The Emotional Jesus

CHAPTER TWO

THE COLOR WHEEL OF EMOTION

Some really important discoveries have been made by accident, such as the discovery of penicillin. In 1928, Alexander Fleming, a professor of bacteriology, returned to his lab after a vacation. While sorting through his petri dishes of colonies of the bacteria Staphylococcus, he noticed mold had started to grow on them. While he looked to identify which colonies he could salvage from those infected with the mold, he noticed something intriguing. Bacterial colonies were dying in the areas where the mold was growing. The mold actually turned out to be a strain of Penicillium that secreted a substance which inhibits bacterial growth. This led to the discovery and development of the lifesaving antibiotic penicillin, which came into use in the 1940’s.

Well, I began one of those accidental journeys in October of 2001. Our church was encouraging the pastoral staff to do continuing education by attending a conference or seminar each year. I was a new staff member but wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to get away and learn when an invitation was placed in my mailbox by our church counselor. She explained she put it there because she couldn’t go and every other staff person had already committed to going to other conferences.

People sometimes ask me, “How did you find out about the THRIVE Conference?4 “Completely by accident,” I would respond. I knew nothing about this place in Baldwin, Michigan or about the things I would learn there. God used this beginning as an open door to a huge change in my life. Today I’m convinced it was orchestrated by the Lord and was not an accident at all.

Our speaker that week shared new and exciting truth. He talked about brain science and Biblical truth and how they work together. During that week he briefly mentioned the idea of a color wheel of emotion. He described primary emotions and secondary or compound emotions. He explained that the six primary emotions are like the three primary colors of the color wheel. He encouraged us to learn how to manage these primary emotions because they are combined to create the compound emotions, and all negative emotions are made from some combination of these six. He didn’t go into great detail but I began to understand this principle through the illustration of the color wheel.

Do you remember learning about the color wheel in elementary school? It has been a long time for some of us, so let me share with you my own experience learning about the color wheel. My teacher explained it by starting with a circle which looked like a pie cut into six pieces. She told us that all the colors in the world are made from only three primary colors: red, yellow and blue. I suspected she was going to label the pie with these colors, but I already wanted to know why she drew a pie with six sections when she insisted there were only three primary colors.

She then painted three sections of the pie with red, yellow and blue, respectively, with an unpainted pie slice in between each two colors. She explained, “We are going to make three other colors to fill in the wheel, but we don’t want to buy any more paint. How are we going to do that?” She had my attention now, but I wanted her to hurry up. I wanted to know the answer.

She then gave one girl red paint and another yellow paint, with the instruction to mix the two paints together. To our delight a new color, orange, appeared. Two boys were given red and blue paint with the same instructions, and purple appeared. Jim and I mixed our colors, blue and yellow, to produce green. Wow, I thought, that was awesome! Our teacher said the colors we had just made were secondary colors. Mixing two primary colors together creates a secondary color. Our teacher went on to explain that mixing combinations and combinations of combinations creates all of the colors imaginable and generates some very complex shades and tones of color.

The early education about the color wheel was placed in my mental filing cabinet; and I didn’t see its application to emotions until much later in my life, when I began to work with individuals who were victims of unresolved childhood trauma, people who struggled with a spectrum of emotions, like the colors on my teacher’s wheel.

At the THRIVE conference I heard Jim Wilder’s teaching about the six primary negative emotions: Anger, Fear, Sadness, Shame, Disgust and Hopeless Despair. Just like artists can create all other colors by mixing together the primary colors, when any two of the big six negative emotions are experienced together, secondary emotions are the result. For example, when the primary emotions of fear and disgust are combined, you experience the secondary emotion of horror. When you combine anger and disgust, you get contempt. When anger and shame are combined, you have humiliation; and when you combine fear and hopeless despair, the secondary emotion will be dread. Even more complex emotions are generated when anger, sadness and hopelessness are all experienced together, resulting in feelings of betrayal. All negative emotions originate from combinations of these six primary emotions or from combinations of combinations to generate more complex emotions. (These combinations of emotions are as reported by Jim Wilder in THRIVE training presentations. I do not have a complete list of the results of combining specific emotions.)

How Emotions Impact our Development

“In a child’s first two years, the desire to experience joy and loving relationships is the most powerful force in life.”5 Even an infant looks for a face and specifically a set of eyes that communicate, “You are special to me; I delight in you.” Consistently giving the baby non-verbal messages that someone is GLAD to be with them helps build a solid foundation of security and joy long before the child can understand spoken words. A satisfied and secure infant will develop an implicit sense of belonging at the very core of their being. This child will likely be resilient and have capacity to face hard things in life as they grow and develop. This resiliency is referred to as “joy strength” or “ego strength,” because there is strength in the great joy the child feels when someone is genuinely glad to be with them, even though they’ve done nothing to earn the affection and love.

As a baby grows and experiences the pendulum of life’s ups and downs, they will naturally face upsetting emotions. Perhaps you’ve seen a child’s dismayed response when Mommy says, “No!” Maybe you’ve seen the tears of shame when Daddy says, “I’m disappointed in you,” or the frightened expression when their parent says, “I’m going to count to three.”

If a child has been given a foundation of security and joy, they will have capacity to face these negative emotions in life; they will then begin to make sense of who they are and download from their parents how it is “like them” to respond when they’re upset.6

If they’ve had enough experiences with someone who is glad to be with them, the child will instinctively know that someone will still be glad to be with them when the negative emotion has passed. They will develop the capacity to face the difficult things of life without being derailed; they will become emotionally resilient.

According to Dr. Jim Wilder, an infant views themselves as a separate person when experiencing each different negative emotion.7 The young child has a distinct self-identity when they are sad and another identity when angry. They see themselves as yet another person when they’re experiencing shame or when afraid. One very important thing is needed in order for the child to realize they are the same person but simply feeling different emotions -- they must have received ample love and acceptance from their caretakers during times of negative emotions. A thread of affirmation and love pulls the different perspectives of themselves together into an awareness that they are the same person when experiencing each upsetting emotion, as they are when experiencing joy!

When a child feels secure in a loving, joyful relationship, they are willing to explore, to risk new things. They’re not terrified of upsetting times and don’t need to avoid negative feelings. When they have a safe place to belong, they can live life bountifully; they can begin to have a secure identity, to see themselves as the same person over time and in varying circumstances. They can enjoy the pleasant times but also endure hardship with a willingness to be vulnerable and to take risks. They are then able to accomplish daring feats, without needing a guarantee of success before they will try.

Children without a secure foundation of love and acceptance often can’t rest or find peace and they will vigorously avoid any emotion they don’t have the capacity to handle. If they can stay in the upset long enough to discover which negative emotion they are struggling with, they can begin processing their pain. But again, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Adults Stuck in Negative Emotion

My heart’s desire was to be used by God in ministering to wounded people. But most of my clients were too weak to be able to take risks in...