"Bad" Feelings: hurt, fear, sadness, anger, and guilt

If we are to develop a greater capacity to create what we need and what the rest of the planet needs, we have to nurture a greater capacity to know our feelings. The place we have the greatest difficulty is with our emotions. We live in a culture which is very disparaging about emotions. This is especially true for men, but we can even be pretty cruel to women's emotional expression as when we label them hysterical.

It helps if we use our capacity to think to support our awareness of our emotions. To that end I suggest a cognitive map for helping us know what emotions we are having.

As we have already noted, there are really no bad feelings; there are just feelings we don't like having. Some emotions arise from events in which we get what we need and some from events in which we don't get what we need. Some emotions arise from events in which we get what we don't need and some from events in which we don't get what we don't need. This is confusing so let's create a chart.

We therefore have the good feelings of safety and satisfaction and the bad feelings of hurt. These become our fundamental distinction between emotions. When we don't get what we need we are hurt. When we do we are safe and satisfied.

Remembering that our goal is to identify what we need by attending to what we are feeling when we are not getting it, we want to give special attention to the bad feelings... to hurt. As we do this we notice that hurt can happen in the past, the present, or the future. Hurt can be something done to us or something we do to others. So we can identify five distinct "bad" feelings.

When we have a present experience of getting what we don't need or not getting what we do need we feel hurt.

When we have an experience of anticipating that in the future we will be hurt we feel fear.

When we remember a time in the past when we lost something which was precious to us or didn't get something we needed we feel sadness.

When we are hurt by what we experience as the result of the choice of another we feel anger.

When we have caused hurt in another by a choice we have made we feel guilt.

Let's make another chart just so we have these five feelings in front of us.

Each of these words for an emotion is but the title of a category of feelings. Under fear we find worry, alarm, terror... Under anger we find peeved, mad, furious... and so on. Each of these other feelings are derivative of the larger feeling being a variation that is more or less intense or otherwise showing a gradation of color. We may think of emotions as colors on a painter's pallet. Each of them may blend with others to create new shades and gradations of emotion.

When we feel "bad," it is because we are feeling one or more of these feelings or their derivatives. In fact, we are probably feeling many of these feelings all at the same time.

After Joe was late to work, having stopped to get gas, he decided that instead of brooding and blaming he would actually use the feelings coming up in him to get to know his own interior better.

He knew he was mad. He was angry that the boys were so hard to get going in the morning and he was mad at himself for not having noticed that the car was almost out of gas and he was mad at his boss for being so rigid about the starting time.

He was afraid that he was not going to get a handle on the morning routine and he would continue to be late and that might result in him losing this job or at least not getting a raise.

He was hurt that Jane didn't seem to appreciate how hard this was for him in the morning and that his efforts to be a better dad to his boys than his own father had been for him were not being appreciated.

He was sad that his relationship with Jane had become strained by her having to get to work so early that she couldn't be there to help and he missed the close time they used to have in the morning.

And he felt guilty that he was so short with the boys and didn't give Jane appreciation for how hard she was working.

When Joe sits with his "bad" feelings he discovers the rich and vivid information about how the qualities in his relationships are not as he would have them be. He can respond differently in ways which create more of what he needs by attending to each of these emotions. If he doesn't know that he is having these feelings he doesn't know what he needs and he can't do anything to address them short of going out with his buddies and getting drunk.

Our "bad" feelings, when they are not named and addressed, can be the stimulus for bad behavior. When we feel bad we have a tendency to do bad things. Consider for a moment a time when you acted in a manner you regret which resulted in harm to someone you care about.

Now, try to remember what you were feeling just before you made the choice you regret. This feeling is different for different people, but in the years I have been posing this question I would guess that about 90% of the time the answer is anger.