Example being that an abandoned baby will feel both sad, but more likely terror...they make horribly pained faces, grip with their bodies, cry, then scream (no "thoughts" involved whatsoever)
I just want to comment on this, but not to derail - it's easy to think that 'thought' is tied to 'language' - but it's not. When examining the basic primal emotions, there is still a kind of cause and effect - in this case, alone (no caregiver) equals some emotion (depending on whatever the child is feeling, from sad to scared to hungry to bored to terrified), leads to physical action - just as you described,
@Chava
Cognitive theory does not say that thoughts precede emotions; only that, in the adult brain, there is a causal relationship between thought and emotion - an emotion can cause a thought, can cause an emotion, can cause a thought...and so on. It's easier to catch the 'thought' and work with it, that's why people tend to take away the notion that 'thoughts come first'.
Generally, in a human being, stimulus creates response. When a baby is hungry, it wants to eat, and it will make noise until it is fed. That noise could be described as communicating everything from pain to anger to terror - depending on what's happening with the baby, the presence or absence of the caregiver, and the food (or lack thereof). Emotions are ultimately a response to
something, but what that something is can be really hard to pin down, especially if it's something that was learned when you were pre-verbal, in your infancy.
I get a kind of wordless, bottomless pit, sad/scared feeling. It sometimes comes along with a really strange physical sensation as well. I know it's tied to something like 'alone' or 'abandoned'...I can kind of feel that thought inside it somewhere. When it hits me, I'll cry and cry, and it's really hard to make it stop, or to manage or modulate it. It used to be impossible to change it, I just needed to wait. Now, I can sometimes get on top of it again. What has changed - the reason why I can get out of the pit, I think - really has to do with trauma processing. Because even though this feeling seems to be from younger that four years old, and maybe is pre-verbal, it somehow became attached to various events throughout my life - like, as an infant I learned something about being left alone and not helped or cared for, and so, when that dynamic was replicated in other situations as I grew up, my mind and body referred back to that original learning, the original stimulus/response of alone/cry/abandoned/despair.
Working on the things that I can talk about, can remember - and processing them in therapy - seems to have a kind of global effect, where when I hit that feeling, it's just the tiniest bit not as uncontrollable.
Anyway, that's my babble about sadness and the brain.
