Following up on the purpose of emotions and that we are always feeling something, we feel what we believe.
By that I mean because emotional responses are like sensory responses, we feel what we are perceiving, what we know around us, or what we’re processing cognitively before it happens emotionally. All of this happens in an instant, and we're typically not consciously aware of it.
One of the best examples is someone pointing at gun at our head. We’re walking down a road or a street, when some stranger pops out and points a gun at our head, and we feel an intense fear response. But if the context is of a young child and a toy gun, we may have a small fear response and some anger at the child, but that’s all it is.
Another example is if someone tells you that they love you. If you believe they mean it, you will feel joy, happiness. But, if you do not believe they mean it, you won’t feel joy, and maybe anger or sadness, or something in those categories.
So we feel what we believe, yet most of the time it’s completely not conscious, or it's subconscious, and that’s almost always the case.
This understanding, or discovery, is at the heart of the most common treatment in mental health, which is Cognitive Therapy. Our goal as therapists is to help people create different beliefs — quite simply to move from negative beliefs to positive beliefs. And then they move from negative emotions to positive emotions — about themselves and their lives.
For instance, quite often we help women realize that it is not their fault that their partner abuses them. Changing that fundamental cognitive belief changes how they feel about themselves, which also helps them feel stronger and more empowered to leave an abusive situation.
Finally, this understanding or discovery has important implications on the experience of fear and sadness. I will talk more about this later, but the goal is to help people not fear their fear or feel sad about their sadness. Both clinical anxiety and depression are partly that. For instance, when having a more continuous fear response, which we call anxiety, we typically believe that is a fearful situation, which causes more of a fear response.
So, a great deal more about this later, but it’s a fundamental discovery about our emotions that we feel what we believe.