Core Feeling: Find Clarity in Your Reactions

Unpeeling the Layers: A Journey to Self-Discovery

Have you ever found yourself in a moment where your behaviour just doesn’t make sense?

Perhaps you snapped at your partner over something trivial, spent the entire weekend avoiding your to-do list, or found yourself constantly checking your phone when you’d promised yourself a digital detox.

The immediate thought that follows is often a frustrated and deeply confusing one: “Why am I doing this? I don’t even know why I’m acting this way!”

This disconnect between your actions and your awareness is an incredibly common human experience. We often react or behave in ways that feel out of sync with our rational minds, leaving us feeling confused, inauthentic, and, most damagingly, unable to clearly communicate our true needs. We end up fighting the symptom instead of the source.

The Emotional Layers: From Defence to Discovery 🧐

To truly grasp this gap between what we do and what we feel, it helps to visualise our emotional system as having layers of defence.

The outer layers are the most obvious behaviours or reactions—the things that everyone, including you, can easily see and react to. These are the symptoms we present to the world, often as a first-line defence:

• Anger and irritability: Snapping, shouting, or being overly critical.

• Avoidance and procrastination: Saying 'no' to social invitations or putting off important tasks until the last minute.

• Hyper-activity or Busyness: Over-scheduling yourself, trying to 'outrun' your feelings.

• Defensiveness or Silence: Shutting down or becoming overly argumentative during a conflict.

  
  

Crucially, these outer layers are almost always protective. They’re a quick, automatic, and often habitual way that our nervous system copes with something deeper, more vulnerable, and perhaps more painful lurking beneath the surface. They serve as a shield meant to keep both the threat and our true feelings at bay.

Getting to the Core

If you commit to the work of gently peeling back those protective layers, you will inevitably start to get closer to the core feeling. This core is the fundamental, primary emotion that is truly driving the whole reaction. It’s usually one of the more primary, universally experienced emotions that we often try to push away because they feel too raw:

• Fear: The anxiety of failure, rejection, or abandonment.

• Sadness/Grief: The pain of loss, change, or deep disappointment.

• Shame/Guilt: The feeling of being fundamentally inadequate or 'bad.'

• Loneliness/Isolation: The deep need for connection and belonging that isn't being met.

  
  

Think of it this way: your immediate reaction of anger (the outer layer) is often just a quick-fire defence mechanism, a burst of energy meant to regain control or keep others at a distance.

But if you sit with that anger and ask what vulnerability it's protecting, you might find a core feeling of fear that your voice isn't being heard, or deep sadness that you feel invisible in your relationship. The core is the vulnerability; the outer layer is the armour.

The Transformative Power of Core Feeling Recognition 💡

Identifying this core feeling is the single most important step toward genuine personal growth and improved relationships. It moves us from surviving to thriving.

1. Living Authentically

When we continually act from the outer layer—the anger, the silence, or the busy-ness—we are, by definition, not being authentic. We are reacting from a place of defence, not honest self-expression. We become actors in our own lives, driven by unseen forces.

Authenticity is born in the moment you can pause that knee-jerk reaction and recognise: "I'm not actually furious right now; I'm feeling intensely anxious (fear) that I'm going to disappoint the people I love, and I'm lashing out because of that panic."

This moment of conscious awareness allows you to shift from an automatic reaction to a deliberate response. Your subsequent action—whether it's slowing down, setting a boundary, or speaking your truth—will align with your true inner experience, making you feel more whole, less exhausted, and genuinely authentic.

2. Mastering Communication

Trying to communicate your needs from the "outer layer" rarely, if ever, yields positive results. It just triggers a defensive cycle, escalating the conflict:

❌ Outer Layer Communication: "I'm furious you left the washing up again! You never help around here!" (This is an attack based on the visible symptom—anger.)

This statement usually results in the other person feeling attacked, becoming defensive, and getting into an argument about who is right, completely missing the deeper, real issue.

However, communicating from your core feeling is a powerful, vulnerable act of clarity that invites true connection and problem-solving:

✅ Core Feeling Communication: "When the washing up piles up, I feel genuinely overwhelmed and unseen (core feeling: loneliness/fear) because I worry I'm carrying the entire mental load of the house. I need a clear plan for sharing this responsibility."

This honest statement is much harder to argue with because it centres on your experience and your needs, rather than blaming the other person. It allows the other person to understand your deep need (support, recognition, partnership) rather than just reacting to your blame or anger. It transforms conflict into a constructive conversation about how to move forward together.

Therapy: Your Guide to the 'Unknown' Feelings 🧭

It can be incredibly difficult to successfully peel back those emotional layers on your own. Our defence mechanisms, developed over a lifetime, are specifically designed to keep the core feeling hidden because, let's face it, it often feels too vulnerable or painful to look at directly. We are experts at self-deception when it comes to emotional pain.

This is why therapy is so transformative. A therapist provides a safe, consistent, and non-judgemental space to explore those 'unknown' behaviours and feelings. They act as a compassionate guide, helping you to:

1. Spot the Patterns You Miss: They can gently point out the recurring 'outer layers' that you are blind to because they are so habitual—e.g., "I notice you always change the subject or use humour when we start talking about your feelings about work."

2. Sustain Vulnerability: They encourage you to slow down the reaction process, helping you tolerate the discomfort of the surface feelings (like anxiety or irritation) just long enough to see what's underneath. They sit with you in that emotional space until the sadness or fear finally surfaces.

3. Name the Core Feeling: By listening deeply and reflecting what they observe, they can offer language to name the hidden feeling, which is the crucial first step to mastering it—e.g., "Could it be that under the constant irritation, there's a strong, underlying feeling of hopelessness about things ever changing?" Giving a name to the feeling reduces its power over you.

   
   

By working through these emotional layers with a therapist, you gain the clarity needed to understand why you do what you do. This understanding gives you the power to choose better, healthier, and more authentic ways to live, communicate, and connect, ultimately leading to a life that feels more fully your own.

Ready to explore what lies beneath your automatic reactions? Get in touch here or via email here.

Kirsten

Freedom Therapy