1.2 The psychology of emotions, feelings and thoughts {adv}  (Page 10/74)

Another aspect of unconscious thought, emotion, or unconscious feeling (all three are the same) is that it tends to be mixed into the rest of your system because it is unconscious. If it was conscious then it remains as an individual feeling, but in its unconscious form you confuse it with the other emotions and feelings and it affects your entire system. So therefore most of what people are feeling is just a mix of feelings that your mind cannot separate out individually. That is the difference between sadness and a depression, a depression lowers your mood and affects all your feelings and emotions, but sadness is just that individual feeling. So the reason that the depression affects all your other feelings is because you can no longer recognize the individual sad emotions that caused it. The feelings become mixed. If someone can identify the reason they are sad then they become no longer depressed, just sad. Once they forget that that was the reason they are depressed however, they will become depressed again. [It is like the depressed emotion transfers to a sad feeling. That makes sense since you can only concentrate on a few things at one time, so if you are feeling it as a feeling, you are going to ignore it as an emotion.]

That is why an initial event might make someone sad, and then that sadness would later lead into a depression, is because you forget why you originally got sad. You might not consciously forget, but unconsciously you do. That is, it feels like you forget, the desire to get revenge on whatever caused the sadness fades away. When that happens it is like you “forgetting” what caused it. You may also consciously forget but what matters is how much you care about that sadness. It might be that consciously understanding why you are depressed or sad changes how much you care about your sadness, however. That would therefore change the emotion/feeling of sadness. The more you care about the sadness/depression, the more like a feeling it becomes and less like an emotion. That is because the difference between feelings and emotions is that feelings are easier to identify (because you can “feel” them easier). [And if you care about something, you are making it more important in your mind, so you are elevating that emotion into a feeling, the emotion might still be there, but you can also feel it as a feeling. In fact, if you focus on one of your emotions it becomes a feeling because you are then feeling it better since you're focused on it. This idea can be applied to various degrees of focus, you can be focused long-term (hours, minutes, whatever) on an emotion or be caring about that emotion (not just short term (seconds)), and you would "feel" it more. Or some circumstance could occur that is negative or positive causing you to think about that emotion.]

The following is a good example of the transition from caring about a feeling to not caring about a feeling. Anger as an emotion takes more energy to maintain, so if someone is punched or something, they are only likely to be mad for a brief period of time, but the sadness that it incurred might last for a much longer time. That sadness is only going to be recognizable to the person punched for a brief period of time as attributable to the person who did the punching, after that the sadness would sink into their system like a miniature depression. Affecting the other parts of their system like a depression. [Depressions are so deep that they probably cause you to feel bad in many ways. Lowing of mood because of depression shows how it can affect all your emotions and "depress" them.]