5.29 A theory of emotion

People respond negatively to pain or any negative emotion. Pain might also hinder development of emotions because it isn’t encouraging. The right factors need to be applied to someone in order to get them to experience the fullest potential of their emotions. This could simply mean having the right people around you who are supportive of you and your emotions. In fact, the words “thrive” and “support” are really key for emotion generation. That being said, it cannot be ignored that emotional events which feel painful in the short term may be beneficial in the long term, and even cause a person to thrive and experience good emotions.

It needs to be clarified what is significant about emotions, or how are they meaningful. There can be an individual emotional event, but this event might impact everything else that occurs in someone’s life. In that way everything is tied in. Even words, or therapy, might change how someone views the world and greatly influence how they experience emotion. For instance, understanding that a loved one likes you – or loves you – consciously would cause your emotions as a whole to change. So not just your understanding of that thing in specific would change, but also your experience with that person. A cliché saying that explains this would be “once you let love in, the world becomes a beautiful and sunny place”.

That expression explains the importantance of positive encouragement, the impact of one event or person on someone’s overall emotions all the time, and the importance therapy can have. That one statement might make someone realize they love someone else and what this love does for their life. [I apologize if this article is starting to sound cheesy, but it is important to realize that all emotions are tied into each other, and that small events or even your cognition (which could be influenced by therapy or words (as in the cliché example)) can greatly influence your life.] Conversely, if something very bad happens to someone, they might not care about their life anymore and start to experience all their other emotions less.

In fact, everything that happens to someone probably influences everything else that happens to that person. You could also just look at life as individual events that only have minor impacts on each other over the long term. I suppose I am asking the question, “what is everything, how does everything feel, and how does everything relate”. Is there a way to describe all emotion other than, “you’re feeling something”? Certain activities bring up certain emotions, individual circumstances and their emotional parts can be described as action-reaction relationships. If all of life is described in that way, does that explain everything? If you describe how everything feels individually then that would describe everything if you take into your account of each situation how all the other things that happened influenced how you feel for that one thing. So that means how you feel most of the time, the general emotions you have that are mostly independent of what is happening – and also how you feel for each thing that happens.