A recovery-focused YouTube lesson by Amber Hollingsworth explaining that feelings are information—"indicator lights"—not directives. The video identifies six primary emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, surprise), describes each emotion's purpose (e.g., happiness tied to expectations; sadness signals loss; fear triggers fight/flight/freeze/fawn; disgust prompts withdrawal; anger clarifies violated boundaries; surprise sharpens attention), and urges viewers to allow and listen to feelings before engaging the thinking brain to make decisions. The speaker contrasts short-term pursuit of happiness with sustainable self-respect, notes risks of being stuck in or avoiding sadness, and assigns a reflective exercise to identify which emotions cause personal difficulty. A follow-up will examine childhood origins of some emotional responses.
Chapters
Today's recovery lesson is all about understanding and dealing with your feelings. Now, when you're in an actively addicted state, our feelings begin to run the show, and we start making way too many decisions based on our feelings. In fact, it's easy to fall into that trap. Even if you don't have an addiction, making decisions based on your feelings or isn't always wise unless you take the time to really sort of understand and analyze your feelings. Fairly simple framework. That's a good starting point for you to sort of sort through your feelings and use those feelings to help you make good decisions. You see, it's helpful to think about feelings like little indicator lights on the dashboard of your car. They're there to tell you important pieces of information about what's going on externally in the world and internally inside of your body. They're indicators, they're information pieces. But a lot of times we take those indicators or information pieces because they feel very strong and they create really strong urges, and we act out based on the feeling instead of reasoning through the situation. I like to say the indicator lights in your car tell you something's wrong, but it doesn't tell you what to do about it. And so you've got to let the feelings be the indicator lights and then make some rational decisions about what to do in any given situation. But there's really not good feelings and bad feelings. They're just feelings. They're just information. Kind of like there's not good indicator lights on your car and bad indicator lights. Right? It's just a message to you. So there are six basic human feelings. And then of course, there's little subsets of those and combinations of those kind of like if you think about the primary colors and how you can mix them together and come up with other colors. So if you think about the primary colors, we're going to talk about the primary emotions. The primary emotions are happiness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise, and sadness. Let's start with happiness, because it's a tricky little devil. Our happiness is very strongly and highly coordinated to expectations. When things are going the way we expect them to go, we tend to be happy. And a lot of our expectations are actually molded by the culture that we live in. So when things are going as expected, according to the culture that we live in or that we. That we regard, then we tend to feel happy because we think things are on track. Happiness is obviously a good one, right? We. We tend to want to feel happy, but we can get caught up in happiness a little bit too much, right? Like, have you ever heard someone say, just do whatever makes you happy, I'm happy for you. If you're happy, you know, are you happy in that relationship? Maybe you should stay in it. The problem with that is if you're constant, constantly, always pursuing what makes you happy, that's a surefire way to get really, really unhappy. Because when you're constantly pursuing being happy, you're automatically setting up an unrealistic expectation because it's really just not possible to be happy all the time. Because there are other indicator lights that are going to come on in your life. And so the idea of always being happy is a myth. Or do whatever makes you happy. I want you to think really strongly about that before you make a decision. It, well, I want to pick this career because it makes me happy, or this person because it makes me happy. Because the thing of it is, what makes you happy today may not make you happy tomorrow. The most consistent thing that can make you happy is being proud of yourself is being the kind of person that you like and that you respect. So if you really want to be happy, you have to have the hard work and the self discipline to become the kind of person that you like. That's the most sustainable form of happiness. The next emotion that I want to talk about is sadness. Now we experience sadness when we feel any sort of loss, grief, disappointment. It can make us feel disinterested in the things around us. It really makes us want to sort of withdraw and pull back from everything and isolate. And it does serve an important purpose. It's kind of like, okay, you've lost something here, something that was important to you, and it's okay to feel sad about it. You know, you have to sort of back up from a situation to process it, to give yourself the space to get on the other side of it. Now if you find yourself constantly in a state of sadness, it could mean that your indicator that your sadness gauge is like stuck in that position, right? And that could mean that something's wrong. Being sad in and of itself doesn't mean that something's wrong, Right? It means that you're sad, that you've experienced some sort of loss that's difficult for you. Being stuck in sadness may mean there's something wrong with the actual light. Like for example, in my husband's truck, his check engine light stays on and it came on about a year ago or something because his gas cap, something with that messed up. And so he ordered another gas cap and he had it fixed. And he's literally like, had it fixed. Like three times. But the check engine light comes on. So we kind of know, we say we just got to the point where we ignore it because we know that it's not giving us accurate information. So if you're, if your indicator light gets stuck somewhere, that may mean that there's something bigger going on that needs to be addressed. But just regular life sadness is supposed to be there. It serves an important purpose. Now the other way that you can run into trouble with sadness is maybe you grew up in a family where it wasn't okay to be sad and you always had to be positive and you weren't allowed to withdraw or think negatively because it freaked out the people around you. So you may have almost like an aversion to sadness, right? So there's sort of you can get stuck in it or you can have the opposite where you won't allow yourself to acknowledge it or experience it. And either one of those states can be pretty problematic. And then there's fear. Now fear is there because it's supposed to trigger us into some kind of like, okay, danger. Protect yourself, right? Most of you have heard of the fight flight freeze response. There's actually another one added to that recently and it is called fawn. And what that means is especially if you've had trauma in your past, sometimes when you get really scared, you may have an automatic response to try to win people support and pull them in. And so you may fawn over them. And really it's like a biological deep down drive to protect yourself is to pull other people close to you. It's almost like if you think of it as like if you see those, like if you see like a kidnapper maybe or something, right? And the person decides the best way to deal with this is to sort of like befriend the kidnapper, right? It's like a survival instinct like that. So you've got the fight, flight, freeze or fawn. Now we all can do all of those things, but most of us kind of have like a primary go to that. We tend to always do and we get in a fearful state. But you've got to remember it's just an alarm system, right? And the first thing you got to do is try to think through what is the situation. Is this a realistic threat? Did the alarm get tripped accidentally? Is the alarm being tripped from something way back in my childhood, which we'll talk about in our next version about identifying those childhood wounds and that sort of thing. Because it all ties together now, disgust is there to make us quickly back up and get away from something. And the easiest way to think about disgust is like when you see some kind of disgusting food or you smell something disgusting. I mean, immediately your face pulls back, your body pulls back, your stomach pulls back. I mean, it's a very physical type reaction. But you can also be disgusted morally with someone. Like I can't like feeling disgusted. When you hear what someone has done, again, it is there to tell you to back up and take some space. Now, anger is a very important, pretty productive feeling actually, because it tells you someone has crossed your boundaries in a way. And the way you should interpret anger is it will really help you clarify what your needs and wants are. So this is one of those things where I say, like, it's an indicator light. It tells you there's a problem, but it doesn't tell you what to do about it. Right? So anger is an important feeling to tell you that there's something happening that you need to pay attention to. Just because you feel angry does not mean you can act out angrily towards other people. And the last emotion that we're going to talk about in this lesson is surprise. And you can be surprised in a good way and you can be surprised in a sort of not good way, like a not good surprise. Right. But what surprise does is it produces a lot of adrenaline in our brain, which is the pay attention to chemical. So the surprise emotion is about getting us to focus and pay attention to something that's happening in our environment because it's unexpected. It's the reason why people are so wired up to listen to stories. You know, we, we like surprise, we like adrenaline, we like twist in our movies, right? We like it to hear the curveball because it keeps us paying attention because we didn't expect something to happen. Now that we've sort of identified those six primary emotions, I'd like for you to think about. Is there one of those emotions that tends to cause you more trouble than the other? Is there one that dominates or maybe takes up too much space in your life? I want you to think about that going into the sort of homework or the exercise assignment that goes along with this lesson as far as identifying your feelings and learning which of the gauges on your dashboard are actually pretty on target and they work. Right. In the next section we'll take a look at why that can happen. And so we're going to go deeper into like childhood experiences and stuff. So I'll leave you with this thought. You've heard the saying before, just feel your feelings, right? Which I think is totally cheesy. Something a counselor would say, isn't it? But what I would tell you instead of feel your feelings, is allow your feelings to occur, listen to your feelings, and then bounce into your thinking brain and make some decisions about what that feeling is telling you and how you want to respond to whatever's going on.
