‘Why’ I’m feeling is interesting, whether I should act on a feeling is obviously necessary to consider - but really just those two things, “what is this and what does it make me want to do” is usually enough to move me into a position where I have agency, sidestepping emotional outbursts and ill-considered or unhelpful behavior.

It’s incredibly empowering to find yourself coming out of a situation, thinking “when I was a teen this would have been awful, but now as an adult, it’s just something to roll my eyes at and move on.” Not everybody gets to do that so easily, I feel very lucky to have figured at least this little bit out for myself.

I don't know if they're technically signals or states or something else; there seem to be conditions by which some are triggered, and circumstances by which some just become True/False when other conditions are met/unmet.

So your theory seems to work. The only exception is anything depression-related, because what are you supposed to do about it (it's a nebulous emotion whose drivers we cannot fully articulate, which makes "find joy" as useless a directive as "overthrow capitalist society," "take SSRIs" and "touch grass").

But second and more importantly, your conception that before people used to talk about mental health issues seems very romantic and unrealistic. People from older generations, at least in the two cultures in my family, tend not to talk about emotions at all. The most striking example is that of my father's grandfather, who fought in the first world war and could not enter a forest for the rest of his life and get very pale and shaky in the vicinity of one (what we would today call PTSD). So what did his wife do when she wanted to collect mushrooms? "Just drive me there and stay in the car, if you do not want to man up. It's just trees, you idiot". You cannot talk about your weaknesses when you are expected to be strong and unbreakable. What a therapist can offer is a space where those expectations of society do not hold, and where the fear of looking weak or dumb can decrease a bit.

While it's true that CBT is the most researched, virtually all of that research is on overall observed efficacy (and there are concerns that the efficacy that has been observed, especially in the earliest studies, is inflated by allegiance effects). That kind of research doesn't provide the tools to say anything about the validity of CBT's underlying conceptual/theoretical model, especially considering that CBT doesn't consistently outperform other modalities with radically different underlying models.

That's... one way to put it for sure.

Emotions can teach you about yourself: what you like/dislike, what actions you are likely to take after a trigger, how you respond if others act a certain way (as you mention), what situations are more/less likely to impact you in different ways, etc.

Understanding what you feel will help you become a better thinker. We're constantly being tugged around by our mind and emotions are a big part of that push/pull. We think we're rational but most of our mind does not work that way and has subtle ways to nudge us.

This can be an exploration about yourself exclusively if you make it so. You could climb a mountain to avoid contact with other human beings and still learn about yourself by paying attention to your emotions.

A challenge is that we don't know how to mitigate every threat or fix every problem, and we may never be able to do so in our current situations or in our whole lives.

So there can be an additional challenge of saying "yep, I got the message, and unfortunately I've actually done what I can about this issue at this time!". (And maybe, if I remember correctly what I thought I understood from the SF Zen Center's anxiety class, "I appreciate that I'm a person who cares about mitigating this threat or fixing this problem; it's great that I can see the value and urgency of this".)

We might say that, evolutionarily, acute anxiety, like acute physical pain from an injury, is hard to turn off merely by saying that we've gotten the message. Anxiety and pain serve as reminders of some of the most urgent problems we face, where procrastination could be very detrimental. But sometimes we need to find a way to say WONTFIX.

The solution typically suggested is to realistically consider the actual consequences of the worst-case scenario and sit with that until it stops being overwhelming. Then we can consider what we could do to mitigate that actual realistic worst-case possibility, and then after figuring out what it would take we get to decide if we want to put in all the effort to take those precautions or if actually it's fine, we can just do the thing despite our anxiety yelling at us. And when we do the thing and nothing bad happens, our body has a chance to learn that it is actually safe after all and it doesn't need to freak out trying to protect us.

If instead we avoid the thing, that makes us more anxious in the future. And if we try to skip examining our fears and just muscle through, we'll end up associating doing the thing with feeling strung out on adrenaline, which also isn't great.

What the article gives is a very formulaic correspondance table between emotions and "messages": anger means this, fear means that. This reminds me a lot of "dream dictionaries": things of the kind "if you dreamt of a tree, it means that you want to sleep with your mother", and "if you dreamt of a dog, it means that you have repressed memories of abuse by your father". This, in my experience, is not helpful. Even adopting a more nuanced approach to dream interpretation, purely intellectual analysis of dreams tends to fall flat: you can build a very plausible interpretation of a dream, but (a) it does not mean that it is "true", and (b) it is often quite hard to know where to move from there. What is helpful is to try to reenact the dream in imagination, be attentive to resonances in the body, and see how things evolve.

Now to Buddhism: I am quite familiar with several Buddhist traditions and studied quite a large portion of the Pali canon, and I am not aware of any advice of intellectualization. Note that there is not even a word for "mind" in Pali: the closest is "cita", which is often translated as "heart-mind" - it is the rational and the emotive/feeling together. The Tibetan tradition also places the center of the mind in the heart, which is where you _feel_ things. So if you have some references to explain what you mean, I would be interested. There are broadly two main ways I learned from Buddhist (or Buddhist-inspired) teachers to work with emotions, and they are the following: - classical Vipassana insight meditation: feel the emotion, and decompose it in smaller components. Look at how impermanent it is. See how the various elements (the resulting papancca ("mental proliferation"), the feeling in the belly, the agitation, etc) really are not bad in themselves, see how there is no such thing as "the emotion", just an ever changing flow of sensations and thoughts. See how the emotion and sensations change when you stop resisting them: in big part, they are fabricated through your aversion, greed and ignorance (the "three poisons"). If you do this long enough, you realize that the emotion is "empty": it has no independent existence. - Rob Burbea's version of insight meditation, based on "ways of looking": based on the insight that emotions (and all phenomena) are empty, actively look at the emotion through a variety of lenses: see the emotion as a message from the divine. See the emotion as a biochemical process. See the emotion as a aggregate of impermanent sensations. when you do this over and over, you again deepen your insight into emptiness.

The core of those approaches is to _feel_ the emotion in all its complexity, not just the intellectual interpretation of it. Of course, there is a skillful use of concepts involved: "looking at the emotion as impermanent" is a concept. But what you do NOT do is to solve the emotion like a puzzle, a stay content when you realized that it is due to your father abusing you as a kid.

Note that I also did CBT with a trained therapist for a while, and it did not work at all for me: I am already a lot "up there in my head", and only when I dropped it and switched to approaches that focus on the body did things start to unwind.

It's when these behaviors persist into adulthood, while also being amplified by the advertising industry who understands all this - and which is profoundly emotionally manipulative - that it becomes a problem.

Funny, doesn't the tech industry today get most of its money from advertising? That would explain some things.

I wonder if you've ever actually felt hatred. Not of some general concept (that is more likely disgust than hatred anyway, and as far as I've seen is usually rooted in insecurity about whether the person earned their relative status and fear that on a level playing field they will lose), but of an actual specific other person.

I have.

It was sparked in how someone was behaving towards me and the consequences his actions had, but my reaction was not some rational response: it was an intense vicious loathing that could have rationalized any response I chose to indulge.

And when I looked into it, really sat and was honest with myself, it was because he was doing things I wouldn't let myself do.

Now, I wouldn't let myself do them for very good reasons, because they were bad things with bad consequences that hurt people, but there was a part of me that wanted to do them anyway. The intensity of my emotional response, which actually got in the way of me effectively responding to his shitty actions, came because I saw the part of myself I liked least, that I had tried to stamp out and destroy, in him. The feeling was evidence that I had failed to eradicate the impulse from myself, and I externalized all of that onto the person who reminded me that that part of me existed.

Once I acknowledged that, that some part of me was envious that he got to do these terrible things and get away with it and I wouldn't even let myself try, I could decide how I actually wanted to respond without being ruled by those feelings I had.

but isn't introspection how you overcome fear, ignorance, or grief?

> Hatred - a call to accept or change something about myself or (my relation to) the world I don't like

Or threat. Not as common in industrialized life though.