As discussed earlier, the purpose of emotions is to give us information about the world around us. You’ve also seen that they can kick off a cascade of additional emotions, thoughts, and behaviours. The first emotion that arises is often pretty automatic and non-problematic. We can call that emotion your primary emotional response. It’s the subsequent emotions, thoughts, and behaviours that occur in response to the initial reaction where the problems can occur. These subsequent thoughts and feelings can include judgments about the initial response.
To make this all a little more concrete, think of the initial emotion as being a fire. Leave it alone and it will eventually die out. Throw in more fuel such as sticks, gas, or anything else, and the fire keeps going, perhaps even getting bigger and stronger, causing a lot of damage and destruction in it’s path. This is what those secondary reactions can be like.
Take, for example, if a loved one died. You might feel sad and cry. This would be a part of a normal grieving process. Over time, like the fire analogy, the sadness will decrease and you’ll resume your regular activities. If, however, you interpreted your sadness as being never-ending or a sign that you can’t cope (fuel for the fire), you might start to feel sadder and have more problems with sleeping and energy.
Or, consider if you were asked to lead a meeting at the last minute. If you don’t do this often, your heart might start beating a bit faster, your knees might feel shaky and you might feel a bit nauseous. If you accepted that you were (quite naturally) feeling nervous about doing a good job, and focused instead on meeting needs, like reading out the agenda and starting a round of discussions, your anxiety would likely subside, even if it didn’t go away completely. But if you kept thinking of the physical sensations and how anxious you were feeling, these symptoms might intensify until it might become difficult for you to stay calm and to hide your anxiety from the other people at the meeting.
It is these secondary reactions that we want to spend some time examining and understanding, to see whether they are an accurate representation of the current situation. Often, depression and anxiety can make us interpret situations in ways based on previous experiences that have little to do with what’s happening in the present moment.