I agree wholeheartedly with your thesis and would go as far as to say they ultimately we are the architect and constructor of our emotions. I’d like to point out an important nuance in that we ought to distinguish between the automatic non conscious affective (feeling) response to an external threat and the arbitrated conscious construction of an emotion. Your article deals with the latter. It’s our primitive nature to instinctively respond to an external threat with emotional pain but we should make it our responsibility to deconstruct that feeling into a positive emotion.

If you haven’t yet read “How Emotions are Made” by Lisa Feldman Barrett, I strongly recommend it.