primary feelings possible that can arise from our unconscious entity are all unwanted feelings, they are “not okay” feelings about ourselves, or something closely identified with us. Whatever we might feel is unacceptable about ourselves, we might secondarily feel has to be somehow made acceptable. These experienced secondary feelings that something about us needs to be made “acceptable,” could be arising from both our reality as well as from our unconscious.
Our secondary feelings often do indicate what we have to do to correct the focus of our primary feelings. For instance, the college woman who feels “fat,” when she actually isn’t, and has the secondary feeling, “I feel I have to eat less,” eating less, or avoiding food, is her corrective action for her primary feeling of, “I feel I’m fat.” If I feel sinful, even though you may feel I have no reason to feel that way, I may, as a secondary feeling, tell you, “I feel I have to atone for my sins.” If I feel poor, my secondary feeling might be, “I feel I need to have two jobs.” If I feel “unlucky” when I’m sitting in prison, I might secondarily feel I have to get more adept at not getting apprehended when I get out. If I feel there is something terribly “wrong” with my health, which could be arising from a primary feeling of having something physically “wrong” with me, and you, as a medical doctor, tell me, after carefully examining me, that there’s “nothing wrong,” I might feel, as a secondary feeling, that I need to see another doctor for more testing. With more of my unconscious entity focused this way, I won’t just “feel” I need to see another doctor, I’ll “know” I will. If I just felt there was something “wrong” with my health before, I’ll now “know” there is, regardless of any doctor telling me otherwise. The more we have of our unconscious entity focused on us, or something closely associated with us in our reality, the more we’ll feel an urgency to have it corrected, and the more we’ll worry about it. If I feel there is something wrong with my health, I might urgently go to one doctor after another, until I find one that will treat me for what I “know” is something wrong, and who won’t be telling me my worries about my health are “all in my head.” I’ll still feel there is something physically wrong with me, and no one will be able to convince me otherwise, until I can decrease my unconscious entity, or unconsciously shift it to some other focus about me, with some other primary and secondary feeling.
That same level of increased unconscious entity that was finding a focus on my health that made me hypochondriacal, could have been focused instead on my new car that I might have just purchased that I might feel “isn’t running right” and that there is something “wrong” with it. With more unconscious entity focused on my car, I might not just “feel” there is something wrong with it, I’ll “know” it’s not running right. I might be taking it back and forth to the dealer multiple times, complaining of something being “wrong” and when the dealer tells me “there’s nothing wrong with the car,” I might, with more worry from still more unconscious entity, urgently take it to another dealer who hopefully won’t tell me my feeling, or belief, “there’s something wrong with my car” is “all in my head” and that there’s nothing wrong with it, when I “know” there is. I’ll continue to feel this way about my new car, until my unconscious entity decreases, or it finds a focus on something else associated with me, which would then produce some other emotional problem. My basic problem is an uncomfortably increased unconscious entity, and an uncomfortable level of an unmet basic emotional need. My feeling of urgency and worry, from an increased level of both my unconscious entity and my unmet basic emotional need, is the exact opposite from the feeling of complacency produced by meeting well my basic emotional need, which is a reassuring worry-free “everything is okay with me so that there is nothing to worry about, and no urgency to do anything” feeling.
Because we all have some amount of this unconscious entity beyond our infancy, which was a time where we didn’t repress our anger but angrily cried over every frustration of our basic emotional need, it is most likely that whatever we feel is so dissatisfying about us, will have an unrecognized component additionally arising from our unconscious entity. It is unlikely that we would ever have an intensely unwanted feeling that arises solely from our reality. In contrast, we can easily have intensely unwanted feelings that do arise solely from our unconscious, and not at all from our reality, like that woman who was a widely acclaimed violin player feeling her on-stage performances were never “good enough” when they really were more than “good enough,” or like hypochondriacs feeling they have something physically wrong with them when their reality is that they don’t. These hypochondriacs contrast with people who do have something physically wrong with them, such as an undetected cancer, but who don’t feel there is anything wrong with their health because their unconscious entity is finding some other focus. Or they don’t because they have a well met basic emotional need giving them that comforting feeling that everything is okay, and most importantly, will be okay. They feel satisfied with their health just the way it is, and feel there’s no reason to worry and no reason for any urgency – when there actually is. This is analogous to the person who does have a defective car with, for instance, a potential for a fatal unintended acceleration, but with a better met basic emotional need, doesn’t feel there is any problem with his car, when there actually is.
All the unwanted feelings that could come from our unconscious entity, can become more intensified as that underlying unconscious entity increases in amount. If I feel unlucky from my unconscious entity, with more unconscious entity focused in this feeling, I’ll feel more unlucky. I might feel so unlucky that I’ll be afraid of taking an airplane flight, or use an elevator, or drive across a high bridge, or through a tunnel, or, if a front-line soldier, I’ll be afraid to engage in any combat. Our unconscious entity will increase in size as the repression of anger increases from both recognizable and unrecognizable frustrations of our basic emotional need, and we store the resulting unconscious entity, instead of turning it back into subtly expressed anger in our talking with friends soon after it is formed. It’s the increase in storing anger that really increases the unconscious entity we have, and not necessarily the amount of frustrations of the basic emotional need that we encounter. We could have more frustrations of our basic emotional need, but if we weren’t excessively storing the resulting anger as unconscious entity, but was soon turning it back into subtly expressed anger in our daily extended talking with others, we wouldn’t increase the amount of our unconscious entity that we are carrying in our unconscious at the end of the day. That’s how those combat soldiers in the last chapter avoided becoming psychiatric casualties. They were getting rid of their unconscious entity by turning it into very recognizable battlefield anger, and by the talking they did with their buddies when they had a chance, so that they weren’t accumulating unconscious entity so that it didn’t reach levels where it could produce emotional problems. In contrast, a person could have much less frustrations of his, or her basic emotional need, but with not getting rid of it fast enough, that person could accumulate a high level of unconscious entity. The person might attain a higher level of unconscious entity than someone else who is exposed to combat conditions, but who has adequate means by which to lower it.
If something angered us, that something would be a frustration of our basic emotional need. If we immediately expressed only the anger that was engendered from that perceived frustration, it would cancel out any brief increase in our unmet basic emotional need that was caused by the frustration. Our immediately expressing the anger would decrease our unmet basic emotional need by the same amount that the perceived frustration increased what was unmet of that need. The anger we express, in regard to this frustration, is “retaliatory anger” that can be just enough of a pleasurable act to cover what the frustration caused in the way of an addition to our unmet basic emotional need. The pleasurable retaliatory anger would have met our basic emotional need just enough to cover what the frustration caused to be not pleasurable. The net result would be a zero change in what’s unmet of our basic emotional need, or how much unconscious entity we have. We would have “evened the score” with our expressed anger. There’d be no gain or loss of anything. If we felt good before we perceived that frustrating something, we’d feel no different after we expressed our anger from that frustration. Anger, expressed to the enemy on the battlefield, may be anger arising not only from the reality of the battle, but also from anger from having some of one’s stored unconscious
