Introduction

Therapists working with couples are often trying to alter interactional cycles that include three interdependent domains within each partner: affect, cognition, and behavior (Davis et al. 2012). When change is effective, shifts occur for each partner in all three domains, even if a therapist is not intentionally targeting all three. However, therapeutic modalities vary in the articulated mechanism of change. Therapists can think of this as what door they choose to go into as a clinician–open the cognitive door, the behavioral door, or the emotion door? In a review of the couple treatments with the most robust outcome research, emotionally focused therapy (EFT) is the only broad couple approach to use emotion as a change element (Lebow et al. 2012). In EFT, emotion is conceptualized as influencing perceptions and priming actions (Johnson 2004). When clients explore and own their emotional experiences, they can integrate feelings, thoughts, and behaviors and change their interactional patterns (Johnson 2004; Schwartz and Johnson 2000).

Further, EFT distinguishes between primary and secondary emotions. Primary emotions are more direct responses that are less conscious and consist of vulnerable feelings typically related to attachment needs and fears (Johnson 2004). In contrast, secondary emotions are more indirect reactions that arise in the moment as a way to cope with more vulnerable, primary responses, such as becoming angry and defensive in response to feeling ashamed.

Theoretical Context for Concept

EFT recognizes that there can be common individual differences in the experience of secondary emotions. EFT is rooted in attachment theory and research, and in adulthood, individual differences in attachment styles are conceptualized as two continua: anxiety and avoidance (Mikulincer and Shaver 2016). Individuals who are higher on anxiety tend to hyperactivate and thus sustain and heighten their own experience and expression of emotion in a way that might intensify conflict (Johnson et al. 2005; Mikulincer and Shaver 2016). Individuals who are higher on avoidance tend to deactivate, suppress, and minimize their expression of emotions, often to the point that they appear passively hostile (Johnson 2004) or as if they “don’t care” about their partner’s thoughts and feelings. Individuals who are lower on both continua (those labeled “secure”) are able to experience, express, and respond to emotion in more healthy ways (Johnson et al. 2005; Mikulincer and Shaver 2016). In less common instances, an individual may be higher on both anxiety and avoidance (labeled “fearful avoidant”), and vacillate between intense expressions of emotion and withdrawal that create challenges for the couple dynamic (Johnson et al. 2005).

EFT conceptualizes those who are higher on anxiety and lower on avoidance as more likely to be “pursuers” and those individuals who are higher on avoidance and lower on anxiety as “withdrawers” (Johnson et al. 2005). In terms of secondary emotions, pursuers tend to emphasize anger and hurt feelings in hopes of capturing the attention of an attachment figure, and they may readily tell the therapist and their partner that they feel angry, frustrated, hurt, unimportant, or alone (Mikulincer and Shaver 2016). Withdrawers, on the other hand, have often coped from an early age by minimizing their own emotional experience as well as any sense of dependence or need for attachment figures (Mikulincer and Shaver 2016). Thus, withdrawers sometimes initially lack the emotional awareness and vocabulary to describe their feelings. The withdrawer’s experience of anger is typically more suppressed or “dissociated” (Mikulincer 1998). When a therapist asks a more withdrawn individual to describe how they feel when their partner does something upsetting, they may respond with a shrug, and an “I don’t know … not good, I guess” or “I don’t know … nothing, really.” EFT therapists learn that this type of response is not the absence of an emotional experience but an indication of different kinds of secondary emotions, such as numbing, or feeling overwhelmed, or inadequate. Thus, when a more withdrawn client says they feel “nothing,” it is not nothing; it is something, and more withdrawn individuals may need to accept and express anger before unpacking more vulnerable emotion. As therapists work in Stage 1 to help couples access and articulate secondary emotions, they use their knowledge of attachment styles, and whether partners are pursuers or withdrawers to guide the emotional explorations. For example, EFT therapists are trained to engage withdrawn partners before helping to soften more critical pursuers and are aware that more withdrawn partners often have secondary emotional responses involving defensiveness, shutting down, or dissociating. This knowledge of individual differences in attachment styles can then inform the therapists’ affective attunement to each partner’s emotional experience.

Description

Secondary emotions are more indirect responses to more vulnerable, unconscious primary emotions. The two most common secondary responses discussed in EFT are anger and emotional shut down (Johnson 2008). For example, in an argument, individuals may be displaying anger or defensiveness (secondary emotions) that are the result of more basic fears of being not valued, invisible, or unlovable (primary emotions).

In EFT, the concepts of primary and secondary emotions are defined differently than in the literature on the emergence of emotion in infancy and toddlerhood. In early emotional development, primary emotions refer to the basic emotions that emerge during infancy (e.g., joy, surprise, sadness, anger/frustration, fear, and disgust), and secondary, or sociomoral emotions, are those that emerge with a growing sense of self during the toddler years (e.g., guilt, shame, pride, and embarrassment; Lewis 2008). Instead, EFT essentially conceptualizes emotions in terms of levels of vulnerability, with secondary emotion as less vulnerable and primary emotion as more vulnerable. Thus, anger is a secondary emotion; sadness, fear, and shame are primary emotions (Johnson et al. 2005).

Application of Concept in Couple and Family Therapy

In stage 1 (of three stages) of EFT, therapists help couples understand their problem cycle in terms of each partner’s cognition, behavior, and affect. For example, couples can be helped to articulate how they respond in conflict: “When you say/do, I respond/react by doing … thinking … feeling …” (Johnson 2008; Johnson et al. 2005). It is not enough, of course, for the therapist alone to be aware of the cycle of interaction. The goal is for the couple to begin slowing down and “standing above” their cycle (Lebow et al. 2012). Rather than just having “conflict as usual,” the couple will view their conflict from a meta-perspective and begin to be reflective: “I noticed I did what I usually do when you get frustrated with me—I first got defensive and attacked back, and then I shut down.”

As couples are learning to take a meta-stance on their conflict, therapists help them to gain awareness of how they think, behave, and feel. Early on in Stage 1, EFT therapists are focusing on secondary, rather than primary emotions. According to Johnson (2004), working with secondary emotion involves three basic steps:

Step 1: Help clients make explicit their implicit secondary emotions. Instead of simply acting angry, partners are able to say, “I get angry when …”

Step 2: Situate these, now-explicit, secondary emotions in the context of the conflict cycle: “So, when your wife does not acknowledge how hard you’ve been working, you get angry, and then you think to yourself, ‘Nothing I do is ever good enough for her.’”

Step 3: Continue the emotion-unpacking process, moving in the direction of primary, attachment-related fears. For example, underneath anger, there might be sadness.

EFT training workshops have often conceptualized secondary emotions as “above the line” – with primary emotions and unmet attachment needs being “below the line” and focused on later in the process, after an awareness has been established of the couple’s pattern of actions, perceptions, and secondary emotions (Woolley n.d.).

Therapeutic Skills for Exploring Secondary Emotions

The EFT therapist uses five basic skills when exploring and reformulating emotion: reflection, validation, evocative responding, heightening, and empathic conjecture (Johnson 2004). Reflection involves the therapist attuning to and labeling the current emotional experience. When using validation, therapists operate from a genuinely nonjudgmental stance to explicitly affirm and accept each partner’s (often disparate) emotional experience in the relationship. With evocative responding, the therapist is trying to evoke, or pull on, a client’s emerging emotional experience in order to deepen and clarify the emotions underlying the couple’s interaction. A therapist using heightening intentionally uses language and voice tone to spotlight and intensify a specific emotion, with the goal of helping clients deepen and crystallize a particular emotional experience. Empathic conjecture involves the therapist making inferences (educated guesses) about a partner’s emotion, guided by attachment theory and an empathic immersion in the client’s position (Johnson 2004). Although all five skills can be used with both secondary and primary emotions, the overall goal is to slowly help clients move from secondary emotions to more primary ones. The examples given below are more reflective of the use of these skills with initial, secondary emotions:

Reflection: “So you feel numb when you see her anger—it is too much to handle.”

Validation: “It makes sense that you would become frustrated when you feel like your voice is not heard.”

Evocative responding: “What is happening for you right now as you tighten your lips and look down? … As you hear him say that?”

Heightening: “When she gets angry, you sort of go away. Her frustration with you is just too much, and it is so hard to see her disappointment in you, so hard to not be able to please her.”

Empathic conjecture: “As I listen to you talk about how angry you are, I also see the tears in your eyes and I wonder if you are hurt, too. Does that fit?”

Clinical Example

Isaac and Maria were a heterosexual couple who attended a 4-week relationship education workshop based on EFT. In the thick of raising young children, they were short on time and energy and high on sleep deprivation. Each was working full-time, with the older child in elementary school and the youngest in day care. Both Isaac and Maria were building careers in mentally demanding jobs and were satisfied with their jobs, yet sometimes overwhelmed and preoccupied by work tasks. They had constructed a fairly egalitarian division of labor but were often negotiating whose “turn” it was regarding various household and child care tasks, and the couple indicated that this had become a source of tension and arguments.

Through discussing attachment styles and completing a questionnaire, Maria identified herself as low on avoidance and higher on attachment-related anxiety. In her family-of-origin, she had had intermittent success being heard by her parents if she expressed her feelings more strongly and dramatically. Thus, when she was upset by something with Isaac, she was likely to express those feelings – she indicated that she wore her heart on her sleeve – and had trouble hiding her feelings from those she was close to. As Isaac laughingly shared: “Maria is mad for about 12 seconds, and then she says … I can’t hold this inside anymore.” Not surprisingly, when discussing their conflict in the large group, Maria took lead in talking about what happened, as well as her thoughts and feelings about the issue. In contrast to Maria, Isaac came to understand himself as more avoidant in his attachment style. Both of his parents minimized emotional expressions, and the conflict between his parents, who eventually divorced, was very quiet. Isaac never “made a fuss” and instead, filled his life with sports activities outside the home. The couple identified Maria as the pursuer and Isaac as the withdrawer in the relationship.

EFT conceptualizes emotion as a series of layers, from secondary emotions that are initially displayed to more underlying, primitive, and vulnerable feelings. Table 1 gives an example of the deepening layers of emotion of Maria and Isaac, starting at secondary and moving to the most primary. As Maria and Isaac explored their conflict around divisions of labor, Maria was clearly able to state her initial secondary emotion of irritation and notice her critical stance. As is typical for more avoidant partners, Isaac had a harder time putting words to his secondary emotions, saying “I don’t know” and looking puzzled. With the help of the workshop facilitator, Isaac came to understand that he coped with Maria’s frustration by shutting down and distracting himself with tasks – in the same way that he survived the tension in his childhood home. In EFT, secondary emotions are identified in conjunction with understanding the couple’s pattern of conflict. Thus, Maria and Isaac were both naming their secondary emotions of anger and shutting down, their behaviors of criticism and distraction, and understanding how these fueled their pursue-withdraw cycle. Maria and Isaac were no longer simply fighting about chores and kids; they were viewing their conflict from a meta-perspective (Lebow et al. 2012) and labeling their secondary emotions. Instead of just acting angry, Maria could say, “I get angry and critical with you,” and instead of just going silent, Isaac was able to express, “When you are irritated with me, I shut down and retreat to other things.” Later in the workshop, Maria and Isaac would use this knowledge of their initial, secondary emotional responses and their pursue-withdraw pattern as the foundation from which to explore primary emotions and attachment needs.

Secondary Emotions in Emotionally Focused Therapy, Table 1 Examples of secondary and primary emotions
Full size table

Cross-References