Discover the Emotional Sequence that Explains Every Behavior or Pattern You Struggle With
In the last article, you learned about the primary emotions, and how all the emotions you’ve ever experienced can be broken down to 5-6 primary ones.
If you haven’t read that article, I highly recommend reading it first, as it’ll help you make more sense of this one.
The thing to understand is, your emotions don’t come up for any reason, and more importantly, they don’t come up randomly.
There’s always a reason an emotion comes up, no matter how unpleasant. What’s more, from my own healing and experience with helping hundreds of clients, I’ve found there’s a specific pattern or cycle of how they come up.
When you can understand the cycle, you can understand all human behavior.
The Emotional Cycle
1. Loneliness
The cycle begins with loneliness. What I’ve found is at the core of the human experience is loneliness.
We humans are pack animals, and we evolved to live and survive in a pack. As a result, we evolved with various characteristics to make sure we stick to the pack at all times.
One of those characteristics is the pain of loneliness. For humans, loneliness is painful. Extremely painful. The kind of pain that can make a person go crazy.
Again, we evolved this way to make sure we always stay in a tribe or community, or return to it if we ever leave.
2. Yearning
In order to stay in community, loneliness creates a yearning for attention, affection, and approval or to be seen, heard, known, and to matter. Not to mention, to be touched and have physical contact.
These yearnings or drives are always there and always coming up. In fact, they never go away.
This is the reason you never feel fulfilled nor your needs ever fully met. They are always coming up to ensure you always stay close to and around people and community.
3. Beliefs
When a yearning comes up, it filters through social norms and cultural beliefs to see how that yearning will or can be met.
For example, the Latin American culture is very touchy-feely. Affection and physical contact are so normal, people give and receive them easily. So, when a drive for affection and contact comes up, it’s more easily met there.
In Ethiopia and India, it’s normal for men to hold hands. It’s not uncommon for men who are good friends to walk down the street holding hands. In such countries, yearnings are also met easily.
In Spain, people kiss on the cheek when they greet each other. In France, they kiss twice, one on each side of the cheek. In Holland, it’s three times. In Argentina, it’s customary for men to kiss each other on the cheek.
The US culture is a bit different, as it’s not as open to affection and contact. It’s also a much more individual culture, where people do things on their own, and not together or in community.
For example, when I was in French Guiana, several people I was having dinner with were telling me how they never eat alone. It’s out of the norm to eat alone in their culture. Whereas people here eat alone all day long.
Other places, it’s even more extreme. Men and women are forbidden to interact. They sit separately, eat separately, and socialize separately. Unless two people are married, there is limited contact with the opposite sex.
So, although the underlying yearning for attention, affection, and approval is universal, its expression is culturally specific.
4. Wants
So when a yearning comes up, it filters through the social norms and beliefs to see how it can be met, and based on that, it’ll create a want or desire.
In Latin America, it will be a desire for physical contact.
In Ethiopia or India, the desire will be to hold a friend’s hand. Though the desire might come up as a desire to visit the market with a friend, where they’ll walk together holding hands.
In parts of Europe, a group of friends will come together, and when they meet, kiss each other on the cheek, and then have a conversation over dinner.
In the US, you’re not likely to see any of these. In fact, the mind of a person raised in this culture would never even consider physical contact, holding hands, or kissing on the cheek to meet a yearning.
This culture is much more driven by media, video games, and shopping. So, you’re more likely to see people come together to watch a movie, play video games, or hang out at the mall.
Though this can become more complex. For example, if a person’s mind feels they need to be popular or successful to have these types of interactions, their mind will create wants for that first. So, if the mind believes they need to be fit, athletic, or pretty, their mind will create drives to become those things.
In fact, most of our drives for money, success, and fame are not so much for the money, success, or fame, but for the attention, affection, and approval we believe they will bring.
So what prevents a person from pursuing the want or drive?
5. Resistance
Anytime we have a want, it filters through resistance.
In other words, the part of your brain that creates wants and desires works separately from the part that actually allows you to go after that desire.
When a desire or option stands before you, it is evaluated by resistance to see whether you should pursue it.
So, before you can act on a desire, resistance will check to see if it’s safe or worth going after.
It will do that by filtering the desire through a host of criteria. It’ll ask, is pursuing this want safe, is it possible, worthwhile, or acceptable given what I believe about others and the situation?
It will also filter the drive through our beliefs about ourselves, whether we feel good enough, deserving, or how much we feel we matter.
6. Fear
If resistance predicts that pursuing the desire could lead to pain, rejection, or harm, it will prevent us from going after it by triggering fear.
The intensity of fear will depend on how much harm resistance senses. The fear can be mild, showing up only to caution you, or intense to prevent you from going after the desire altogether.
7. Hurt
If the fear prevents action, that will lead to feelings of hurt, like I wasn’t chosen, l won’t receive the connection I need, or I’ll be alone.
The hurt can also be communicating this isn’t fair, why do others get to have this but not me.
8. Anger
The hurt leads to anger. Remember in the previous post I said, where there is anger, there is hurt. So, if you’re hurt, it’ll trigger anger to do something about it.
9. Behavior
The anger triggers the thoughts in our heads, which leads to the behavior.
For some, the behavior can include lashing out, for others becoming passive-aggressiveness, still others shutting down, while for others it’s an impulse to prove themselves.
To summarize, the sequence goes like this:
1. Loneliness
↓
2. Yearning
↓
3. Beliefs
↓
4. Wants
↓
5. Resistance
↓
6. Fear
↓
7. Hurt
↓
8. Anger
↓
9. Behavior
Just as every species of plant follows a cycle in which it develops roots to absorb water and nutrients and grows branches and leaves to absorb sunlight, all humans follow this emotional sequence.
This cycle is a bit simplified to illustrate the sequence. As with any model, however, the reality is a bit more complex, as there can be a good amount of back and forth between each step.
Though what’s important to understand is, if you find yourself in an unhealthy thought, pattern, or behavior:
A. You’re likely angry.
B. If you’re angry, you’re hurt.
C. Underneath the hurt is fear.
D. Fear comes up because there is resistance.
E. Resistance doesn’t show up for any reason. It shows up when deciding whether you should pursue a want.
F. The want is an expression of a deeper yearning for either attention, affection, and approval, or to be seen, heard, known, and to matter.
G. That yearning is designed to keep us from feeling loneliness!
Within the context of this emotional cycle, loneliness doesn’t mean being alone. It’s simply the core feeling every human has.
The more loneliness a person has, the bigger their yearning to be seen and heard, and the stronger the want and desire it creates, creating a more intense response from resistance, meaning more intense the feelings of the fear, hurt, and anger, and ultimately, behavior.
Emotional Cycle Examples
To better understand how this emotional cycle works, it helps to see it play out with some examples.
Emotional Cycle Example #1
David works twelve-hour days. When he gets home, he’s exhausted, but he rarely stops. He answers emails during dinner, works on weekends, and is constantly thinking about the next goal.
One day, his boss doesn’t recognize his work, and David gets angry.
From the outside, it may look like David is overreacting, but if we follow the cycle backward, it’s clear to see there’s a rational reason.
David is angry because he’s hurt. When his work wasn’t recognized, he felt overlooked and undervalued.
Underneath the hurt is fear. David is afraid that if he fails or his work is not good, people won’t value him.
That fear comes from resistance. Growing up, David came to the conclusion that he’s not “good enough,” and that feeling is creating a need to produce high-quality work.
Underneath the resistance is a desire or want to be successful.
That want is produced by a deeper yearning for attention, affection, and approval. Somewhere along the way, he learned that being successful is the way to receive that.
Of course, that yearning is driven to avoid the pain of loneliness.
On the surface, it may seem like David is simply an ambitious person. A closer look, however, reveals his ambition is really a way to receive the attention, affection, and approval he’s inherently built to want and need.
This drives his behavior to work longer hours, take on more responsibility, set bigger goals, and always try to prove that he is enough.
And his boss’s comment isn’t a mere comment, it’s a threat to his ability to be enough and receive the attention, affection, and approval he craves.
Emotional Cycle Example #2
Sarah gets home from work and notices that her husband hasn’t asked about her day.
She says nothing, and for the rest of the evening, becomes increasingly cold and distant.
On the surface, it may seem like Sarah’s has a lot on her mind.
The reality is, Sarah is upset (Anger).
She’s upset because she’s not being noticed (Hurt).
Underneath the hurt is a worry about asking her husband for his time and attention (Fear).
The fear is coming up because growing up she learned that needing attention makes her needy, weak, or undesirable (Resistance).
The resistance is triggered because she wishes to ask for her husband’s time and attention (Want).
That want is being driven by deeper yearnings to be seen and heard.
At the root of that drive is to avoid the discomfort of solitude (Loneliness).
Sarah isn’t really wanting to punish her husband. She’s merely trying to figure out how to meet her yearning without coming off needy or weak.
Like I said, loneliness is the core of the human experience, so it never goes away. As a result, her need for attention, affection, and approval won’t ever go away either.
Even though her husband think he’s already given her attention and affection, he fails to realize it’s not something that is given once and fills a person’s cup forever. By the nature of being human, it needs to be filled constantly.
The stronger a person’s loneliness, the more need they have.
Emotional Cycle Example #3
Mark is addicted to video games. He spends most of his days online playing the latest shooter with people he’s never met or knows.
Mark assumes he simply has an addictive personality, but if we follow the cycle, it’s easy to see there’s something deeper happening.
Although Mark is driven towards games, underneath that drive is a yearning for connection, intimacy, and physical contact.
He feels lonely, but he doesn’t necessarily think of his experience as loneliness. He doesn’t even know what loneliness is as it’s never been talked about.
When he comes home from school, his parents aren’t around, but they were always happy to buy him the latest toy or game.
So, his brain learned to fill that time with toys and games.
When the yearning for connection comes up, it simply goes to video games as that’s all his brain knows.
For him, there’s no sequence of fear, hurt, nor anger, it’s simply a yearning for connection that is immediately expressed with online games.
In fact, he receives the connection and affection from talking to the people he plays games with online.
In fact, the better he gets at those games, the more attention and approval he receives from them.
As you can see, it’ll be nearly impossible for him to stop playing games as that’s the only way his brain knows to avoid the pain of loneliness.
So on the surface, it may seem like he has an addiction, when in reality, he’s just trying to fill a yearning.
These examples illustrate how this sequence plays out for different people.
Most of our addictions, compulsions, and so-called disorders are often the brain trying to move through this sequence in the safest, most healthy way for the person as possible.
I’ll go as far as to say, some of our most extreme behaviors and character traits fall into this pattern.
That means, most of your challenges and struggles can be resolved by resolving this sequence.
Prior to Covid, everyone thought I was crazy when I put loneliness at the core of the human experience. However, that event reminded us how core loneliness is to who we are and everything we do.
The reason it doesn’t get talked about is because most people don’t know how to access the loneliness, let alone release it … or even the other emotions and drives for that matter.
Fortunately, I’ve spent the last 26 years traveling to 103 countries understanding human behavior and I have developed a process to do just that, and do it quickly.
Instead of years and decades, it can be done in a few sessions.
If you have an addiction, a heartache, a heartbreak, an unresolved issue from the past, a block you can’t seem to push through, this process can help you release it.
Once released, you’ll forget it was even an issue at one point.
