Regret is an excellent feedback mechanism for making changes in our lives. Sadness and grief teach us the importance and value of life and friendships. These emotions are our energy sources for solving problems, and each of them has significant role to play in keeping our lives ordered. Life without them would be empty and meaningless. Before turning to an exploration of how we deform or corrupt our emotions, I want to briefly not the connections between our emotions and our thoughts.
Emotions are to a considerable extent feelings.
Initially, they occur directly in response to certain pleasant and unpleasant objects in our environment, as when young children encounter an angry dog, appraise it in some way to be dangerous, and then experience the emotion of fear as pounding heart, facial tensions and other body responses. Later, as a result of learning, our emotions can also occur in response to our thoughts and self- talk, as when we start catastrifizing about some future event and begin to experience the same reactions as a child with the angry dog. And when they become habitual, it becomes very difficult to change them without first changing the corresponding thought patterns and self-talk. For example, if, when driving, we repeatedly make angry gestures, curse other drivers, and think evil of them when they cut us off, we will probably have to stop our gestures, cursing, and evil thinking if we want to change our angry feelings. We could take James' advice in the New Testament and substitute blessing for cursing.