Are we sure that "Emotions are byproducts of thought processes"? In my experience is certainly true when we have recurrent thoughts which entrap the mind into a certain loop of emotions. Our attention goes to one object, for example "authoritarian violence":), and enjoy many many thoughts on it, fostering a specific feeling. But in other cases I see deeply that thoughts are just the cream of the coffee. There's a much more profound and non-verbal field that contains emotions and generally when we work with them and understand them we have much more profound realizations compared with working with thoughts.

So we can ask: why these attacks are so powerful psychologically? We can understand their material power (threats, exclusion, violence etc), but is our feeling of separateness really depending on their conditioning or on something much more profound in our psyche? And has it something to do with our God/parents as Waters and you brilliantly pointed out?