I will write too even though we have spoken about this in person, it might provide some reference but also it might become clearer where my explanations didn’t quite do it.
For me it was Claudiu’s explanation that did it with regards to affective awareness. Because I discovered actualism after having spent time doing vipassana meditation and therefore essentially practicing dissociation.
Claudiu’s recommendation was to intuitively sense out the ‘flavour’ of each emotion. That there might be behaviours, thoughts and bodily sensations associated with emotions and yet those are not the emotions themselves.
Emotions are not experienced in the same way that behaviours, thoughts and bodily sensations are experienced, they are experienced intuitively. Each emotion has it’s own affective ‘flavour’, fear has a different ‘flavour’ to love for example.
The task is to become exquisitely aware of just how am I experiencing this moment of being alive, each moment again (which for a feeling being will always be done affectively) Essentially what ‘flavour’ is happening right now? Once this becomes a habit then you will have an affective awareness up and running, which means that cognitive engagement can be applied to whatever else that is going on. Which means that each time this ‘flavour’ changes from the felicitous and innocuous feelings and over to the ‘good’ and the bad feelings you cannot help but be aware, then you have something to look at to find out when, where, why and what for this change took place.