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