Paraphrased from Scream Louder:

"The four basic emotions are Joy, Fear, Sadness, and Anger. (mad, sad, glad, or scared)

Many people seem to believe that Joy is the only good emotion and Fear, Sadness and Anger are bad emotions. This is not so. All emotions are good. Fear and Sadness and Anger are good. While emotions can provide the energy for actions, they are not the actions.

We have a tendency to confuse the emotion Anger with the action of violence. We do this because our dysfunctional families do not teach us the difference between emotions and actions and because for many of us in dysfunctional homes, violence often followed Anger or took the place of it. We believe then that violence and anger are the same thing and that our anger is, therefore, bad and must be avoided. We amass huge amounts of anger and when we can hold no more, we burst forth in violence or react with passive agression. If we learn to experience our anger when it happens, we do not need to use violence.

Fear and Sadness/Hurt are primary emotions. Anger is a secondary one. Because anger is a secondary emotion, it does not mean that Anger is less important than the others. It means that Fear or Sadness/Hurt or both will trigger first, and then Anger is triggered from one or both of them. Fear and Sadness/Hurt are soft receptive emotions. Anger is a hard emotion; it is powerful and dynamic. It is our protective defensive emotion and often the only way we know to defend our boundaries. Although Anger does not trigger first, once it is triggered, it mut be experienced and completed (not acted out) in order to return to and complete the Fear and/or the Sadness/Hurt from which the anger was activated.

If you have been taught (as men in particular have been taught) that Fear and Sadness are bad, Anger is probably the only emotion you will experience. If you have also been taught that Anger is bad, you will suppress that as well and begin to behave with passive aggression. Unable to directly express Anger, you will seek indirect covert ways of expressing it.

Because most women have been taught that Anger is bad, women shut down on Anger and either turn it against themselves or become victims of everyone else's Anger.

Joy is where all of us wish to be. There is nothing wrong with wishing to experience joy. The problem comes when you believe that you should be there all the time, and then you try to hold onto it and avoid feeling Fear, Sadness and Anger. Trying to hold onto Joy (or anything else) removes you from reality and the ability to live in the moment. You have to be able to experience your Joy and complete it in order to stay present in the moment. If you truly allow yourselves to live in the moment, you will discover that you will have the opportunity to experience not only the other emotions, but all the richness that life has to offer.

When you leave Joy, you will go to either Fear or Sadness/Hurt or both. If you complete and release those emotions, you can return to the place at the top to await Joy. If you do not complete and release the Fear or Sadness/Hurt, you will either store them or convert them to Anger. When you store Fear or Sadness/Hurt, you will find it difficult to return to Joy, and the more Fear and Sadness you store, the more difficult it will become to experience any Joy...and walk around pretending to yourself and everyone else that you are happy.

There is no direct pathway between Anger and Joy. In order to return to a place of Joy, you must complete and release the experience of Anger, and go back and experience the actual Fear and/or Sadness from which the Anger was triggered. Only then can you return to Joy.

If you are not experiencing some form of Joy (happiness, contentment...), you are going to be experiencing some form of Fear, Sadness/Hurt or Anger in various combinations.

Most people who claim to feel "nothing" when they are in the middle of difficult circumstances feel nothing becasue they are either having an emotional response but are in denial about it or they are so disassociated from their emotions, they are numb.

Western cultures tend to prize intellect and degrade emotions. People often use this as an excuse to intellectualize all human experience and behave and communicate like living computers, very reasonable with no show of emotions.

If you are an Adult Child, you have had such poor emotional models and have gone through so much dysfunction, you have shut down your ability to experience your emotions. That does not mean that the emotions are not happening; it does mean that you are out of touch with them. As a consequence you are probably having several other types of experiences ranging from anxiety attacks to addictive urges, all of which result from the inability to experience the true emotions that are there.

If you are in recovery you are probably beginning to discover emotions and experiences that you never thought possible. If that is not the case, you need to do something other than what you are doing so that you can move your process along.

Learning about the emotions and learning to experience them are not the same thing. You may have learned that you have emotions. You may even be able to recognize them. Learning to recognize emotions is like coming upon the ocean and learning what it is. You see the ocean and, then you sit down and watch it. In order to experience it completely, you have to go in and swim.

If you wish to stay out of the Triangle, you must learn to tell the truth about what emotions you are feeling and take responsibility for them. No one else is responsible for your emotions. No one else can fix them for you or change them for you. People may support you in experiencing them, but ultimately no one but you can complete and release them.

When you tell the truth about what you are feeling, no longer take on the guilt that others try to place on you, and are willing to feel the fear and sadness when being accused of being the Persecutor by people who stay in the Triangle, you will step out of the chaos of your life.

1. Whenever you discover that things in your life are not working, you can assume that your addictive process has been activated and you are caught in the Triangle.

2. Ask yourself which position you are in at that moment. Is this your primary choice in the Triangle?

3. How did you get there? What lie did you tell yourself or someone else?

4. Which emotions are you avoiding? If you are not experiencing some form of Joy, you are experiencing some form of Fear, Sadness/Hurt or Anger. Are you having Anger? If so, you must experience it and complete it, not act it out. Then look for the primary emotion from which the Anger triggered. Is it Fear, or Sadness/Hurt or both? Again, experience that and complete it.

Your emotions must be experienced, not intellectualized. You cannot think your way into an experience. Intellectual understanding of something is not the same as experiencing it.

If you are experiencing disappointment, you have discovered a complex experience that combines the emotion of sadness associated with an unmet expectation. It takes time after all the years of suppression, to find and feel your emotions. Find someone who can help you experience your emotions.

Some people can identify the emotions, but not complete them. There are several possible reasons for that.

1. You may have mislabeled an emotion so that you can't really experience or complete it.

2. You may be having more than one emotion and experience activated at once. You will need to identify all of them.

3. You may need to process the tapes and the scenes that have surfaced with your exploration.

4. You may be running your emotions on yourself or the others in the Triangle.

When you are stuffing emotions, you are denying, ignoring or disassociating from your emotions. You may be going numb. You may not be in touch with your emotions. You may have been raised to believe only one emotion was acceptable and translate all your emotions into the acceptable one.

At some point in your healing process, you will begin to have a sense of what the emotions are and how they feel. This is the point at which you may begin running them. What happens is that you make some contact with the emotion, but you still do not take responsibility for experiencing and completing it. Instead, you use the emotion to try to manipulate someone into the Triangle to rescue you from your emotion. You will blame others for your emotion and expect them to do something to take it away. You are attempting to control with your emotions. You are running them or making them right so that you do not have to feel them.

You will probably sound like this: "I'm hurt (or angry or scared) and it's your fault" or, "I'm feeling...(fill in the blank), and you should do something about the situation." Or "What you did made me feel...(fill in emotion) and now you have to stop, change, etc., or I can't get through my feelings."

It is not the other person's responsiblity to fix your emotions.

When you are further along in your healing process, you will be able to recognize the various emotions. Then you will begin to express them to others to get further in touch with the emotions and not to try to make someone else responsible for them. Remember, this is a process, and you may slide back and forth until you are in touch with your emotions and the way that you deal with them and can express them clearly and cleanly in order to complete them.

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