KINDS & DIMENSIONS

OF EMOTIONS         

 

In the four previous articles, I began offering some basic definitions of
what an "emotion" is.  In those articles, I made numerous distinctions so as
to create some more precision regarding the emotional life that we are
referring to.  One thing that is obvious from all of that is this: All
emotions are not the same.  Emotions come in many different sizes and
shapes.  We have already noted that there are many different levels of
emotions (#3) from primary emotions to multiple levels of meta-emotions.
There are also different kinds of emotions as well as emotions in different
dimensions.  Here are some more distinctions that we can make about
emotions.

 

The go/ no-go emotions.  Many emotions create a go energy.  They are
excitatory, positive, and energetic emotions that activate us to move
forward to our values, our goals, and our desires.  And conversely, there
are many emotions which function with a no-go energy.  They are inhibitory,
negative, and constraining emotions.  We commonly call these the "positive"
and the "negative" emotions although that description is not very accurate.

 

Sympathetic emotions.  As already noted, there are the sympathetic nervous
system emotions of the General Arousal Syndrome: stress, excitement, fear,
anger, lust, and excitement.  These are all primary emotions and when you
feel them, you can point to the place in your body where you experience
them.  You encode them somatically.

 

Parasympathetic emotions.  The parasympathetic nervous system also activates
a certain set of emotions such as relaxation, calmness, peaceful, feeling
centered, etc.  These restful emotions enable us to turn down the bodily
activation, allowing us to feel apathetic, sleepy, bored, etc.

 

Social emotions.  Because the social emotions actually make up the largest
number of our emotions, they suggests that one of the primary functions of
emotions involve how we relate to each other.  These include: kindness,
care, love, hate, compassion, apathy, forgiveness, jealousy, respect,
disrespect, empathy, sympathy, and the list goes on and on.  For this
reason, there's a very close connection between emotional intelligence and
social intelligence. 

 

Conscience emotions.  Some emotions arise from our sense of right and wrong,
our sense of the ethics that we want to live by in relating to others.
These conscience emotions start with empathy and sympathy, how we connect to
others and feel responsibility to others and sometimes for others.
Conscience emotions leads us to feel conscientious about our behavior, how
we relate, our integrity in living up to our values, our congruency or
incongruency.  Those with little conscience will feel very little in terms
of others.  A person who is sociopathetic may be unable or unwilling to
"take second perceptual position" and at least, try on what another person
may be feeling in order to understand them.

 

Cathecting emotions.  To cathect is to reach out with your caring energy to
identify with and connect with a person, thing, place, etc.  By cathecting,
we "bring the world into our sense of self" and with that, our sense of self
expands.  Our inner world expands.  The cathecting emotions include: love,
desire, attachment, bonding, etc.  When we de-cathect we withdraw our
identity, care, sympathy, sense of connection with the person or thing.  We
experience this as loss, as grief, as sadness.

 

Self emotions.  Because there are so many aspects of "self," there are a
great many self emotions: sense of self, self-confidence, self-doubt,
self-efficacy, self-identity, temporal self (past self, future self), role
self, gender self (masculine self, feminine self), etc.

 

Meta emotions.  Anyone with a self-reflexive mind inevitably applies
feelings to feelings and this generates the meta emotions.  These are
layered and complex emotions.  So in fear about fear, one experiences
paranoia and if you fear the paranoia, you may create a fearful mood, a
fearful attitude about life.  If you anger at your fear-of-your-fear, that
generates another multilayered emotion.  Generally bringing any "negative"
emotion and applying it to a previous emotion-you are attacking yourself,
your emotions and the energy from that construct has nowhere to go except
against your mind and against your body.  In Neuro-Semantics we call those
highly toxic emotions- "dragon states."

 

Pseudo-emotions.  Just as you can bring an emotion against an emotion, you
can bring emotions against thoughts, against concepts, and you can bring
concepts against emotions.  It is in this way that we create
pseudo-emotions.  They seem like emotions but they are not really.  While
"fearing failure" is an emotion, an emotion about a concept, "shame about
failure" may be a concept about a concept.  That's because the 'shame' here
may not be so much of an emotion as an idea- "You shouldn't be that way,
feel that way, talk that way. Shame on you!"  Actually you can create all
sorts of pseudo-emotions by saying, "I feel..." and then add a judgment.  "I
feel weird," "I feel like I'm going to be fired."  "I feel under the
weather."  "I feel judged."  These are not emotions.  They are judgments
masquerading as emotions.

 

Time emotions.  There are a wide range of temporal emotions.  Some are about
the past and some are about the future; very few are about the present
moment: nostalgia, hope, regret, worry, anxiety, anticipation, expectation.

 

Vestibular emotions.  The sense of balance that's generated by the inner ear
generates the vestibular emotions: dizziness, disoriented, balance, joy,
playful, etc.

 

So many kinds of emotions!  What this means is that when you begin talking
about emotions, don't assume that everybody is using that word in the same
way as you are.  They probably are not!  That's why it is always good to
check.  "How are you using the word emotions?"  "What kind or level of
emotion are you referring to?"