I was wondering why the realization the the emotion was "wrong" was so ineffective in the instances I talked about (with the alcoholic not wanting to obey the urge to drink, or the obese person not wanting to follow the urge to eat more). I contrasted these cases with cases in which a certain realization can lead to the abolition of an emotion. As an example of this, take a person who suspects that, at this very moment, his spouse is cheating on him. This person knows where his spouse is, and wants to break in and confront her in the act. Doing so, he goes to the room where she is, breaks down the door and says "AHA!," only to immediately realize that she was indeed not cheating on him. At this moment, the powerful emotions of jealousy and fear that he had probably been feeling likely disappeared, perhaps leaving a residue of anxiety, but largely evaporating. These emotions were declared to be wrong or inappropriate given what was actually happening in the situation he arrived at.
How can it be the the knowledge that the emotions are wrong in this instance immediately lead to the emotions' demise while with the drunk or the obese person, the emotions persist in the knowledge that they are wrong? The reason for the difference, I reasoned, has to do with what I will call the logic of emotions. All emotional reactions are in some way logical. There are certain conditions under which they arise, and other conditions under which they are not activated. The ways that any given emotional reaction obey this is called their logic.
With the suspecting husband, the emotion disappeared immediately after he saw his wife alone because this sight changed the conditions that led to the emotion, making its presence no longer appropriate. With the alcoholic and the obese person, the realization that their pesky emotions were inappropriate did not violate the logic of the emotional response. Instead, their ideas about the drink/food desiring emotions being wrong was not part of the logical system governing the activation of these emotions.
The desire to drink operates in accordance with the conditions of a variety of factors in the alcoholic. First of all, drinking is equated with drunkenness, a positive state which, for the drunk, is preferable to the average non-drunk state. When the alcoholic is not drunk, the system governing the desire to drink is aware that the drunken state is currently unfulfilled, and puts pressure on the system to change this. If this particular alcoholic wants to stop drinking, this urge is, on an abstract logical level in the alcoholic's mind-the level that realizes the futility of drinking and the problems it causes-, subordinate to the desire to not drink. But this abstract logical level does not have complete control over the system.
The emotional logic that led to the desire to drink is unaffected by the knowledge that drinking is not a good solution. This does not change its conditions for activating the emotion. You might say that these are two logical systems speaking a different language.
At this point, it is now appropriate to bring in the alternative explanation for the emotional discord: the competition model. In the competition model, the outcome of competing and contradictory desires is control by the desire (the emotional-logical system) that is strongest at a particular time. While the realization model accounts for how the logical contradiction is not resolved, the competition model accounts for which logical system has the upper hand. In the case of the alcohol/food addict who cannot stop eating or drinking to excess, the emotional logical system governed by the satiated-drunk/non-satiated-sober awareness is stronger than the emotional logical system governed by the doing the right thing/not doing the right thing awareness. Presumably, their relative strength is a factor of the potency of the conceptual duality (drunk/sober, or "do right/do wrong").
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