In couple’s therapy based on attachment and object relations, great focus is placed on feelings and emotions. The partners are asked to be attentive to one another’s feelings, give space to feelings, contain them, reflect (mirror) them and regulate them mutually. Worthiness and Differentiation based couple’s therapy approaches, however, see such preoccupation with feelings as a process encouraging dependence and symbiosis.
What can be the right approach to working with feelings and emotions from the perspective of differentiation? How can we work with feelings without creating dependence between the partners or on the therapist?
When Bowen and Kerr were asked about this issue, they emphasized strongly the well-differentiated individual’s ability to think objectively and not be controlled by his feelings and emotions. They wrote:
The capacity for autonomous functioning does not mean a person lacks emotions and feelings. It means that while the person may respond to input from others on an emotional, feeling, and subjective level, he has the capacity to process these responses on an objective level. The processing at the highest levels of mental functioning is what frees the person from automatic responses and permits choices.’ A well differentiated person has a togetherness force and is responsive to togetherness determined cues from others. His action or inaction in response to those cues, however, is strongly self-determined. (Kindle Locations 981-984).
The understanding that a highly differentiated person is able to separate between his emotions and his thinking and therefore does not allow his emotions and feelings to control his thinking is vital and significant, but not sufficient. There are additional things occurring in a person’s world of feeling when he or she develops differentiation. The feelings and emotions themselves are transformed. Not only do highly differentiated people’s feelings and emotions become quieter and less influential, but in many ways, they also become more profound and filled with life. They become less dramatic and manipulative; their power grows inward and they become more connected with their own authentic self.
Bert Hellinger, the founder of the Family Constellation approach, made an interesting distinction between four types of feelings, a distinction that may greatly assist the therapist in his work with couples’ emotional worlds. Hellinger (1988) classified feelings into primary, secondary, systemic and meta- feelings. He writes:
The main difference between primary and secondary feelings is that primary feelings support constructive action, while secondary feelings consume energy that could otherwise support change. Feelings that produce effective action strengthen people, while feelings that hinder effective action, or justify not acting, or substitute for effective action all weaken people. I call those feelings that support constructive action primary feelings, while the others are secondary feelings.(p. 224)
For example, fear is a primary feeling when it supports you to run for your life when a tiger chases you. It is a secondery feeling when in blocks you from trying to achieve your goals.
According to Hellinger, “Most feelings that are dealt with in therapy are secondary feelings. Their primary function is to convince others that one can’t take effective action, so they need to be dramatic and exaggerated. When you’re in the grip of secondary feelings, you feel weak, and the others present feel a need to help. If the emotions are dramatic enough, the would-be helpers don’t notice that there’s really nothing that can be done in the situation.”
This distinction describes accurately what takes place in the process of raising the differentiation level. An individual who develops a higher differentiation level stops using his feelings and emotions in a manipulative manner. He is no longer interested in convincing others that he is to be pitied, comforted, that he has to have their approval or that they have to act instead of him. He becomes more attentive to his primary feelings, which help him and actually push him to act in a way that is more authentic and more appropriate for the situation.
The stronger our connection is to our primary feelings, the more evident their role becomes in our lives: to direct us and guide us to effective action. When a feeling does not guide the patient to effective action in his life, it is most probably a secondary feeling.
When the therapist encourages a person to feel and express a primary feeling, this drives him to accurate action. Primary anger, for example, may push a person to stand his ground. Primary grief may help someone feel the pain fully, take leave of the other person for good, pick up the pieces and start again. Primary guilt may push one to take the correct action that will help him atone effectively for having hurt the other person, take responsibility for his actions, accept the consequences, and find ways to mend broken relationships.
Expressing secondary feelings, on the other hand, makes a situation worse instead of improving it. When the therapist encourages the patient to express secondary feelings, he is weakening instead of strengthening him. He encourages dependence, instead of setting him free. Therapy approaches that encourage the expression of secondary feelings go on for much longer and do not really produce results.
However, something else happens when the members of a family or group do not express their primary feelings. Somebody else will probably express these feelings on their behalf. Systemic feelings are the feelings that family or group members express on others’ behalf.
“The third type of feelings,” Hellinger writes,
are feelings that have been taken on from the system; that is, when what one feels as one’s own feelings is actually someone else’s feelings. It’s strange for most people to think that what they’re feeling isn’t their own feeling, but somebody else’s… Whenever you feel a feeling that belongs to somebody else, then you’re caught up in something that’s not of your own making. That’s why your attempts to change it usually fail (p. 228).
Family members with low or average differentiation levels “transfer,” “borrow,” and “steal” each other’s feelings much more than we might think. Usually, systemic feelings are experienced very intensely by the person who feels them. His extremely strong identification with the feeling makes him believe that it is authentic. But when people exhibit systemic feelings, they actually deprive someone else the ability to experience his primary feeling. And as a result they also deprive him of the ability to act effectively. A careful therapist must recognize systemic feelings and avoid the temptation to help a person to express them. Instead, the patient has to learn to refuse to take on feelings that are not his and return them to the person they belong to.
“There is also a fourth category of feelings,” Hellinger writes, “I call meta-feelings. These feelings have an entirely different quality. They are feelings or sensations without emotions. They’re pure, concentrated energy. Courage, humility (the willingness to accept the word as it is), serenity, remorse, wisdom, and deep satisfaction are examples of meta-feelings. There’s also meta-love and meta-aggression.” (p. 229)
“When meta-feelings appear, they’re experienced as gifts. You can’t make them happen; they come on their own as blessings. They’re the reward for life experience – like ripened fruit.” (p. 230)
In many respects, meta-feelings are the prize or the gift for real progress in the work of differentiation. When a person devotes sincere effort to raising his differentiation level, he becomes wiser. “Wisdom,” writes Hellinger, “is associated with courage, humility, and the energy of life. It is a meta-feeling that helps us to distinguish between what is really important and what isn’t. Wisdom doesn’t mean that I know a lot, but that I’m able to determine what’s appropriate to the immediate situation and what isn’t. It tells me what my personal integrity requires of me in every situation. Wisdom is always related to action. A wise person doesn’t deduce his actions from principles, but what is required by the situation is perceived directly. That’s why the truly wise person’s behavior is often surprising.”
And perhaps the most essential difference between the emotional world of a poorly differentiated person and that of a highly differentiated person lies in the person’s body sensations and his ability to feel and understand the sensations in his body.
The body is the space where feelings are experienced. They are experienced in the whole body, but there are a number of areas in the body that are the most central for sensing one’s feelings. In the region of the pelvis and the lower abdomen, for example, one can feel fear, on the one hand, and security, on the other. In the chest and throat area, we may feel sadness, pain and also love. When we do differentiation work, sensing our feelings becomes purer and clearer. Our body then becomes an exact instrument for getting to know our feelings. Not only our own feelings, but also those of the other person. When we clean up our emotional system, that is to say, we stop expressing secondary feelings and refuse to take on systemic feelings, our ability to sense and understand the other person’s feelings becomes more accurate and refined.
Instead of reacting automatically to the feelings, emotional needs and projections of those around him, the differentiated individual is able to simply sense and feel them, without reacting to them, and through them to understand himself and those around him.
Feeling is done in the body. Understanding is done in thinking. And responding is done out of choice associated with a person’s attention, integrity and conscience.
As therapists, our job is to encourage these abilities. We can do so 1) by not yielding to the temptation of secondary feelings, not only by not encouraging their expression, but even by blocking them; 2) by helping the patient be clear about which feelings belong to him and which don’t, and inviting him to refuse to take on and express feelings that don’t belong to him; and 3) by encouraging the patient to sense his body and listen to the messages and insights that arise from it.
Throughout this book, you’ll meet numerous cases in which the therapist doesn’t “contain” the patient’s feelings. Note that the feelings that the patient is trying to express, in these cases, are secondary feelings. The choice not to “contain” them is intentional.
