The Five Basic Emotions

And why learning to feel them is crucial

Early in my work with clients, I will introduce the five basic emotions. People often seek help when they are feeling stuck or are repeating a pattern in their lives. One way I describe my work is that I help people see how they are stuck and assist them in finding the freedom to live their lives most authentically. Emotions are like our body’s GPS signals that help us in navigating our choices in life. However, instead of having childhood experiences that assist us in developing and expressing the full palette of our emotional guidance system, we are taught systems of suppression by our family upbringings, schooling, religions, and more. For instance, as children, we learn to withhold sadness because it is weak, that expression of anger towards adults is punishable, or that feelings of sexual arousal are ignored or shamed. We are told what we should value or find joy in. And we carry this into adulthood.

Becoming Lost

This “education” clouds and confuses our body’s innate ability to use our feelings to guide our life decisions. As we become teenagers and gain more independence, we unknowingly carry these strong alterations in what we feel and thereby value, which impact foundational choices such as college majors, career decisions, romantic partners, and more. In other words, we invest much time and energy into building a life we don’t entirely want. This early miseducation of emotions and their expressions also impact how we relate to people. Suppressing our full palette of feelings significantly hinders both our ability to share ourselves with others authentically and to empathize with others, which can lead to feelings of distance from others and loneliness.

To help visualize this, I like to use the metaphor of a boat starting off in Europe and setting sail across the Atlantic with the dream of finishing its journey in the US. This envisioned route being roughly equivalent to our life’s purpose or Soul’s journey. However, just as we begin to sail, we are told by older sailors that certain parts of our planned route are dangerous and we are foolish to go down our path. Others laugh while telling us that the US is boring and that more fun is to be had if we follow them to South America. Or when we check our social media, we see others promising treasures and wealth if we head to Asia. Suppressing our emotional guidance system is akin to turning down the volume on our GPS, leaving us unable to feel our body’s wise signals and lost in unfulfilling waters.

Getting Back on Course

This is often where people are when they come to me seeking assistance. Feeling stuck, repeating unconscious patterns, and not quite knowing how to free themselves. A significant part of my work is helping people reacquaint themselves with their emotions so that they can, in turn, use them to guide themselves back to feeling empowered in creating a life that feels like their own. As I share above, the influences that significantly alter our trust in what we really want and need begin in our early childhood. The five basic emotions are essential in our journeys back to wholeness as they are the foundational building blocks of our human wayfinding system. We must tune up and use our GPS to get our boats back on our desired paths.

Artwork by Hannah Faith Yata

The Five Basic Emotions

Anger, sadness, fear, joy, and arousal (sexual and non-sexual). These are our body’s foundational emotional experiences. They do not require thought or language. Pre-verbal children, even in infancy, can feel and express these five. Having simple, common vocabulary around emotions can be helpful as we refamiliarize ourselves with how we feel and communicate with others. As I begin working with clients, it is common for people to feel largely disconnected from feeling at least 1 or 2 of the basic emotions. When I first started this emotional work on myself at the age of 34, I felt really lost. I was so disconnected from my emotions that I often couldn’t even identify what I was feeling and felt ashamed to even ask for help. A mentor introduced me to a “feelings wheel” diagram that was really helpful at the time and influenced my approach with clients.

I want to share a couple of things as you explore basic emotions for yourself. First, if you search for basic emotions or feelings wheels, you will find slight variations from the emotions I use. Although many are used and developed by psychologists, you will rarely encounter one that includes arousal. I feel this is an important oversight to take note of as it reflects the current discomfort around feelings of arousal in both our culture and in mental health professionals. Second, emotions can be thought of like steam in a pressure cooker and suppressing the pressure in one place causes leaks, and dysfunction, in other areas. A common way our bodies handle the trapping of one emotion is to then feel another one disproportionately. In our society, this is most often seen in the suppression of sadness or fear, leading to amplification in anger. As we reconnect to our feelings and their healthy expressions, it will be crucial that we include dialogue around our entire spectrum of emotions.

Reconnecting to Our Emotions

The journey back to listening to our body’s emotional signals and redirecting our life from a place more aligned with our feelings is long. We each have unique upbringings, life circumstances, and traumas that have impacted how we experience our emotions and the decisions we have made. Our boat can be quite off the path we most desire when we begin to realize that we need to navigate differently. I could not do justice here to suggest any particular approach or place to start (though I plan to get into them in later writings). Over time, one’s journey back to wholeness will likely include different therapists, friends, communities, healing modalities, and more. You will pick up various pieces of the puzzle along the way. However, the most important thing I’d like to communicate today is that reconnecting to our emotions is a worthwhile endeavor. Simply being curious about your feelings and desiring to explore them will take you a long way.

Questions for self-reflection:

1. Which of the five emotions (anger, sadness, fear, joy, arousal) are easy for me to identify in my body? Which are difficult to identify?

2. Of the emotions I can feel, which are easy for me to express to others? Which are challenging for me to express?

3. How were the five emotions expressed by my parents? Were any not expressed at all?