Anxiety as a Secondary Emotion

People with chronic anxiety and worry that is uncontrollable and causes significant life problems get diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. People with GAD tend to have some sort of disposition to experience the world in a way that is anxiety provoking, and most of their life experience is seen through this lens. One of the downsides of this that is less often discussed is that anxiety can be a “cover” for other emotions. The following will briefly discuss this idea and make suggestions for how to avoid this.

Secondary Emotions

A secondary emotion is one that is experienced in place of another emotion that is difficult for the person to feel or express. For men, anger is often a cover for jealousy, hurt, disappointment, embarrassment, and sadness. For women, anxiety tends to often function the same way. Theoretically, this way of defending ourselves protects us from having to deal with the more complicated and difficult feelings. Therefore, we can easily make a mistake thinking that a situation or occurrence has made us anxious or angry, when in fact the true emotion is something different. For people with GAD, this can become very complicated. Most of life is experienced as anxiety, and it is a relatively expected and familiar feeling.

Other Feelings

In trying to understand what feelings (primary emotions) could be underneath your anxiety, the first thing to do is actually ask yourself that question. If you allow yourself to be open to the possibility that you are hurt, disappointed, or grieving rather than anxious, you are taking great leaps forward in understanding yourself, having greater emotional intelligence, and having the ability to make efforts to improve your situation based on other underlying feelings.

If you are left with some sort of fear, then your anxiety is likely in the right place. Give this a try and see if it can reduce your worry, and help you make life changes that will actually alleviate the true negative feelings you have, rather than missing your experience and causing continued worry for “no reason,” as many people with GAD tend to do.