First we need to gain a new perspective and look from the point of view of people with healthy emotional responses.
This is crucial to comprehend the role of emotions in the therapeutic progress and the day to day activities.
Briefing:
Thoughts and emotions are closely linked, depended on each other. One affects and influences the other and so on.
People with emotional distorsions have distorted emotional responses to external and internal stimuli and difficulty in expressing emotions. This also creates a downplay of the importance of emotions in one’s life in some cases
To understand this idea, we need to see emotional healthy people as having different emotional responses from us, they are influenced by emotions more and they understand them.
By influenced by the emotions I mean that through emotions they feel like they belong in a certain place, with certain people, in certain settings, studying a certain field, at a certain job, maybe even in life itself at the same time believing that they belong because of the emotional response .
The importance of emotions cannot be stressed enough in the life of regular subjects.
The difference in therapeutic settings is in the fact that when an end conclusion is reached in therapy, the subject relies on the feeling associated to it to integrate it in himself and consolidate it in his core beliefs, boosting the chances of that integration to happen. They relly on that feeling to draw the motivation and streght for keeping and evolving that end conclusion
Emotional memory plays a role also in integrating and consolidating the end conclusion. the person remembers the journey he went through to reach that end conclusion, making the conclusion feel like a goal which was reached and worth keeping.
The emotional memory is that part of mind which is activated by a certain emotion and when it’s activated the behaivours and thoughts associated with it are also activated. The emotional memory can be activated by certain thoughts or behaivours also, is the memory of emotional meaning.
In a nutshell. The emotional responses are connected with the thoughts of that specific part of the person which deals in changing something in the person itself.
On the other hand, people who have emotional distorsions have a different way of interpreting the end conclusion, if they have interpret it as a regular person they might not keep the original emotion as it was when it was reached. It may not be kept intact in the emotional memory.
They might interpret it distorted from the start.
The emotion might suffers distorsions, sometimes distorting the importance of the end conclusion and give it a whole new meaning, or downplaying the meaning of it.
This is not the whole story. It’s more nuanced then that, and because of the connection between emotions and cognition is hard to separate the emotion from cognition.
Some might say the distorsions happen because of the cognitive distorsions which influence the emotional responses making them distorted
