Emotions: Primary, Secondary, and Instrumental.

Most people have a love hate relationship with emotions. We all love the good ones and hate the bad ones. Emotions are a way to have a unique connection to the world in which we live. The feelings that we feel tell us about ourselves, our lives, and that moment that we are at in time. However what people don’t understand is that emotions are a driving force for action, not just an internal response reaction. For example fear drives us to run away. Anger drives us to defend boundaries. Sadness is a crying out for loss or distress. These emotions seem to happen automatically to tell us about our situation, place and time.  Because emotions are both built in and learned we find that many people are confused and sometime miss-understand what is happening inside of them. They interpret the emotions in a way that they themselves don’t understand. There are three ways in which we use emotions to call to action our bodies and operate in a situation. These three types are called, primary, secondary, and instrumental.

Primary emotions are basically a first level emotion that we generally use to communicate to ourselves about a response to a situation or place. For example fear, fear experienced tells you to run, hide or fight.  Fear experienced is calling us to action in response to danger, danger in physical damage, mental damage, or even emotional damage. Generally fear like this comes from such things as an armed robber threatening your life. Anger expressed in us drives us to defend, or fight for our boundaries and possessions whether they are physical or internal. One example would be defending your family’s name when someone talks bad about it.

Secondary emotions are emotions used in response to a primary emotion. The primary emotion calls to action a secondary emotion which is then expressed instead of the first emotion being expressed. The best example is reacting in anger out of fear. That may be confusing so let me give you an analogy that is easier to understand. A mother or father who has fear for their child’s safety may react in anger towards their child running into the street. They may yell, discipline and show anger in facial expressions even though the first emotion was fear. Another example is a partner in a relationship attacking their mate angrily as a response to the loneliness they are feeling in the relationship. Secondary emotions tend to cause confusion and can create problems because many individuals who express secondary emotions don’t always know that it is coming from a primary emotion. This can lead to chronic miss-interpretation as they begin to use a single secondary emotion to react to all their primary emotions. This also causes problems because the people around the individual that is expressing emotion, interprets only the shown secondary emotion and therefore never grasp the true base issue of that person. Many marriage and family therapist will use techniques in emotion focused therapy to help individuals in relationships get in touch with their primary emotions and express those instead of using a secondary emotion in which they convey a false meaning to what they are actually feeling.

The third use of emotion is called instrumental emotion. This is when an emotion is used in an action sense to cause a reaction, sometimes in a manipulative way. One example of this is when a girlfriend cries to soften her boyfriend’s attitude towards spending more time with her instead of his buddies. Even though she is not sad but rather jealous she will express sadness as a tool to get a reaction. Another example is when somebody responds out of anger to mask the inner feeling of sadness. An example of this is when a young man loses a girlfriend that he really cared about but tells his friends that she was a terrible person. He wants them to believe that he doesn’t care and that he is tough. So even though he knows that he is sad inside, he flashes anger to make his friends believe what he wants them to.

Emotions are a way of communication to ourselves and the people around us. It lets us know our state of being in that moment and our stance towards the situation, while also conveying to the world around us. While most the time emotions are healthy and normal sometimes the patterns can become detrimental to our health or the health of the people around us. We tend to see more problems with the secondary and instrumental emotions as opposed to the primary emotions. However one issue that is found in primary emotions is the area of phobias. Secondary emotions tend to hurt the individual experiencing them because they don’t understand where exactly they come from. While instrumental emotions tend to hurt the person in which they are being expressed towards. Although these are the general patterns they are not always true. Secondary and instrumental emotions can hurt both individuals as well. Having a grasp on the initial beginning of an emotion and where it comes from will better help you cope and communicate with the world around you, and the world inside you.    

I graduated college and my life has ended. "The truth about transition"

If you’re like me, a fresh graduate of college you may be experiencing some interesting emotions that were completely un-expected. You probably feel like you hit a brick wall with no doors and no signs of what to do next. It’s like being at the starting gate of the rest of your life but the gate just isn’t opening. What’s more your social network is moving away or somehow not what it use to be. Many are asking themselves why they are still working a part time college job when they have this degree diploma hanging on their wall. Let me discuss the nature of this transition point.

The first thing is understanding how this situation was set up to automatically happen, like I’ve always said “the first step to change is understanding”. Believe it or not we were trained to think something that is false. For the last fifteen to twenty-five years, depending on how long you went to school. You have been preached to and drilled into your mental understanding that a college or post college degree would provide the key to your happiness. The day you graduated the perfect dream job would be awaiting you as you walked off the stage with your degree in hand. Unfortunately this has never been further from the truth especially with the current economy worldwide.  To give you a little idea of what I’m talking about there are over 1.2 million graduates from college a year in the United States alone. I guarantee you there are not 1.2 million new dream jobs available each year.  Then you throw on top of that all the super brains that come in from other countries and you can see right away that the competition is suddenly painfully high. With this depressed economy it is even harder to find jobs that are considered dream jobs. The very fact that you still have a job at the local Starbucks is a blessing even though it may not be your dream job.

The second part of these emotions is the loss of a readily available social life. Along with the preaching and drilling of guaranteed success you have had a very well organized social life with opportunities to create relationships. In school whether it was grade school or college you had things like sports, classrooms, dorms and organizations where a body of people were brought together in a situation where you were pressured to interact and in the process were drawn to certain people that had shared interests. This makes it easy to form relationship that eventually grow into meaning and become very important to you. You also had the support and interaction with teachers, coaches, mentors and the constant checking up from mom and dad.

So how does this all lead you to where you’re at right now? This support system has been building over the years of your life up until graduation day. Then suddenly as you walk off the stage with your degree, it all explodes like a bomb. Nobody is offering you a job, all the job openings that you qualify for are entry level only and you are one of four hundred applicants. Your friends begin to return home or move away to take whatever job they can find, teachers and coaches are not seeing you every day anymore, and those random midnight group runs down to the local taco shop stop happening. If that’s not enough you have to find multiple part time jobs to help pay off the educational debt you accumulated over the years. All the sudden you went from the top of a mountain with a full working system around you, to looking up at a huge hurdle with a system that seems to be falling apart. Welcome to the transition time of your life. 

It’s not that you have failed or missed something. It’s just that you are now starting over again, only this time at a higher level. You have to rebuild the structure of your new life. It’s like waking up on the first day of attending a new school, no friends, no niches, NO IDEA. haha Now that I have walked you out on the plank of reality let me bring you back in with another part of reality. THIS IS ALL NORMAL! Haha I guarantee if you ask any one of your relatives, teachers, or coaches they will all tell you that they have been there. You just never hear them talk about it because lets be real, who talks about the down years?

Starting over is always hard and slow. Continue to work at your situation you will begin to make those grown up friends, get closer to a smaller body of friends. As you continue in your search for a job you’ll find that the creation of a new life will lead you to meet new people that hold opportunities for you. You never know the next person you serve at the local restaurant may be in need of a new marketing rep with good people skills, trust me I’ve seen it happen plenty of times at the restaurant I worked at with other recent grads. In fact the job that I currently have, I got because I met somebody at my cousin’s little league baseball game. The truth is you haven’t failed you haven’t missed something your just beginning a fresh new start. The broken system is mentally telling you that life is over. It’s not it is simply transitioning into a new one, starting from scratch with a new set of skills. Build those new relationships, join in with that new club at church, take your dog for a walk, and work hard at your part time job. Go ahead transition into the rest of your life. It’s coming and it’s going to be great!

Feel free to leave any comments or questions I’d love to cover topics of interest to you, the reader :)

-Colby

How Meaning Changes Trauma

Why were there so many veterans that came back from Vietnam with post-traumatic stress disorder as opposed to WWII? History leaves a wake of trauma victims but why are some experiences considered less traumatic? Although WWII was a painful situation for some, it is still romanticized in movies and literature. On the other side Vietnam is totally the opposite. Hollywood depicts veterans from these wars totally different, and what we see as the public also parallels Hollywood. Why is that?

The answer is “meaning”. This may be confusing to most so let me break it down. Meaning in life is not really anything we can grasp. It’s the interactions between life and ourselves that create this background. Meaning is created through culture, social networks, faith, beliefs, perspectives, and the physiology (emotions) interaction of our bodies with the world around us.  The analogy I like to use is the game of chess. In chess each of the pieces has a part of the game. Those pieces work together to achieve a goal. They all have a purpose and direction. However these pieces only have these things in relation to the checkered board (background of meaning). If you remove the checkered board these pieces are useless and are scattered on the floor, much like the individual without a sense of purpose or meaning. The final analogy I want to make to hammer this home is this. Think of two rooms, a torture chamber, and the labor ward at the local hospital. They both are traumatic experiences, they both have blood and guts, and they both have excruciating pain involved. The victim of torture will carry that pain and agony of the traumatic experience for the rest of their life, while the new mother will quickly forget the experience only hours later. The expectant mother goes through the trauma and pain with a meaning of giving life, creating, and expecting the new joy that is sitting in her lap, while the tortured person experiences the meaning of life taken away through aggression, stealing of freedom, and helplessness. The difference between the two people is the meaning. The expectant mother has incorporated the experience into the meaning of her life, while the tortured victim had their meaning destroyed.

WWII veterans were praised as heroes and warriors when they returned home. Parties and parades were put on for these soldiers. They were thanked for their services and appreciated by their background of meaning. However the Vietnam veterans were spit on and called criminals when they arrived home. Their sense of meaning or background was destroyed during their traumatic experience.

The therapy for these types of patients is to re-build their sense of background of meaning. It’s like re-introducing the checkered board to the game of chess. All the sudden the pieces line up and have a meaning, purpose, and goal. WWII veterans had this when they arrived home, Vietnam veterans had the opposite.

The first step to any change is understanding. Meaning changes trauma. Meaning is simply mental life :) see you guys next time!  

Am I crazy or stupid?

I was going to start with my series on the existentialist bug, why my daughter left the church when she left for college, but decided that it would be best to start with something  a little more lite for the release of my blog :D

As an extreme sports participant and bull rider I’m often asked “are you crazy?” which I tend to prefer over, “are you stupid?”  Although some may consider climbing aboard a 2000 pound pissed off hamburger, and trying to hang on for eight seconds, just stupid. Even though un-recognizable to most there is a difference between “crazy” and “stupid”. If you look back in history you see that many of the important people that shaped and changed our lives were called crazy at one point For example, Thomas Edison, and the Wright brothers.  It’s also ironic to note that the opposite of these historic crazy people is now considered stupid. If someone told you to live without light or to walk to Japan you would look at them as if they were complete idiots.

So is there a difference? Yes! The difference is two things “perspective” and “approach”.  It is simply how we go about doing it, our mental setting that prepares for the action. Perspective is our understanding of the situation. If a bull rider understands that this sport is dangerous and he could be killed while riding then his senses can be better prepared for the “approach”. “Perspective” prepares “approach”. Because the rider understands the consequences of his actions, he will then desire to prepare for the best outcome. This desire pushes the rider to train, learn, rehearse, and get guidance in preparation for the action (these preparations are the “approach”). By the time the rider actually climbs aboard Bushwacker he has already mentally worked through and prepared for every outcome. He is now ready to perform the action. Unlike a drunken college kid on spring break who jumps off a cliff into unknown water below (if you didn’t catch it, this is called stupid :). This adolescence didn’t stop to consider the consequences (Perspective) and did nothing to prepare for the action (Approach). 

So turn the lights on, take an airplane, be smart, and simply live a mental life.    

About Me

Hi my name is Colby Drye and I’ve started this blog as an encouragement to those looking for understanding of some miss-conceptions in mental thinking or just understanding of what’s going on in their mind. I hold a graduate degree in research biology, and have studied Psychology, with a cross emphasis on bio-psychology. My interest stems from inter-personal communication between the sexes as well as interpretation and expression of emotions. My preferred approach is experiential psychodynamic psychotherapy because this type of therapy draws on all types of techniques and does not limit the techniques to a rigid theory.

I was born and raised in a small country town in southern California. An area of California that has the same mentality as Texas, work hard, get tough, don’t complain, and suck it up. I certainly maintained this aspect of life growing up, however as I progressed through my many experiences I realized that being mentally sound and understanding the thoughts that went through my head was important to achieving goals and coping with things that could not be suppressed.

I have had many experiences in life that have allowed me to grasp hold of many concepts that I studied. I am the second oldest of seven boys, I was a quarterback for eleven years including two years with the San Diego Stallions minor league pro team, amateur bull rider, mixed martial arts competitor, extreme sports participator, crew member during amateur regattas (sailboat races), flew both fixed wing and rotor wing aircraft, I attended six different colleges, one of those was overseas in Europe, I have traveled to over twenty-six different countries, I have worked in agriculture, hospitality, retail, personal relations, and have coached adolescence in the majority of my sports, as well as leadership skills.

All of these experiences have allowed me to put techniques that I have learned as well as theories that I have developed into experimental practice. I’m excited about exploring these concepts and ideas on this blog. It will be fun to interact and hear from you as we all live a simply mental life.

Kindle making life simple.