1.2 The psychology of emotions, feelings and thoughts {adv}  (Page 23/74)

But there are limitations, because thought can only do so much. You still need to take in the reality of life, and what actually generates “real” emotion in order feel things that are real, not created by thought. So the title of this section “rules of emotion” is misleading, because these rules can be bend and changed just based on your attitude, how you feel, and your thoughts.

The next question is, “what then generates real emotion, especially since your own thought process can make you feel different things in different ways”. The answer to that is that your thought process works along with reality, so although your thought process can change how you feel emotions, it ultimately itself is going to be based in reality. Reality would be things like, “physical pain causes emotional pain”. That is logical, if something causes physical pain you should feel bad emotionally about it. There might be a person out there who feels good about physical pain, but then the source of that good feeling would generate from that person’s philosophy of life, or attitude towards life. That is because they would be thinking at some level that pain is a good thing, and that would be generating the positive emotion. Why would someone think that pain is a good thing, however? Maybe for them, when they feel pain, people in the world respond more positively to them. So maybe they got positive reinforcement somehow from pain. They are not going to be able to change the immediate painful response when they feel something, and that is because that type of feeling is too fundamental to who they are. You can’t change something that as that fast of a reaction, because it doesn’t seem to be a mental thing that is related to thought, it just seems to be a fact of life.

Or beautiful things cause good emotions is something else that seems to be a fact of life. It is these facts of life that your thoughts determine what is good and what is bad, so that is why you are usually going to think that pain is a bad thing, because in reality it is bad. But if you get “enough” positive stimulus from pain in the real world, then maybe that could override the idea of the pain being bad for you. But the point is, all your thoughts are going to be tied into reality in the first place. Like when people pick on you you understand that is bad because that would cause you to think bad things about yourself, which makes you feel bad because then you image yourself in situations where you are a failure. Maybe that then makes you think about not getting food, starving, since in life if you are a failure you might wind up starving. There are chains of thought you cannot change based on your attitude either, and if one of those thoughts is a thing that is more tied into reality that you can’t “change” no matter your attitude, then you are going to have to base how you feel and therefore the rest of your thoughts off of that reality. Reality is going to determine your thoughts (or your thought structures which determine how “good” or “bad” something is for you), which in turn is going to determine how you feel. You can only change so much from reality.