Hello everyone and welcome to therapy in a nutshell. I'm Emma McAdam, a licensed marriage and family therapist.

And this is the podcast where I condense mental health skills into bite-sized nuggets of health.

Are you ready to start letting go of some of those distorted and painful feelings?

I hope the last couple of videos have helped you get the idea that the process of struggling

with and shaming your emotions makes you feel worse, but I also hope that you haven't gotten

the idea that you just have to feel crappy forever. You just have to go

through the stage of feeling in order to get to the stage of feeling better. So just because we

aren't labeling emotions as good or bad and we aren't struggling with or fighting them doesn't

mean that all emotions are truthful, helpful, or even what we're really feeling.

There's a lot of reasons why something we're feeling isn't going to be helpful.

But to get to this point where we're exploring that, we have to stop judging and resisting and labeling our emotions long enough to explore them and figure out what's under them.

So there's a lot of reasons why what we're feeling isn't based on reality.

It could be cognitive distortions, an unhelpful worldview, self-justification,

or what we're going to talk about in this section,

secondary emotions. Secondary emotions are a habitual or learned response to cover up sensitive emotions with a less sensitive emotions.

So, for example, fear is sensitive and hate is less sensitive.

So people often cover up their fear with hatred.

Secondary emotions are all about self-protection, but in the long run, they tend to hurt us much more by ruining relationships,

keeping our guard up, keeping our heart walled off, and that often leads to people feeling angry,

numb, exhausted, and lonely. Secondary emotions lead to more pain and suffering. So in this section,

you're going to learn what they are, how to notice them, and what to do instead. And this is going

to help you more effectively overcome anxiety, depression, and get better at feeling.

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