Your Not Self Theme isn't the only emotion worth listening to

A few weeks ago, I shared something on Instagram that I felt really needed to be said, and I hadn’t seen anyone speak it out loud.

Once it was published there, I realised it really should be in all the places. And while it’s taking me a while to create the processes to share the same one helpful idea across multiple platforms, I’m starting by re-sharing things as I realise/remember.

I took that IG post and shared it here as a ‘Note’. (If you’re new to Substack, Notes are like micro posts that show up in your Feed, similar to people’s posts on Facebook.)

A longtime follower of my work commented on that Note and asked me to dive deeper into this topic. So, without further ado, the very next chunk of text is what I said. Directly below that, you’ll see the essence of what he asked. And after that, you’ll see my (long) response. I hope you find it helpful.

Your Not-Self Theme is not the only emotion you should pay attention to.

Let me explain…

You probably already know your Not-Self Theme for your Human Design Type:

Anger / Manifestors

Frustration / Generators

Anger & Frustration / MGs

Bitterness / Projectors

Disappointment / Reflectors

But if you’ve accidentally fallen into the trap of thinking your Not-Self Theme is the only ‘negative’* emotion you should be watching out for, you’re missing out on GOLD!

(*There are no such things as ‘negative’ emotions, but sometimes we label them that way.)

I’ve seen:

Manifestors who are extremely bitter,

Reflectors who are angry as hell,

Projectors who are deeply frustrated,

Generators who are very disappointed,

and MGs who express all these emotions in a single session!

And if they had fallen into the trap of thinking that only their specific Not-Self Theme emotion was worth paying attention to, they would have missed out on the vitally important message the emotion they were ACTUALLY feeling was trying to tell them.

PSA:

All emotions are relevant.

All emotions are valuable.

All emotions deserve to be listened to.

Please repeat after me:

All emotions are relevant.

All emotions are valuable.

All emotions deserve to be listened to.

So YES, please DO pay attention to your Not-Self Theme AND remember to pay attention to any OTHER emotion that’s arising within you, asking to be expressed.

It has something important to say.

How do you discover the range of emotions that can arise in a person?

How do you learn where frustration ends and disappointment begins?

If the goal is to identify the message the emotions are bringing to my attention, how do I do that?

Or, say in a child, when you see emotions rise in them, but it’s not clear if it’s excitement, frustration or sadness.

Or what seems more common is when a sibling of theirs seems to be pushing out an emotion, and they don’t notice until the emotional climate in the room is volatile.

It’s apparent to me that emotional literacy is not available to all of our society.

I feel that space is not well represented in the authentic voices competing with the loud voices of opinion and social commentary.

Your note feels like an invitation to discuss this topic more deeply.

Let’s start with this question:

How do you discover the range of emotions that can arise in a person?

Unless you’re a sociopath (which you’re probably not, if you’re attracted to my work) or you’ve experienced repeated horrific trauma that caused you to shut down so much you just feel numb, then you, like most people will, at times, feel all the emotions.

Anger, frustration, bitterness

Fear, nervousness, worry

Sadness, grief, regret

Powerlessness, hopelessness, despair

and

Optimism, willingness

Happiness, joy

Delight, surprise

Appreciation, love

Peace, bliss

and every other emotion you can think of.

But if, as a child, you had parents who struggled to understand their emotions (and this is extremely common in our so-called ‘civilised’ societies), then they sure as heck could teach you about yours.

How many people do you know who genuinely feel safe to express all the emotions that I’ve listed above?

I’d be lucky to count on one hand the number of people I know who can get anywhere near this goal, and I have surrounded myself with the most conscious, emotionally intelligent people I can find for more than a decade.

If we don’t feel safe to feel certain emotions, we won’t feel safe to express them either.

If we don’t feel safe to feel or express them, we certainly can’t understand them well enough to teach about anything about each of these different emotions to anyone else.

So, how do you discover the range of emotions that can arise in a person?

Start by noticing anything that arises within you and, instead of judging it or trying to suppress it, get curious. Notice how it feels in your body. What sensations do you notice? Where is it in your body? If it could talk, what would it say?

Just working with those three prompts will tell you sooooooo much. So much.

How do you learn where frustration ends and disappointment begins?

Once you’ve had a play with the prompts I shared above, you’ll start to realise that two emotions such as frustration and disappointment feel quite different. In a moment, I’m going to explain what I notice in my body when I feel several different emotions, but for now, just know that when you start to become curious about the sensations you’re feeling in your body, you’ll learn first-hand what frustration feels like vs disappointment or any other emotion.

It seems worth highlighting something at this point, and that is what emotions actually are. A lot of people will say emotions are simply ‘energy in motion’, and while that’s true on some level, it’s not that helpful in truly understanding what’s going on.

A definition I find far more helpful is:

Emotions are the names or labels we give to a collection of sensations.

(Shout out to Irene Lyon for this definition.)

So, as I explain what these seven different challenging emotions feel like in my body as I feel them, notice that what I’m doing is telling you a lot about what I’m perceiving inside my body rather than what I’m thinking about what an emotion means intellectually.

I only know what to call the experience I’m having because I learned, over time, the appropriate name in English for each of these.

And for those of you who struggle to identify what you’re feeling, please know that while my parents were loving and tried to teach me useful things about emotions, it wasn’t their strong point; most of what I’m sharing here I’ve actually learned through observation, conversations and deliberate study as an adult.

To answer the next question this subscriber asked - If the goal is to identify the message the emotions are bringing to my attention, how do I do that?

In no particular order… let’s just work through some of the ones I listed above. Please know, as I describe these, your brain will naturally create a similar feeling inside you. So, if it feels too much for you, just take a break or skip to the next one.

As I think of something that makes me angry, I feel my heart beat faster and a flood of energy to my arms and legs. I feel the desire to move forward, towards the person who is making me angry. I feel energy swirling around inside my mouth, like I want to yell or scream or bite the person.

I am hyper alert, on guard, ready to hurt them, ready to defend myself or those whom I perceive are being hurt. I feel stronger than usual, and I notice a willingness to get hurt fighting the person if that is necessary.

If I ask this feeling what it wants to say, it swears before I can even finish asking. This collection of sensations I’m calling ‘anger’ tells me it wants to “rip their head off”. And when I ask it why, it says, “because they’re hurting us and they need to know it is NOT okay.”

…

It’s all too common to think that anger is a ‘negative’ emotion. But every single emotion has a reason for existing. They all have a job. And anger’s job is to protect you and other people from harm. No other emotion will create that same physiological response that allows you to attack or defend when harm is coming at you or at someone who cannot defend themselves.

Therefore, anger is not negative; it is not bad, and it is not ‘inappropriate’. If you’re feeling angry, it means someone or something has trodden on your boundaries and anger has shown up to help you assert that boundary.

As I tune into something recently that caused me to feel frustrated, I notice a restless, irritated feeling. Energy is stirring in my body, like it wants to get out, like it's trapped and banging against the internal walls of my body. It’s not as powerful as anger, but it’s a similar feeling - like a smaller cranky cousin that’s about to yell out loud but probably won’t punch anyone.

I can feel my jaw clenching, and all this extra energy bouncing around my body is being funnelled towards that one thing that’s driving me nuts. It’s hard for me to take in anything good around me; I just want to growl. If someone were to hug me right now, I would throw their arms off me as if to say, “get off me, get out of my way, I want to solve this effing problem”.

It’s destructive energy. It makes me want to do things like throw my computer across the room (if that’s the source of the problem) or yell at my partner (if I feel like he’s not listening to me) or tell people to “shut up already” (if they’re bitching about meaningless crap that doesn’t help anyone).

While Generators and Manifesting Generators will probably know this feeling all too well, the rest of us experience it too - whether we realise it or not. While frustration feels bad, it doesn’t make it bad. It’s just an emotion, trying to do a job, just like all the others.

Frustration’s job is to tell us that what we’re doing isn’t working. It gives us energy to try something different. And while frustration left unchecked can hurt people (including ourselves), and we can do silly things with it (like bang our heads against a brick wall - metaphorically or literally!), when you know what it’s trying to tell you, then you can use that energy to change direction or try a new tactic to solve the problem.

Since I talk so much about Human Design, it seems sensible to keep moving through the Not-Self Themes, and as many of you will know, ‘bitterness’ is the challenging emotion that we Projectors feel when we haven’t been ignored or dismissed (instead of recognised and invited).

When I search within me for a time in which I felt bitter, I find this kind of passive-aggressive quality inside my chest. I can feel a wall in front of my heart that feels like it’s trying to protect me from the hurt, but there’s another sensation occurring simultaneously. It’s reaching out to try to attack the person who got the invite I wanted. This feeling is nasty, bitey, mean, cruel.

If bitterness were a character inside of me, you’d see she has her body behind the wall but one long arm reaching waaaaaaaay out into the world, with a sword in her hand, ready to slay the person she feels is causing her pain.

If I ask her how she’s feeling, she’ll say, “It’s not fair. I should have been picked. They didn’t deserve that good thing. I should have got it. Why can’t I get things like that?”

This sensation feels something like if anger and sadness had a baby, it would feel like this. The anger makes her reach out and try to hurt those she feels hurt her. The sadness makes her protect her heart with that strong wall.

It makes this emotion of bitterness feel far more contained, and also far more bitchy and whiny than anger. Bitterness will complain to anyone who will listen, but she won’t do anything about it. She’ll just keep waving her sword around, barely able to touch anyone or anything in any kind of meaningful way because she knows she has to stay behind that wall.

…

Bitterness, also known as resentment, is there - like frustration - to tell us that the thing we were trying to do didn’t work and we need to try something different next time. It also tells us very clearly what we want. We wanted that person to invite us out on a date. We wanted the book deal. We wanted the opportunity to make that kind of cash doing something we love.

The solution when bitterness shows up is to not judge it, not dismiss it, but realise it’s showing you clearly what you want, and that, if you can value yourself, your knowledge and your skills more, next time the invite is more likely to come to you.

Since I just shared a bit about sadness, let’s feel into that one now.

For me personally, as I go within to find sadness, I already feel a sense of dread like I don’t want to go there. I know the heaviness that comes with sadness. I feel my chest dropping and my shoulders sagging forward as if someone has put a heavy weight across my shoulders, and my whole torso immediately compresses as a result. But I can tell it’s just my body trying to protect my heart that hurts so damn much.

I feel my face change. My eyes want to look down. If I were to look in the mirror, I would see the face that comes just before I cry. I feel heavy, closed, collapsed, like I just want to collapse to the floor and be held by the wall or a person or a heavy blanket. I want to feel contained. To feel this heaviness without feeling contained leaves me feeling exposed.

There’s a sense of despair present. Like all hope is lost. Like the world around me suddenly feels darker. And I feel small. It feels like this feeling is never going to end.

…

Ah, it feels like a relief to shrug that one off! But sadness, of course, has its place. It is telling us that we lost something or someone that was important to us. It shows us what we value, what’s truly important to us. Our heart hurts because of the pain of being separated from that person, pet or thing that matters (or did matter) to us.

‘Matter’ is a good word to find myself using here. It’s a reminder that we experience sadness because we are in these bodies, living a human experience, where we feel like we are made of physical matter. And because the game of life is so compelling and our physicality feels so real, it means separation and loss also feel so real.

This emotion feels like a cousin of sadness to me. But let’s tune into her now and see what she tells us.

I feel my shoulders sag again, like I did with sadness. It feels less heavy than the sadness did, less overwhelming. I have more capacity to think about how I’m feeling with this emotion. I can feel my eyes drop, my head drop, things feel downcast. There is mild hopelessness associated with this feeling.

This part of me wanted the thing, and she didn’t get it. She says, “What’s the point in trying? Things don’t work out for me so why bother even trying? You know?”

She’s willing to connect, unlike with some of the other emotions. She wants to talk about it, but she doesn’t know if it can change, if it can get any better. She’s kind of afraid to try again because disappointment feels bad enough that she’d prefer to avoid it, if at all possible. And the only way to avoid it is by not going after what she wants, by not hoping, not dreaming, not trying again.

Disappointment feels bad, but like all our other emotions that get labelled as ‘bad’, it isn’t. It’s just an experience. When we are disappointed about a result or someone’s behaviour (two of the most common reasons I can think of that disappointment might arise), it’s telling us that we were attached to something being a particular way.

We’re allowed to dream and hope and want certain things, and disappointment clearly communicates to us that we didn’t get what we wanted. When we feel this way, it’s our opportunity to notice what’s important to us and also consider any attachments we might have to things being exactly the way we want them. Sometimes, when we sit with our disappointment, a funny thing can happen: we might suddenly realise that not getting what we wanted is actually the exact thing we needed.

Firstly, I want to tell you that fear is one of the emotions that I struggle to feel and express cleanly. Most of us who have been doing deep healing work for many years usually have at least one emotion that makes them pretty uncomfortable. At the moment, this is mine.

If I look at less intense versions of fear: worry, nervousness, etc, they don’t feel nearly as scary. I feel those more often than I’d like to admit, and they feel fairly familiar to me. But fear… well, it scares me enough that I’ve now written two paragraphs as I try to procrastinate having to feel it :P

Okay, Caroline, deep breath. You can do this. Fear hasn’t killed you yet. Let’s just feel it for two or three paragraphs. Then we can go back to analysing the emotion instead of feeling it.

I’m instantly hyper-alert. There is danger. I feel my eyes wanting to dart around to see where the danger is so I can run away. I need to know, right now, so I know which way to run and think about the best place to hide.

I can feel my heart beating fast, energy in my legs, and my brain is on overdrive, ready to think about possible solutions to keep me safe. I feel small but fast. While there’s so much energy inside of me ready to be used to move me to safety, I feel no need to say a thing or make a sound. I just have to get out of here.

…

Big deep, audible breath out.

The first thing I notice is that I had no distance from the emotion. In the previous descriptions, I was able to feel the sensations and notice the way my body was reacting almost as if I was separate from it, being the observer. But with fear, can you see how I was in it?

While this is a tangent from the main point of this article, I wanted to point it out as it’s SUCH a good example of how we can get swallowed by our own emotional experiences. If this happens to you - with any emotion - as soon as you realise it has happened, that is the moment you can step back and start to make a clearer, more self-aware decision about what to do next.

Now, back to the purpose of fear.

If you have a healthy relationship with fear, it will be obvious: fear is there to help you get away from a threatening or dangerous situation. It’s there to protect you and your body, and in many cases, your loved ones as well. It gives you the energy to escape to somewhere safer.

If you have an unhealthy relationship with fear, where you feel like you’ve been plagued with fear your whole life, it might show up unexpectedly in all sorts of situations where it’s not actually that useful. Like you might be terrified when you get any kind of critical feedback. Or you might be really afraid that your partner might cheat on you when they’ve never done anything remotely suspicious the whole time you’ve known them. Or it might scare the living hell out of you to speak in front of an audience that is full of your peers who are actually interested in what you have to say!

If yours is the latter experience, the solution is to do some active deconditioning work to change your relationship with fear. As you may know, I do this work using my trauma-informed version of Tapping, and you can use any method that you find genuinely helpful for reducing the amount of fear you’re feeling in situations that logically shouldn’t be that scary.

I left the best for last, right? Ha! Shame is such a doozy; it makes people want to run away just thinking about having to talk about it. I’ll talk about that more soon, but first, let’s feel this bad boy.

Immediate collapse. My chest caves. My shoulders hunch. I see the shameful part of me stare straight at the ground. I’d like the floor to swallow me. I cannot possibly look the person in the eye.

She says, “I am bad”. She feels like she deserves to be hit. She’s feeling like there is no option but to disappear, withdraw, disconnect entirely. She cannot possibly be loved because whatever the ‘bad’ thing is that she did makes her a ‘bad’ person who cannot, should not, must not receive love.

This feels like death. It’s intolerable. I wish the ground would just swallow me whole; then this pain would disappear, and I wouldn’t need to feel so vulnerable; my whole body would no longer feel like it’s on fire with the acute pain of feeling not worthy.

…

Fun, hey? So much fun. That’s why no one, I mean no one, likes feeling shame.

It. Feels. Horrific.

Why? Well, when we as humans do something that harms another person, it’s supposed to feel bad. We are supposed to feel bad. Really bad.

There is a part of us that knows that if we harm another person badly enough, we can get kicked out of the tribe. And while our conscious mind knows that in 2026 most of the world’s population do not live in tribes where our actual survival depends on a small handful of other people, our bodies don’t know that.

Our bodies still think if we feel shame we’re gonna die.

Shame is important. Very important. Having an inability to feel shame is what makes psychopaths so freakin’ dangerous - they have lost their inbuilt shame response. Without shame, we humans simply hurt other people to get what we want without any kind of remorse.

But too many of us feel shame about stupid shit that is of no consequence to others. You’re not supposed to feel ashamed when you record a YouTube video and trip over your words as you try to explain a new concept to your audience. You’re not supposed to feel ashamed when you read the book you’ve just had published, and you spot a spelling error, even though you and several others went over it countless times. And you’re not supposed to feel ashamed when you put on a dress to go on a date and realise you can see the shape of your squishy curves where someone, somewhere, at some point told you that part of your body should look different.

None of these things hurt anyone else; that’s why having a shame response is not ideal. But having an awareness that you’re beating yourself up, ready to withdraw from the people who love you, is a great opportunity to heal some of that pain.

Because the only time I want you to feel shame is if you do something that hurts someone else, so it feels bad enough that you never do that particular thing again. Everything else should be tapped, cleared or let go.

The last couple of questions/comments were these:

Or, say in a child, when you see emotions rise in them, but it’s not clear if it’s excitement, frustration or sadness.

Or what seems more common is when a sibling of theirs seems to be pushing out an emotion, and they don’t notice until the emotional climate in the room is volatile.

What I believe this person is trying to ask is this:

“Sometimes, I look at my children/grandchildren/kids I work with, and I’m not sure what emotion they’re feeling. How can I tell what they’re feeling if they don’t understand their emotions enough yet to be able to tell me?

And if I can’t tell what they’re feeling, how do I know what to do in order to support them?

Also, what if one child is having really big emotions and their emotions are affecting their siblings and/or the other children around them? How do I help that child understand what they’re feeling so they can do something more constructive and less destructive with their powerful emotions?”

Based on my understanding of what was asked, this is what I want to say to you who asked this, and to all parents, grandparents, and adults who work with little people in any way, shape or form.

While I have not given birth to my own children, here is what I have learned and observed from working with and watching many, many children over the years, and looking for ways to apply everything I have learned about emotions and emotional regulation:

1. The better you understand your own emotions, the more you’ll be able to understand your kiddos’ emotions.

2. The more skillfully you can feel and appropriately express your own emotions, the more skillfully you’ll be able to demonstrate, teach or coach the children around you to express their emotions in appropriate ways.

3. We cannot just intellectually learn about emotions in a book and then teach this stuff to children; we have to be the embodied example. We have to know what it feels like to ‘feel the thing’ and work through the discomfort of ‘working with’ or ‘being with’ the thing, to have any chance of helping the children in our care do the same.

I’ve covered a lot in this post. I could add in more about some of the so-called positive emotions, what they look and feel like in the body, and how to spot them in the wild (i.e. in real life, in those around you), but this post is already very, very long. So I’m going to leave it here.

I trust that you were able to take something valuable from these 4,000+ words. If something in particular stood out to you that you’d like to share, please tell me in a comment below (on Substack) or reply to this email (if this landed in your inbox).

Caroline x

P.S. And if this article sparked more questions for you that you feel fit in the intersection of Human Design, Tapping, deconditioning, nervous system education and becoming more of your wonderful self, I’d love to read those as well.