0.2 Emotions and feelings and the difference between them {cp}  (Page 2/3)

You can recognize any feeling, that is what makes it a feeling. If you are sad that is a feeling, but if you are depressed that isn’t a feeling it is more like an emotion. You can’t identify why you are depressed but you can usually identify why you are sad. Feelings are more immediate, if something happens or is happening, it is going to result in a feeling. However, if something happened a long time ago, you are going to think about it unconsciously and that is going to bring up unconscious feelings (the reason the things that happened previously are going to be more similar to emotion than things that are happening currently is that sensory stimulation (or things happening currently) is a lot closer to feelings than things that are less linked to direct sensory stimulation (such as emotions which are therefore usually going to be about things which require memory to figure out, things like thoughts that are less like feelings and more like emotion)). So emotions are unconscious feelings that are the result of mostly unconscious thoughts (instead of feelings – a feeling can trigger an emotion, but it isn’t a part of it). Feeling defined there as something you can identify. Also, you can’t identify the unconscious thought that caused the unconscious feeling, but you can identify the unconscious feeling itself (aka emotion). [Memory isn't the only thing that is going to be more similar to an emotion than a feeling. Any type of thinking, (emotional thinking or non-emotional thinking) or using logic would be more like emotions since thought is deeper than feeling. Those things still generate feelings, or are in part feelings. You can't say when you bring up a memory you don't feel anything, but since this memory is less tangible than something which you are currently experiencing, it is going to be more like an emotion. It requires thought to bring up, so that is a deep experience because thought is deep, which makes it more like an emotion (because emotions are deep) but it is lacking a feeling of "realness" or reality. Thought probably also lacks that feeling, because thought is just something in your head, not something which you can feel like a physical object.]

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.]