Emotions vs Feelings, 2

A feeling is actually a portrayal of what is going on in the brain and body organs when you are experiencing an emotion. It’s really the next thing that happens. If you have just an emotion, you would not necessarily feel it. To feel an emotion, you need to represent in the brain (in structures that are actually different from the structures that lead to the emotion) what is going on in the organs when you are in the grip of an emotion. It involves the process of perceiving what is going on in those organs when you are in the grip of an emotion. That feeling perception is achieved by a collection of structures, some of which are in the brain stem, and some of which are in the cerebral cortex including the insular cortex. Practically, this means that you are not responsible for every emotion that arises in brain and body. Neither are you responsible for every feeling that crosses your brain in response to and in explanation of the emotion. However, you do have the ability to decide a couple of things. One: what action do you want to take or what behavior do you want to exhibit based on the emotion? And two: do you want to hang onto your initial feeling or do you want to ‘feel’ something else based on what you decide to tell yourself? You choose.