Emotions are Experiences of the Brain
Let me speak to the particularly human madness of believing that thoughts and emotions are one thing and your heart beating is an entirely different thing.
Inside your body you have tissue, hormones, neurotransmitters, neurons exchanging electrical impulses. Some of these tissues make up your heart, lungs, kidneys, muscles, some of these tissues make up your brain, vegus nerve, HPA axis (flight or flight trigger), adrenal glands. What people call emotions are merely your experience of the tissue’s well being in your brain or functions in your central nervous system. Isn’t it funny that if you have a pain in your stomach, people are like, ah, sorry about that, maybe take some medication or see a doctor, but if you experience pain from your central nervous system, people are like “it’s just in your head”, “Don’t feel like that”, “you’re not being rational”. If you have gall stones and are in intense pain, people are frantic to get you help, they don’t blame you at all, but if your prefrontal cortex has experienced years of stress and abuse and your brain has collapsed into a depressed state people are like “well, just think positive, you’ll feel better”. Are you getting how asinine this response is? There is no separation between the medical and the psychological. They are the same systems and the same experiences.
And the solutions are the same. You aren’t responsible for having gall stones, but you are responsible for caring for yourself, taking reasonable actions to heal and to ensure you no longer suffer. You aren’t responsible for being clinically depressed, but you are responsible for leaving the environment that continuously assaults your prefrontal cortex and triggers your HPA axis until your brain collapses into exhaustion (depression). You are responsible for seeing a therapist or taking other actions that care for your brain and bring it back to healthy functioning.