Alarm Emotions

When your Five Elements are balanced, you are physically healthy and emotionally happy. So how do we know when we’ve become imbalanced? From a physical perspective, the answer is easy: we get sick; from an emotional perspective, we get triggered.

Everyone knows what it’s like to be triggered: something happens, and a huge emotion flares up. Sometimes you know exactly what set you off, but there are also times when you don’t even realize why you’re upset. All you know is, something isn’t right. We call these intense feelings Alarm Emotions because they let you know urgently that something is amiss in your otherwise normal life.

So we get a big Alarm Emotion and we stop and consider what the problem might be. As I mentioned, sometimes you know immediately what triggered you, but sometimes it’s not so obvious what’s wrong. Luckily, the type of Alarm Emotion that goes off gives us a clue where to look, since each Alarm Emotion corresponds to an element. Once we know where to look, then we can work on bringing ourselves back into balance.

For this reason, we don’t think of Alarm Emotions as bad. On the contrary, Alarm Emotions alert us to the fact that something is wrong so that we can attend to it. If we never realize there is a problem, we don’t have the chance to fix it.

Anger (Wood)

Wood is the element of power, growth, and expansion. When your knee-jerk reaction is anger, ask yourself, “What possible intrusion or obstacle is there that’s preventing me from reaching my goal?” You can’t move towards your goal in the same way as before the anger arose.

A good example of you knowing exactly what’s made you angry is road rage: some lunatic driver cuts you off and causes a near accident. You have to swerve or slam on your brakes to avoid a crash and creating an even greater delay to your goal of getting home safely. In this case, it’s good if you can let go of your anger quickly once you realize no amount of swearing in your car is going to prevent that particular driver from repeating his bad behavior. Remember, your goal is to get home safely, not to mete out justice to bad drivers.

Sometimes what causes anger is more subtle. An entire generation of people were told that if you got a college degree, you were sure to get a high paying job and your future would be secure. Students went off to college in the millions, graduated with mountains of student debt and few good job prospects. Forget about living comfortably, everyone’s just hoping to keep their heads above water.

What happened here? Someone – everyone!! – told us that college was the path to a secure future. Now we have the obstacles of student debt and limited job opportunities, and we’re angry. Rightfully so! But fixating on the obstacles isn’t going to help you achieve your goal; coming up with a new game plan for creating a secure future will. And while these obstacles are real and not to be ignored, think about what would be the most effective way to move past them, whether over, under, around, or through.

Sadness (Metal)

The next alarm emotion is sadness. What’s the purpose of being sad? Well, let’s take a look at when we get sad: when a loved one dies, or the business we’ve dedicated years of our life to shutters, or our best friend moves across the country, we are devastated. In other words, we get sad when we lose something that we had a strong defining connection to; these are things that we look at as an integral part of our lives, or even of ourselves. The stronger the connection, the greater the sadness.

Okay, how is this related to Metal, which is the element of order? Well, there are two distinctly different aspects of separation: the first creates order and justice, as in separating the right from the wrong, the wheat from the chaff, and so on; the second kind of separation is when something gets ripped apart that you want stay together, like a relationship with a loved one or losing a job that defines you.

In the first case we feel good; this type of separation creates order, justice and harmony. In the second, we become sad; your mother’s gone, and your daily phone calls with her are never coming back. It’s as if your Self gets ripped open.

Separations can be mixed, as well. If you break up with a bad boyfriend, on one hand, you feel great! You are no longer burdened by his unacceptable behavior. But some people are surprised to find that even a good separation makes them feel sad. The process of figuring out who we are without something we have separated from has to happen even if what was left behind was a burden — a bad relationship, an exploitative job, or a home you lived in for too long. 

Sadness makes us aware that something was detached from us that was part of our self, of how we define ourselves. As an alarm emotion, it sounds the alarm that we lost a piece of how we define ourselves. Of course there is more mild sadness, but still you can ask yourself, “What loss did I suffer? What did I have that is now gone?” Then you can think about how to rebuild and redefine yourself.

Worry (Earth)

Let’s explore worry next. Worry is the alarm emotion that sounds when something is amiss with the element of care (Earth). Care itself is a circle, a give and take between two people; we call this the Care Cycle. The Care Cycle has four conditions: do the right thing to fulfill a need, do it in the right amount, at the right time, and (most difficult) do not apply any force; you can’t expect a favor in return and consider that “caring” – that’s an exchange, a transaction. If all these conditions are fulfilled, you’ll receive gratitude in return and the care cycle is complete.

We worry when our needs are not fulfilled. Or, if we are helping fulfill somebody else’s needs, and we don't receive gratitude, we worry that we didn’t meet the care cycle conditions in the way we intended. Either we didn’t do the right thing, or do it in the right amount, or at the right time, or that we pressured the other person in a way that they felt obligated to us. All of these things cause us to worry.

Say you notice your daughter left her lunch bag in the kitchen before heading off to school. You worry because she might get hungry and won’t have anything to eat (her needs are not met). If your car starts making strange noises, you worry that you won’t have transportation (your needs are not met), or that the mechanic’s gonna charge you an arm and a leg and you don’t have the money to make the repair (you won’t have enough resources to meet other needs). In these cases, there is an obvious breakdown in the care cycle that results in worry.

So when you have a general feeling of worry and you’re not sure why, remember that worry is an alarm emotion; stop and ask yourself, “What needs that are important to me do I think will not be met?”

Fear (Water)

Water is the element of purpose, of existential understanding. Fear wells up in you when your life is threatened, or when your survival is threatened.

Pretty extreme, right? How often is our life actually threatened? Rattlesnakes, hurricanes, and wildfires notwithstanding, we live in a physical environment that is generally safe. More often, fear comes up as a triggered state from our childhood. When we’re young, there are often traumatic events that imprint onto our snake brain that trigger fear. Authoritarian parents are particularly good at this. When a parent withholds something that is essential to a child’s survival – even temporarily – that casts an imprint. Over time, the kid’s not sure which version of their parent they’re gonna get: the withholding parent or the nurturing one, the one who can sustain their life or the one who can literally end it. Naturally, authority figures will trigger a fear response for this child.

I talked to a friend about what I believed to be a universal trigger for fear: seeing the blue and red flashing lights of a police car in your rear view mirror. For some people, this is a literal life-or-death situation; for others like me – who should know full-well that they will not die if they’re given a ticket – it still feels like my stomach has dropped out of my body. This happens on sight, before the cop has pulled me over, before I’ve considered whether I’ve done anything wrong, before I’ve even ascertained whether it’s me he’s after! When I was talking with my friend, she replied, “I don’t feel fear. Maybe annoyed because I’m going to be late to where I’m going ....” Guess which one of us had the authoritarian parent (hint: it wasn’t her).

Fear is quite a crude, black-and-white alarm. “Could I die in this situation?” Sure, there’s an outside possibility, but to deal with fear we need to take a look at how likely it is that we will actually die. “How high is the probability that I will die if I don’t pass this exam, or if I drive again after an accident?” That gives the situation more nuance and more hope.

Pain (Fire)

But pain… Pain feels very bad and belongs to the element of Fire, which rules all feelings. Anger, sadness, worry, and fear are all alarms that something external has happened: anger screams at us that we are being derailed from reaching our objectives; worry is about the uncertain state of our care cycles; in sadness we lose someone or something we are closely connected to; and fear washes over us when our life is threatened.

Here, for the first time, the alarm is about our internal environment: pain tells us that something inside of us is broken. It’s not existential – you don’t think you’ll actually die – but in the moment you feel like you will never heal. Remember your worst break-up: the ache in your chest that your beloved, the one you charged with taking care of your heart, was the one to break it. We never want to love again once our heart is broken; we just want to collapse. That’s emotional pain.

Emotional pain also occurs when we are not seen or understood by those around us, another key feature of fire. Imagine feeling like you were born into a body whose sex organs did not match your mind. Everyone thinks you’re a different person than how you feel, and people reject your own account of what’s going on inside you. That’s the pain transgender people feel when others refuse to accept their truth. They try to be seen, to be understood, but some people refuse to recognize them for who they are on the inside.

Emotional pain is debilitating; you isolate yourself, retreat, contract, and can’t move. Paradoxically, what we need to do is the opposite: when we feel emotional pain, we should reach out to others so we’re not isolated and alone, and we can feel love again. 

Conclusion

In summary, alarm emotions may be triggering, but they serve an important purpose: alerting you to look around at what’s amiss in your life, and even giving you clues on where to look. The better you get at understanding what each alarm is telling you, the faster you’ll be able to come up with a plan and turn that alarm off!