From Essays After Montaigne
And the thing we call to help us, and keepe us company in so great and hazardous an adventure, ought, as much as possible may be, lie still in our disposition and absolute power. As I would counsell a gentleman to chuse the shortest weapons, and such as he may best assure himselfe of: It is most apparant that a man may better assure himselfe of a sword he holdeth in his hand, than of a bullet shot out of a pistoll, to which belong so many severall parts, as powder, stone, locke, snap-hanse, harrell, stocke, scowring-peece, and many others, whereof if the least faile, or chance to breake, and be distempered, it is able to overthrow, to hazard, or miscarry your fortune. Seldome doth that blow come or light on the marke it is aymed at, which the ayre doth carry.
In Upheavals of Thought, her weighty treatise on the intelligence of emotions, Martha Nussbaum portrays emotion as a cognitive and evaluative adaptation to a threatening world:
As Freud writes,... the story of human birth is the story of the emergence of a sentient being from the womb of secure narcissism to the sharp perception that it is cast adrift in a world of objects, a world that it has not made and does not control. In that world, the infant is aware of being an unusually weak and helpless being. Bodily pain is nothing by contrast to the terrifying awareness of helplessness, close to unendurable without the shelter of a womblike sleep. When we wake up, we have to figure out how to live in that world of objects. Without the intelligence of the emotions, we have little hope of confronting that problem well.
For her, emotions are a way of protecting us from the reality that many of the entities and events crucial to our thriving are beyond our control (as horses and pistols were crucial to combat in Montaigne's time, but not always sufficiently under the combatants' control). Emotions are self-interested assessments of value rather than irrational animal impulses, and they allow a far more flexible sense of self that includes that which we care about. This definition of emotions erases the distinction between thought and emotion and blurs the distinction between the individual and her environment. Nussbaum spends more than seven hundred pages making her case, so I can't reasonably expect to fully explain her ideas or convince anyone of their brilliance here (though if you're so inclined, I encourage you to read the book), but I've found her perspective very helpful while trying to understand my own struggles with emotion.
I've never been convinced of the distinction between thought and emotion. Can you think of an embarrassing situation without feeling embarrassed? Can you feel embarrassment without thinking of an embarrassing situation? I cannot. You feel embarrassment not simply because you're in an embarrassing situation, but because you think that situation is embarrassing. That evaluation is a necessary part of the experience. Being told since I was very young that I think too much and don't feel enough hasn't been especially helpful. It led me off on a search for something other than what I knew to be happening in my own mind. I thought that if I could just figure out what made people cry or made them dance (Was it physical? Did it come from the soul, about which I'd heard much and knew little?), I would know how to feel. I didn't know that the anxiety, sadness, pain, and hope that drove, colored, and grew out of so much of my mental activity were feelings. I didn't know this because I rarely expressed them, so the people around me couldn't tell me that they were actually emotions.
To be comfortable with emotions, to give them adequate attention and expression, you have to recognize and be comfortable with the lack of control over your surroundings that they've evolved to manage. Growing up in a chaotic home, feeling as though I wasn't looked after, I needed to believe that I controlled what happened to me, since it didn't seem that anyone else did. I wasn't in the frame of mind to explore my helplessness, so I wasn't ready to explore my emotions. I exerted the control that I needed by keeping them at one remove. But that's not the same as not feeling them. I need to learn not how to feel, but how to pay attention and give expression to what I am feeling. Now that I know what I'm trying to do, I'm much more likely to do it well.
8:23:03 AM 
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