Learn · Chapter 6 of 15
Emotion, stress and trauma
Behind most difficult behaviour is a feeling the person has not named: often shame, envy, contempt or resentment. This chapter shows how to read which feeling is driving someone, how they manage it, and when a reaction belongs to an old harm.
Most trouble between people runs on four feelings that are rarely named: shame, envy, contempt and resentment. Anger is usually the visible layer. Underneath it, look for hurt, fear or shame.
How to identify it
- Separate the self-conscious emotions by what they make people do. These are feelings about how the self looks, to others or to oneself. Guilt says "I did a bad thing" and moves people to repair. Shame says "I am bad" and moves them to hide, freeze or attack. Humiliation says "you made me small" and moves them to retaliate. The visible behaviour tells you which one you are facing.
- Envy and jealousy differ. Envy involves two people: you have what I want. Jealousy involves three: someone might take what I have. Envy rarely shows itself directly. It comes out as faint praise, nit-picking of the envied person, or sudden moral concern about how they got there.
- Watch how they regulate. Regulation is what people do to manage a feeling once it starts. People who reappraise change the story and settle. People who suppress keep a still face over a running feeling. Studies find that talking to a suppressor raises the listener's own stress. The flat, controlled person may be carrying more than the openly upset one.
- Recognise a trauma response. A trauma response is a reaction shaped by past harm and set off by something in the present that resembles it. It is out of proportion to the present, starts suddenly on a cue, and comes with a visible shift in state: eyes, voice, posture. Afterwards the person often recovers and is embarrassed. A trait shows up evenly. A trauma response switches on.
- Watch the window of tolerance in conflict. This is the band of arousal in which a person can feel and still think. Above it, people can't listen (flooding). Below it, they go blank (shutdown). Neither state can be reasoned with. Pause, wait 20 minutes, then continue.
- Ask what the compulsion is solving. Gabor Maté is a Canadian physician who writes on addiction and trauma. Maté's question is not why the addiction, but why the pain. Drinking, overwork, porn, shopping or status-chasing usually follow a particular feeling. Find the feeling and you have found the pattern. His wider claims about illness and ADHD go beyond the evidence.
Several popular terms in this area are useful shorthand but weak science: amygdala hijack (an emotional reaction that outruns thought), much of polyvagal theory (a model of three nervous-system states), and the fawn response (placating a threat to stay safe) as a formal category. The table below lists the main terms. Its Evidence column shows how well each one holds up, so you can tell the solid ones from the shorthand.
| Term | What it is | Often confused with | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic emotions | The claim that a small set of emotions (usually anger, fear, disgust, sadness, happiness, surprise, sometimes contempt) are evolved, universal programs, each with a recognisable face, physiology and action tendency. | Constructed emotion; Emotional contagion | Mixed |
| Constructed emotion | Emotions are not triggered programs but are built in the moment: the brain combines raw bodily feeling (pleasant or unpleasant, calm or activated) with learned concepts and context to produce 'anger' or 'anxiety'. | Basic emotions; Cognitive reappraisal | Mixed |
| Shame | A painful sense that the self is defective, exposed and unworthy in the eyes of others, rather than that one did a bad thing. | Guilt; Humiliation; Harsh superego | Moderate |
| Guilt | Discomfort about a specific act or omission that harmed someone or broke one's own standard, with the self still basically intact. | Shame; Moral injury; People-pleasing | Moderate |
| Humiliation | Being publicly lowered or degraded by someone else, in a way the person regards as unjust. | Shame; Narcissistic rage; Resentment | Moderate |
| Envy | A two-person pain at another's advantage (status, talent, money, love) that one wants and lacks, with a wish either to have it or for them to lose it. | Jealousy; Resentment; Social comparison | Moderate |
| Jealousy | Fear and anger about losing a valued relationship, or one's place in it, to a rival. | Envy; Anxious-preoccupied attachment; Coercive control | Moderate |
| Contempt | A cold sense that another person is beneath you, of lower worth or competence, and not worth engaging as an equal. | Resentment; Secondary anger; Devaluation | Moderate |
| Resentment | Lingering, re-chewed anger at a perceived injustice or slight, usually unexpressed to the person responsible. | Contempt; Envy; Passive aggression | Moderate |
| Anger as a secondary emotion | Anger that sits on top of a more vulnerable primary feeling, usually hurt, fear or shame, and covers it. | Narcissistic rage; Displacement; Emotional flooding | Clinical |
| Fear versus anxiety | Fear is a short, sharp response to a present and specific danger; anxiety is a longer, diffuse apprehension about a possible future threat. | Generalised anxiety; Hypervigilance; Panic | Moderate |
| Grief (complicated, disenfranchised, anticipatory) | The response to loss. Complicated grief is intense yearning and impairment that does not ease over many months; disenfranchised grief is loss others do not recognise (an ex, a pet, a job); anticipatory grief begins before an expected loss. | Major depression; Trauma; Change curve | Moderate |
| Ambivalence | Holding strong opposing feelings or wants toward the same person, choice or thing at once, such as love and anger toward a parent. | Splitting; Passive aggression; Procrastination | Moderate |
| Emotion regulation | How people influence which emotions they have, when, how strongly, and how they show them: choosing situations, shifting attention, reframing, or controlling expression. | Expressive suppression; Emotional dysregulation; Isolation of affect | Strong |
| Cognitive reappraisal | Changing how one interprets a situation so that its emotional impact changes, early in the emotional response. | Expressive suppression; Rationalisation; Spiritual bypassing | Strong |
| Expressive suppression | Inhibiting the outward display of an emotion already under way, without changing the feeling itself. | Suppression; Isolation of affect; Emotional numbing | Moderate |
| Co-regulation | Two or more people influencing each other's emotional and physiological state, typically one calmer person helping steady another. | Emotional contagion; Codependency; Containment | Moderate |
| Alexithymia | A stable difficulty identifying and describing one's own feelings and telling them apart from bodily sensations, with an externally focused, concrete thinking style. | Isolation of affect; Emotional numbing; Autism in adults | Strong |
| Experiential avoidance | Unwillingness to stay in contact with unpleasant inner experiences and efforts to escape or control them, even at the cost of what the person values. | Suppression; Denial; Procrastination | Moderate |
| Emotional flooding | High physiological arousal during conflict in which a person can no longer listen, think flexibly or take in what is said. | Stonewalling; Amygdala hijack; Panic | Moderate |
| Window of tolerance | The range of arousal within which a person can feel emotions and still think, relate and act; above it is hyperarousal, below it hypoarousal. | Hyperarousal and hypoarousal; Emotion regulation; Polyvagal theory | Clinical |
| Hyperarousal and hypoarousal | Hyperarousal is too much activation: tense, alert, irritable, unable to settle. Hypoarousal is too little: flat, foggy, slowed, disconnected. | Major depression; Hypomanic character; Dissociation | Moderate |
| Amygdala hijack | Goleman's term for a sudden, outsized emotional reaction in which threat responses outrun considered thought. | Emotional flooding; Secondary anger; Triggers | Weak |
| Emotional contagion | Catching other people's emotions, often by automatically mimicking their faces, voices and postures. | Co-regulation; Projective identification; Attunement | Moderate |
| Stress response and allostatic load | The stress response mobilises the body (cortisol, adrenaline, heart rate) to meet demands; allostatic load is the cumulative wear when it fires too often, lasts too long or fails to switch off. | Burnout; Generalised anxiety; Hyperarousal and hypoarousal | Moderate |
| Fight, flight, freeze | Automatic defensive responses to threat: attack, escape, or go still and watchful, with collapse at the extreme. | Fawn response; Dissociation; Stonewalling | Moderate |
| Fawn response | A trauma-shaped habit of reacting to threat by placating, agreeing and attending to the other person's needs to keep them from turning hostile. | People-pleasing; Agreeableness; Identification with the aggressor | Clinical |
| Polyvagal theory | A theory that the autonomic nervous system has three hierarchical states (social engagement, mobilisation, shutdown) and that people automatically scan for safety and threat ('neuroception'). | Window of tolerance; Fight, flight, freeze; Co-regulation | Mixed |
| Trauma (big T and small t) | A response to events that overwhelm a person's capacity to cope. 'Big T' is exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violence; 'small t' covers repeated, less extreme harm such as humiliation, neglect or chronic criticism. | PTSD; ACEs; Grief | Moderate |
| Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) | After a traumatic event: intrusive re-experiencing, avoidance of reminders, negative changes in mood and beliefs, and heightened arousal, lasting over a month and impairing life. | Complex PTSD; Generalised anxiety; Major depression | Strong |
| Complex PTSD | After prolonged or repeated trauma that was hard to escape: PTSD symptoms plus lasting difficulties with emotion regulation, a sense of self as worthless, and trouble sustaining relationships. Recognised in ICD-11, the World Health Organization's diagnostic manual, but not in DSM-5-TR, the American one. | PTSD; Borderline personality; Trauma | Moderate |
| Triggers | A cue (sight, sound, smell, phrase, tone, situation) linked to past harm that sets off a reaction belonging to the original event rather than the present. | Secondary anger; Rejection sensitivity; Amygdala hijack | Moderate |
| Hypervigilance | Sustained scanning of the environment and people for danger, with heightened startle and difficulty relaxing. | Conscientiousness; Paranoid personality; Fear versus anxiety | Moderate |
| Dissociation | A disruption of the normal integration of awareness, memory, identity, emotion and perception. Depersonalisation: detached from oneself, as if watching from outside. Derealisation: the world seems unreal, dreamlike or flat. | Schizoid fantasy; Emotional numbing; Isolation of affect | Moderate |
| Trauma bonding | A strong emotional attachment to someone who harms you, formed through a power imbalance and alternating cruelty and kindness. | Limerence; Codependency; Intermittent reinforcement | Clinical |
| Learned helplessness | Giving up trying to change a situation after repeated experience that one's actions make no difference, even when change later becomes possible. | Disengagement; Major depression; Locus of control | Moderate |
| Moral injury | Lasting harm from doing, failing to prevent, or witnessing acts that violate one's deep moral beliefs, or from being betrayed by those in authority. | PTSD; Guilt; Burnout | Moderate |
| Post-traumatic growth | Positive change reported after struggling with highly challenging events: closer relationships, new possibilities, greater strength, deeper appreciation, spiritual change. | Resilience; Spiritual bypassing; Reaction formation | Mixed |
| Emotional numbing | A reduced capacity to feel emotions, especially positive ones such as love and joy, often after trauma, chronic stress or depression. | Isolation of affect; Dissociation; Anhedonia | Moderate |
| Interoception | The sense of the body's internal state (heartbeat, breathing, hunger, tension, temperature) and how accurately a person perceives it. | Alexithymia; Health anxiety; Affect labelling | Moderate |
| Affect labelling | Putting a feeling into words ('I feel anxious'), which reduces its intensity even without trying to change it. | Cognitive reappraisal; Intellectualisation; Rumination | Moderate |
| Resilience | Maintaining or returning to healthy functioning after adversity; more an outcome built from relationships, resources and skills than a fixed trait. | Expressive suppression; Post-traumatic growth; Grit | Moderate |
| Authenticity versus attachment (Maté) | Maté's claim that when a child must choose between authenticity (feeling and showing what they actually feel) and attachment (staying close to the people they depend on), they will choose attachment every time. The suppressed authenticity resurfaces in adulthood as an inability to say no, compulsive niceness, buried anger and, in his account, illness. | Fawn response; People-pleasing; Expressive suppression | Clinical |
| Addiction as an attempted solution to pain (Maté) | Maté's reframe: ask not why the addiction but why the pain. Any behaviour a person craves, gets short-term relief from and can't give up despite harm (drink, drugs, work, sex, shopping, gaming, status) is an attempt to solve an emotional problem they can't otherwise solve. | Substance addiction; Experiential avoidance; Behavioural addiction | Clinical |
Next: Cognition: schemas, distortions, biases and mentalising