm You know, feeling this way, right? So let me just say, uh, as an example, you know, have you ever felt angry and then you felt guilty for being angry? Or have you ever felt sad and then criticized yourself for being so emotional?

And have you ever experienced anxiety and then became frustrated with yourself for not being able to handle it, right? That's the thought. I should be able to handle it. There's that should, right? We're shaming ourselves.

So these are some examples of the secondary emotions. And when you can understand the difference between primary and secondary emotions, it can help you develop a greater emotional awareness, reduce self-criticism, and respond to the difficult emotions with more compassion. All sounds pretty good, huh? We need some more self-compassion for sure. So what are the primary and secondary emotions?

Let me explain that first. So primary emotions are the initial emotional response to an experience or situation or event, and they often arise automatically and provide information about what we're experiencing, right? Things come automatic. Your moods come automatic. Your thoughts come automatic.

So some more examples would include like, um, if you're feeling sadness after losing someone or something important. If you have fear when facing a perceived threat, if you feel angry when you experience unfairness or violation of your boundaries, when you feel disappointment when your expectations are not met, and when you're hurt when someone we care about rejects or criticizes us. So those are primary emotions. Okay, I mentioned the sadness, the fear, anger, disappointment, and hurt. So your secondary emotions are emotional reactions to these primary emotions.

So in other words, we just don't feel an emotion, but we develop another emotional response to having that emotion. You following me? So for example, a primary emotion might be that I feel sad, and then I may secondarily feel ashamed that I am so sensitive. Or another primary emotion is that I feel anxious, and the secondary emotion is I feel angry with myself for being anxious. So the secondary emotion will often add another layer of suffering, right?

Because now you're not just anxious, now you're angry. Or you weren't just sad, now you feel ashamed. So I'm going to give you some more examples of things I think you'll relate to in everyday life, just to make this clear for you and solid so we go forward. You can use the tools. So sadness that is followed by shame would look like a primary emotion would be that I'm sad that my adult children don't call me very often, right?

And the secondary emotion of that could be that I shouldn't feel this way. I'm being needy and pathetic. So that's an example there. Another example would be anxiety that's followed by frustration. I think that's really common.

People get really frustrated that they're feeling anxious because they don't want to feel that way. So you may say that I'm anxious about an upcoming event, and the secondary emotion would be that I'm so frustrated with myself. Why can't I just relax? Another example is anger felt by guilt. Very common again.

So the primary thought might be that, or feeling, is I'm angry that someone crossed my boundaries, right? And the secondary emotion is that I feel terrible for being angry. I should be more understanding. And then one more I'll give you guys is fear followed by embarrassment. So your primary emotion would be that I'm afraid of driving on the freeway.

And your second one would be that I'm embarrassed that I'm still afraid. Other people don't have this problem. So we can hear a lot of the hot thoughts, obviously, as I'm talking to you guys, but it's understanding a little bit about this is the first emotion I'm feeling and the secondary is what comes after that.

So how do I explain this in a CBT way? So CBT can help you understand that emotions are influenced not only by what happens to us, but how we interpret what happens, right? That's really one of the most important things is our interpretation, how we perceive things. Because 2 people can go through the same thing and react completely different, right? Secondary emotions frequently develop through your automatic thoughts, right?

Your hot thoughts, your beliefs and judgments About your initial emotional response, right? So a lot of like self-criticism, and that's what I was talking about—having more of the self-compassion.

So the important distinction between the primary and secondary emotions is that the original hurt. May be totally understandable and appropriate, but the additional shame or self-criticism may be what intensifies the distress. All right, so I'm going to give you, um, an example of how this might work. Like, a situation could be if someone criticizes me, right? And my first emotion is I feel hurt because I was criticized, and my automatic thought My hot thought: I shouldn't let things bother me so much.

So now I feel shame. I could feel frustration, and I can get angry towards myself.

Right? So what do I want to do with that? What? How do I want to use my CBT tools? Is I want to identify and challenge the thought that I shouldn't feel hurt.

Right? Because when I'm saying should, I'm shaming myself. So that's where you wanna start. Just say, okay, let me think of a situation where I felt a negative emotion, right? Or something— I'm not— you did feel a negative emotion, but the situation of something that happened.

So I said someone criticized me, you know. How did you feel when that happened? What was your hot thought? What were the secondary emotions that came up from that? And then really doing a thought record, right?

Identify and challenge the thought. That you shouldn't feel hurt or feel angry or whatever that mood might be. So again, I'm going to repeat what I said earlier, but the important distinction is that the original hurt is totally understandable and appropriate, right? So it's normal that I felt hurt. I got criticized.

The additional shame and self-criticism I put towards myself is what really intensifies my distress, not so much that I felt hurt about being criticized.

So let's talk about some common thinking patterns that can contribute to the secondary emotions, right? So there's several cognitive distortions that can contribute to secondary emotional reactions. And I have a whole podcast on cognitive distortions if you want to listen to that, but I'm going to go over about 6 or 7 of them here and give you some examples. Okay? So a cognitive distortion, one would be should statements, right?

So you might say, you know, I shouldn't feel anxious. Another one is called labeling. So that's where you say to yourself, you know, I'm weak because I cried. So you're labeling yourself as weak just because you cried. Not true.

Another one is called emotional reasoning. An example of that would be that I feel guilty, so I must have done something wrong. Not true. Another one is called all-or-nothing thinking. It's like black and white thinking.

You kind of hear it in both terms. An example would be that, you know, if I was emotionally healthy, I I wouldn't feel this way. Whew, that's a biggie. That's a super hot thought. Another one is called personalization.

So you personalize things. So an example would be that I must be responsible for making everyone happy. That's exhausting even attempt. And one more is comparison. So an example of that would be that other people handle this better than I do.

So you can see they're all like super hot thoughts. You know, I call them super hot thoughts because They're just super hot thoughts, right? And it's really gonna make you feel terrible and just shame and all of those things we're talking about. So an important CBT goal is obviously is to recognize when we're judging ourselves for having normal human emotions, right? We do not have to judge ourselves on top of feeling negative emotions because that's just what makes you human.

And it probably shows all the awesome things about yourself.

So how can we use CBT to work through your second emotion? So a lot of this is going to be the thought record, but I'm going to tweak it a little bit here.

So first, you obviously want to identify the initial emotion, right? So ask yourself— there's a few questions you could ask yourself to help you out. So you can say, you know, what am I actually feeling, right? So you want to look at your mood list. You know, if you guys don't have a mood list, or the Mind Over Mood book has a mood list in in chapter 4.

But if you don't have that book, you can just go on the internet and look up mood lists and you'll get hundreds of them. So that's something you could always have for yourself and print it out or just have it to reflect to whenever you want to identify feelings. Having a mood list is a really good thing because there's so many moods that we never identify that can really help explain how we're feeling. So again, you can ask yourself, what I'm actually feeling, what happened immediately before this feeling, And what might this emotion be telling me? So that's your first step.

You want to identify the initial emotion. And then you want to ask your— you want to identify the emotion about the emotion. So how do you do that is you want to ask yourself, am I judging myself for feeling this way? Am I embarrassed, ashamed, frustrated, or guilty about my initial emotion? And what am I telling myself about having this feeling?

So I'll go over the number. This is step 2. Am I judging myself for feeling this way? Am I feeling embarrassed, ashamed, frustrated, or guilty about my initial emotion? And what am I telling myself about having this feeling?

What's that hot thought? So the next step would be to identify your hot thoughts, right? Your automatic thoughts. So maybe it might be that, oh, I'm too sensitive. I should be over this by now.

I have no right to be angry. Or I should be stronger. Those would be some examples of possibly your hot thought that you're having. And then we want to challenge the thought, right? So you want to ask yourself, is there evidence that having this emotion means something negative about me?

Um, you can ask yourself, you know, would I judge someone else I love for having the same feeling? That one's always good. We can usually come up with an answer pretty quick. Um, am I confusing having an emotion with acting on an emotion? Right?

It's okay, whatever emotion you have. The important thing, aspect of that is we don't want to act on our emotions, right? Because we don't make good decisions based on how we feel. And is it possible to experience this feeling without criticizing myself? Can I just feel this and give my, you know, have some self-acceptance?

And then of course we're going to do our balanced thought, right? So instead of saying, you know, I shouldn't be so anxious, something is wrong with me, you know, you could tell yourself that anxiety is an uncomfortable emotion. It doesn't mean something's wrong with me. I can experience anxiety and still make healthy decisions, right? Because if you use my mantra to make decisions based on what's best for you, not how you feel, That's how you can experience a feeling and still make a healthy decision, right?

Full circle there. I love it, love it, love it, love it. So let me give you another exercise to help you see the emotion beneath the emotion, right? The secondary emotion. So this can help you distinguish between the initial feelings and the reactions to those feelings.

So there's just another way of looking at all of this. I want to give you guys lots of tools. I always, you know, tell everybody there's lots of tools with CBT. You want to find the ones that work best for you because it's all about you feeling better. So you could write down on the top of a piece of paper, my emotions about my emotions, right?

And you want to write down what happened, what was the situation or event that you want to address. I always tell everybody there's no rules, there's no right or wrong answers. You know, you could do thought record in this exercise also, you know, anything in the past that's still bugging you, something that currently happened as well, and, you know, even something coming up, because you have lots of emotions about things that haven't happened yet, right? So you want to describe the situation. And then what was your primary emotion?

So if you have this mood list, you can look at possibly it could be sadness, Fear or anxiety. Maybe you're feeling angry or hurt. Uh, it could be disappointment, could feel lonely, right? Or any other feeling along with that. And then you want to figure out, okay, what was my secondary emotion?

Was it feeling guilty, shame, embarrassment? Was I frustrated? Did I feel angry towards myself? Um, did I feel anxious? And any other emotion that you would want to pick, right?

So what's my primary ones? I want to mark those up and then say what, you know, came after that, my secondary emotion. And then you want to write down, what did I tell myself about having the primary emotion, right? For example, you might say, you know, I shouldn't feel this way for whatever reason you put down, whatever you told yourself. Right, for the primary emotion.

And then, you know, what's a more balanced way to look at this? So you might say to yourself, you know, my feelings are understandable. I don't need to judge myself. These are just my feelings, and that's okay. And then also ask yourself, you know, how can I respond to myself differently?

Right? What would be a more compassionate way or healthy response for you to say to yourself? Right. That just, you know, I have a lot of emotions and I'm glad I feel everything, and I'm not going to react off my emotions. I'm just going to sit with them, figure out what my thoughts are, and then make a decision based on what's best for me, not how I feel.

That would be much more compassionate than all this judgment and feeling bad and just, you know, compiling everything. So that would be another exercise, right? What's the situation or the event that happened You know, what was my primary emotion? Write all those down. What was my secondary emotion?

What did you tell yourself about having the primary emotion? And what's more of a balanced way to think about this? And then how can you respond to yourself differently? Hopefully with more compassion, patience, kindness, those kind of things. So let's talk a little bit more about that self-compassion and the connection between that and secondary emotions.

So one of the most important lessons is that you learn to accept your emotions without approving of every behavior that might accompany them. So I'll give you some examples. So I'm going to say that one more time, but the most important lesson is that you can accept your emotions without approving of every behavior that might accompany them. So for example, I'm going to give you a few here. So It's okay to feel angry, but it's still your responsibility to communicate respectively, right?

It's okay to feel jealous, although that's pretty uncomfortable, right? It's no fun being jealous, but you can examine the insecurity without acting possessively, right? Not letting that anxiety come out towards your partner or whoever it's targeted toward. It's also okay to feel anxious, and you can learn to tolerate your anxiety without allowing it to dictate your decisions. And one more example would be that it's okay to feel sad, and you don't have to criticize yourself for not being happy.

That is self-compassion, all those examples I just gave you, right? It's okay to feel whatever you feel. And the self-compassion is you still have to make good decisions for yourself. And to be kind to yourself. And this distinction is important because emotional acceptance is not the same as emotional indulgence.

We don't have to act on every feeling, but we also don't have to punish ourselves for experiencing it. That feels good just saying that out loud to you guys, huh? It's important to have the distinction Because emotional acceptance is not the same as emotional indulgence, right? Lots of people— emotional indulgence is, I'm just going to act on however I feel. I don't care about me, myself.

I don't care about others, how it affects them. We don't want to do that. We want to have emotional acceptance, and we don't have to act on every feeling. We don't want to— anyway, you know me, I don't want you to act on any feelings.

But you also don't have to punish yourself for experiencing it, the feeling that you're having. That's where you can connect your secondary emotions and be compassionate towards yourself. These are all really important things, and these all, you know, bring together all the tools I teach you guys all the time, right? The thought— it always goes back to the thought record, right? The situation, the event is what created your feelings and then all these secondary feelings, right?

So I ask you guys and all my clients that when you're working on identifying your feelings/mood, same thing, um, is, you know, put them all down and take your time. Because again, a lot of times we get caught up in one or two moods. Oh, I'm depressed and anxious. That might be true, but also what about the other emotions I talked about today? Do you feel ashamed?

Do you feel embarrassed? Do you feel guilty? You feel frustrated. You know, being able to identify more of your moods will help you understand, oh, I got all these other secondary emotions that, you know, are now making it more complicated, creating more hot thoughts and making the hot thoughts even hotter, which now is going to feed into my negative moods, right? Because your thoughts are creating your moods.

So that's why identifying your mood sometimes can be easier than your thought right away. But then using your moods to say, okay, why do I feel guilty and ashamed and embarrassed and frustrated? And whatever your answer will be will be your thought.

And then also saying, what did I tell myself about having the primary emotion? Again, that, you know, what did I tell myself? Those are the thoughts. It's just a different way of saying it, right? And, you know, also ask yourself, you know, what did I do?

What was that negative step that I took? Maybe I did lash out on somebody. Maybe I lashed out on myself, right? Punished myself in some way. How can I respond differently to myself?

And we talk to ourselves in that way, and we think about how can I respond differently. And you write that down, right? How could I be more self-compassionate? That next time this comes up, you can go back to what you wrote down and said, oh yeah, I'm going to do this instead. Because I understand when you're in the emotion You know, it's hard to think of like, oh yeah, what was that?

You know, what did Julie say? Right? Or, you know, what was that thing I said I was going to do this time? I don't know. I'm just so upset right now.

So that's why writing things down, writing down, like I call it an action plan, you know, next time I feel ashamed, next time I feel guilty, or whatever the mood is that maybe you struggle with the most, you know, what can I do to be more self-compassionate towards myself? Obviously, obviously self-compassion. But, you know, I'm just going to go look at that piece of paper. Oh yeah. I'm gonna give myself a timeout.

I'm gonna go take a walk. I'm gonna call a friend that I really trust and talk through this. You know, I'm gonna ask myself, what would I tell my friend if they were telling me they felt this way? I can do that. I can look at that piece of paper and I can see what I was planning to do to be better towards myself, and I can just do it now.

I don't have to think of it on my own. So that's why it's really important to write stuff down. Also, writing stuff down really helps us Gets at underlying issues. It helps us understand ourselves better. You know, we're not rushing through this because it's really important, and it's important for you to take your time to understand that.

So there's some other questions you can explore based on this podcast if you want to that I wanted to also share with you that I thought could be really helpful. And ask yourself, you know, You know, why do I feel guilty about being angry? If that's true for you, right? A lot of people I have met, um, were not allowed to be angry growing up in their home. Uh, you know, their, your family, their families did not deal with negative emotions.

They just wanted everybody to be happy and calm, even though there's probably a lot of anger brewing underneath. So when I do feel angry, then I feel guilty, like I'm doing something wrong. That might be an answer to that, but that's just an example. Also, if you feel ashamed when you cry, that'd be a good question to ask yourself. That— what's that?

You know, what are some of the underlying emotions? Why am I feeling ashamed about doing something that's completely human and healthy, which is crying?

You know, where did you learn that certain emotions were unacceptable? You know, did that come from your childhood? Is there a relationship you're in? Did you know— where'd you learn that? You know, was there, um, you know, some kind of, um, uh, other people in your life growing up that, um, you know, you got that message from, or some kind of, um, you know, religious affiliation?

Sometimes that happens as well, right? But where did I learn that certain emotions aren't acceptable? How does your childhood conditioning contribute to your emotional self-judgment? Right? If you're judging yourself based on your emotions, you know, was there some conditioning in your childhood?

As I said earlier, you know, maybe you lived in a house where you couldn't show your emotions other than being happy. You know, that's something to think about.

And why do we— or why do you, let me say— criticize yourself sometimes for being anxious? You know, why do you get down on yourself for that when That's an emotion we all feel at different times.

You can also ask yourself, you know, do your attempts to control your emotions actually make the emotion stronger, or does it help? So trying to just control them could make them stronger, which then will make you feel worse. So that's something to ask yourself, right?

If you have kids, you know, how can you teach your children that all emotions are acceptable? Even when the behaviors are not, right? It's okay that you're upset, but it doesn't mean you get to punch your little brother, right? It's okay that you're frustrated and you want that candy. It doesn't mean you can go take the money off my dresser, things like that.

And how does the self-compassion help interrupt secondary emotional reactions is, as we talked about, right? If I can be compassionate, I'm not going to Have reactions. I'm just gonna be able to feel my emotions and be with them and start to understand where they're coming from. And can you learn to experience difficult emotions without making them mean something negative about yourself? You can, but you have to learn how to do that and practice it by using your CBT tools and really walk through that thought record to understand what thoughts are creating Your primary emotions as well as the secondary emotions.

So you want to stop judging yourself for feeling. Sometimes the first emotion we experience is not what causes the greatest suffering, but it's the judgment we attach to that emotion. We all feel sad, and then we criticize ourselves for being sad. So we're all going to feel sad. We don't want to criticize ourselves for being sad.

We feel afraid, then we become embarrassed about being afraid. We feel angry, and then we feel guilty for being angry. So your CBT tools teach you to examine your judgments towards yourself, right? We want to question the beliefs behind them, and we want to develop healthier relationships with our emotional experiences, right? So we can't always choose what we feel.

Our feelings just— oh my God, they just pop up. Right? But we can learn to change how we respond to what we feel.

We cannot always choose what we feel, but we can learn to change how we respond to what we feel. And how we do that, right, is understanding what are we thinking that's causing all of these feelings, right? And I can pause and breathe and not respond. Secondary emotions aren't necessarily irrational or unhealthy. I'm not saying that.

Sometimes guilt, sadness, or anxiety about an initial emotion has a lot of meaning and can really be beneficial to understand that. So the goal isn't to eliminate the secondary emotions. That's not what I'm saying here. It's to understand whether your interpretations are helpful, adequate, and proportionate, right? So you're not overreacting.

So we want to understand, you know, the emotion beneath the emotion. And why you feel bad about feeling bad is you want to ask yourself that, right? Why we feel bad about feeling bad? Because we don't have that self-compassion, that understanding, that acceptance that we're all of our emotions. And with CBT, The focus is not to get rid of your negative emotions, but it's to understand them, embrace all of them, right?

And figure out what am I thinking that's causing all of these emotions I'm struggling with? And how can I— maybe I don't have to feel sad about a certain situation, or just make it more manageable, right? Let's get down to 20%, 15% versus 80%, which is super strong and hard to, hard to manage. So What I wanted to also teach today was that, again, it's not just, oh, this is my one emotion. It's like, okay, what else am I feeling that might be coming up because of this emotion?

What are these secondary emotions? So I don't want to get too overwhelmed, but I want to see what's going on. And now I can really figure out what I'm thinking, and I can give myself some compassion, like, wow, this particular situation has created a lot of emotions for me. Let me just sit with that and And not be judgmental and not punish myself because of that and make things worse. And stop judging yourself for having feelings that are uncomfortable or might be more negative emotions.

So I hope I got you to start thinking about yourself, about all these feelings that we all have, and remember how to use the thought record so we can start to manage them and figure out What our thoughts are. And just start off with self-compassion, you know, on a daily basis when you wake up. You know, just take that moment of, you know, I'm going to have self-compassion for myself today. Whatever, whatever comes my way, I'm going to pause and breathe. I'm going to be mindful of what am I thinking?

What are my feelings? What are my secondary feelings? What can I say differently to myself to be kinder and to be able to walk through the situation? Easier and to make decisions based on what's best for you, not how you feel. It always comes back to my mantra because it works.

So I appreciate you being with me today. Again, I hope you're all doing really well. Please share this with anyone you think might benefit. You can find me on my website at mycognitivebehavioraltherapy.com. You can also find me on Instagram under My CBT Podcast.

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Please take good care of yourselves out there, and I will say one more time, make decisions based on what's best for you, not how you feel.