Firstly we are given the natural feeling to an event.  For example, if we were to walk across the street and fall over, there is an obvious pain that is felt through the body from the nerves within the area of the fall.  This includes also the shock that the body gets from the initial fall itself.  These are the feelings of the event, which are physically produced pain and shock incidents that the body picks up via the nerve system and the other physical senses.  ‘Feeling’ is picked up by the mind but is purely based on physical events that take place.

The way we react to the event however is something very different.  This reaction of emotions comes purely from the mind and how we order to cope with the incident through our consciousness.  The mind itself is conscious that the event has taken place after the feelings are felt.  It then decides how to handle the event via a system of ordered reactions that are learnt from past experiences.  This would preclude that emotions are a learnt paradigm and that they are produced from experimental learnt reaction within our physical world.

Think about it in terms of a baby and how they react to pain events in their first year.  If a baby has a fall often the shock of the experience makes them not know how to react.  The reason they often do not first react fast to the incident and just look into space before they start crying, is because they are unsure what to do.  They have not yet learnt the procedure for such an incident and how to react to their feelings of shock and pain through the nerves.  They know though that when they cry that they get attention, so then after they go silent they then start to cry because of not being able to determine what to do in the circumstance of such an event.  Then as we grow older we start to learn that when we fall if we cry it will not achieve anything, so instead we swear because it makes us feel better.  We then learn a new emotional reaction in order to deal with the same situation at hand.

Most emotions that are learnt in our world come from our first experiences as a baby and from our childhood growing up.  We play with emotions a lot in order to achieve desired results.  We cry, yell and even laugh at certain events in order to achieve a way to get what we want.  It is in a way an attention magnet, a way to get someone to notice you and feel compassion towards you.  The only thing is that compassion too is an emotion and they soon learn to realize who they cannot manipulate over people who do not show the same level of compassion as does another.  Emotions in this way are just really a manipulation device in order to achieve a desired result.

Emotions stem also to another level, an even deeper one.  This is what could be termed emotional overload.  To describe this sort of emotion it is better to look at what happens in order to produce such an event.  The best way to see this is in a story form:

Imagine if you can that you are a girl named Kelly, and you are learning emotion for the first time.  Kelly’s first best friend at school has hit her and called her a name.  This causes a shock reaction in Kelly’s body and makes her first want to cry because of her upbringing as a baby, this is how she would normally deal with such a situation.  Instead she goes inside herself and orders this event as a feeling impulse.  This feeling impulse is remembered by a certain event that takes place.  It is then in Kelly’s mind called ‘hurt’.

This ‘hurt’ that Kelly feels, which really is just a reaction of feeling, is now being imprinted in her brain as an event and a learnt reactive scenario.  She stores this event inside her as a learnt experience that builds her character and determines how she handles scenarios in the future.  Then a year further in her life she is gradually forgetting her feeling from her first best friend, Kelly now proceeds to befriend another girl in the class.  One day this girl goes to say something nasty to Kelly and hit her.  Automatically Kelly then reacts to this scenario way before she did the first time.  This scenario is then labeled well and truly ‘hurt’.  Instead of dealing with the situation at hand, Kelly has instead decided to label it for future use.

Now Kelly has a labeled emotion in her consciousness, one that she can refer to and talk about to others.  She says to everyone that her best friend ‘hurt’ her.  This is now an emotional cycle event that Kelly can return to at any time to live out over and over.  Eventually such an emotional event takes her over to the point of overload, where she no longer can evaluate such an event that she herself created in the first place.

What she did not realize that her friend Joan had also a similar experience with her own best friend and that she decided to handle it totally different.  Instead of learning an emotion called ‘hurt’, she instead responded back to the experiences with physical reaction.  She told off her best friend and said for her not to do it, and was then satisfied when her friend said sorry.  She then did not learn ‘hurt’ but instead ‘control’.  Each being a totally opposite emotional event base, depending on an individuals choice and experiences within their life.

One thing is in this life and that is that we are not robots, we have consciousness and emotions that are learnt through our mind.  We do react from learnt scenarios as we grow up in this world and produce stories in order to value our lives.  This gives us the ability to learn emotions to suit the needs we have daily. 

Emotions are learnt within our world, and can be changed at any time.  We choose ourselves the cycle of emotion to which we want to experience, what reaction from feelings that we wish to utilize over and over.  This makes us the main actor, that chooses the character that we are in our life, the personality that we wish to project to the world around us.  Emotions are not only determined by feeling, but determined by learnt experience and our own choice to be seen in a certain way.  Therefore we are not ruled by the emotions, but instead we create them.

By Stacey T Pollock.