Gemma Spake

If you don't know your emotions, your emotions are a reaction to your experiences.

How can you know your experiences if you're never in touch with what you feel about them?

So yeah, we miss out.

And that's why we need to talk about, okay, what are we going to do here?

What is the path back to feeling our feelings without feeling like, oh my God, I want to know how many times I say feeling in this episode, but without feeling like they are going to completely run our lives.

How do we actually process our emotions?

Something I've really come to learn recently is that our big emotions often like to disguise or hide themselves as other emotions that feel more temporary or easy to manage.

And that's what we would call a presentation layer.

That's the word I've heard used to describe it.

If you want to learn how to process your emotions, you have to look for the clues and interrogate what is the immediate feeling and what is the deeper feeling.

What is the feeling that comes first and what is the feeling that actually wants to be heard?

In psychology, I think

I've heard people refer to this as like a primary emotion which is the original instinctual response like that's the real emotion the sadness the fear the loneliness and then again the secondary emotion and that's the one that comes in to protect us like anger irritability numbness even humor at times I feel like humor is a massive coping mechanism

And again, this is a learned response and it can often feel like the secondary emotion is the main emotion because it's a lot louder and it's a lot more visible.

For example, like I think anger is the best example of this actually.

Anger can feel a lot safer than admitting that you feel rejected.

So when you've been like slighted by a friend or criticized at work or ghosted or whatever, it's easier to just feel rage.

than to investigate why you feel rage.

Probably because you're scared about your value.

You're scared about being lonely.