Complex Emotions - what are they & how do they stop being simple?

You might remember our earlier blog on the function of feelings, a brief foray into the purpose of emotions. Well today, we're looking at not just any emotion, but complex emotions. That's right, the messy stuff.

Complex Emotions: When More Than One Thing Is True

We tend to talk about feelings as if they arrive one at a time:

I’m sad

I’m angry

I’m happy

These are primary emotions if you like, simple, singular and clear - but real emotional life is rarely that simple and most of the time, we’re carrying several truths at once. Relief braided with guilt, love tangled with resentment, gratitude sitting right next to grief - and often we're fighting to understand which is "real", allowed or most valid.

When we're holding multiple emotional realities, contradicting feelings or we create dissonance by judging the feelings we think we shouldn't have, we experience complex emotions. Whilst they may feel confusing and maybe even wrong, they’re not a sign that something is wrong with you, they’re a sign that something is happening to you, with you or around you - & you’re paying attention.

What Complex Emotions Actually Are

A complex emotion is not truly confusion (even though it can feel that way), it’s coexistence. It’s the experience of holding two or more emotional states at the same time, often ones that feel completely oppositional. You can miss someone who hurt you, you can feel proud of yourself and disappointed in how things turned out, and you can want change - yet fear it deeply.

Complex emotions often show up during transitions: endings, growth, healing, becoming. They emerge when life stops fitting neatly into categories of good or bad, right or wrong (the problematic binary we're often drawn toward for certainty). And because we’re rarely taught how to hold multiple emotions at once, our instinct is to flatten them, to pick the “right” feeling and squash the rest away for as long as possibly and ideally, forever. But emotions don’t disappear because we ignore them, they actually just get louder in other ways, and generally, they get bigger than they were the first time you felt them.

Why We Struggle With Them

Complex emotions are uncomfortable because they resist resolution. We like clarity, we love it actually, and we really like clean narratives. We want to know how to feel so we can move on - and complex emotions slow that down. Complex emotions ask us to stay present longer than we’d like, so we can notice what we've been avoiding.

They also challenge the stories we tell ourselves, for example, if we feel both hurt and grateful, what does that mean about the relationship? If we feel relieved and sad, what does that say about the choice?

Often, the discomfort isn’t the emotion itself, it’s the meaning we’re afraid it carries. Much like trauma is often not what happens to you, it's what you think about it, it's what you brand your emotions to be, that creates the problems you have in receiving them.

Working With Complex Emotions (Instead of Against Them)

Working with complex emotions isn’t about solving them. It’s about making room for them:

1. Let “and” replace “but.”

Language matters. “I’m sad but relieved”, this subtly tells your nervous system that one feeling cancels the other. With “I’m sad and relieved."nothing needs to be erased for the other to exist and both get to be heard.

2. Separate feeling from action.

You can feel angry without acting on anger. You can feel longing without going back. Emotions are information, not instructions.

3. Get curious instead of critical.

When you notice emotional conflict, ask: What makes sense about this? Most complex emotions are logical when you look at the full context of your experience. And whilst mapping logic onto emotions can sound antithetical, true wisdom comes from bringing the facts and the feelings of your experience to the middle foreground of your attention.

4. Allow different timelines.

Some parts of you heal faster than others. One emotion may be ready to move forward while another is still catching up. That’s not a failure, it’s being human and it's simply giving you insight into what you might more readily accept or process more broadly in your life. Sadness is allowed but anger isn't? You might find your anger starts rolling around later in the day, week or month when you've not had the conscious capacity to let it pop up the first time.

5. Name what’s actually there.

Complex emotions lose some of their power when they’re named honestly. You don’t need poetic language. Simple and true is enough. That kind of truth creates internal trust:

“I feel proud of myself, and I’m grieving what this cost me.”

The Quiet Skill of Emotional Maturity

Emotional maturity isn’t about being calm all the time. It’s about being able to sit with internal complexity without rushing to escape it. It’s knowing that two opposing feelings can exist without cancelling each other out - without cancelling you out.

Complex emotions often show us that we’ve cared deeply, tried sincerely, and lived fully. They’re not a mess to clean up. They’re evidence of depth. And sometimes, the most self-helpful thing we can do is stop asking ourselves to simplify what was never simple to begin with.

You’re allowed to feel all of it.