Should we trust our brain--or our gut? That's the question. The answer, though, is more complicated than most people realize. Somehow, over the past few decades it's become conventional wisdom that we should put our faith in our feelings. That is, if we feel something--especially if we feel it intensely--then it deserves to be seen as valid, or truthful. The adage "trust your feelings" has by now become almost axiomatic. But ultimately, how logical--or, how safe--is it to conclude that if we feel something strongly, we should both believe it and permit it to control our behavior?
The very essence of cognitive-behavioral therapy (and ratonal emotive behavior therapy as well) is derived from the theory that how we think determines how we feel. But as this theory itself might ask, if our thoughts are exaggerated, distorted--or, for that matter, downright delusional--how can we possibly place our faith in any feelings that stem from such irrational thoughts? Are we not in a GIGO type of situation here (i.e., garbage in, garbage out)? For if our thoughts are erroneous, or based on false assumptions, the feelings tied to these thoughts are bound to be equally distorted--and hardly to be trusted.
To give some examples, if we mistakenly interpret a situation as dangerous, the anxiety or panic that we'll feel--however intense--will still be groundless, because it's not reality-based. Or if we irrationally perceive our situation as hopeless--despite the fact that several options exist that could extricate us from our quandary--the depression we'll experience will be similarly illogical. Or finally, if we were overindulged as children and grew up with the narcissistic assumption that we deserved to get everything we wanted, then when we're older and subject to a world that fails to cater to our desires, we'll probably feel we're being treated unfairly. And consequently, we'll experience a great deal of self-righteous anger, even indignation. But since our sense of entitlement was false to begin with, our keenly felt anger will be without reasonable justification.
In further reviewing why it's so important to be wary of letting our feelings dictate our behavior, it's also crucial to distinguish between emotions not rationally linked to present-day circumstances and what I'll call true "gut feelings," e very essence of cognitive-behavioral therapy (and indistinguishable from intuition. When, say, a woman feels markedly uncomfortable (or "spooked") in an elevator she's sharing with a stranger, it's only prudent that she exit at the next floor. And it needs to be added that her taking such a precaution is guided not so much by the diffuse emotion of anxiety--which might suggest an exaggerated distrust of strangers based on personal history--but by a more instinctual, fear-based response, itself derived from her innate intuitive faculties. As I see it, genuine intuition (as a survival mechanism hard-wired into all of us) can be safely relied upon. It's inherently trustworthy, whereas our emotions need to be viewed much more cautiously.
Going back to the elevator example, if a woman routinely feels threatened whenever she's alone with an unfamiliar male, there's far less reason to think that her trepidation is intuitive or reality-based. In such a case, what most likely would be setting off her anxiety is some unresolved disturbance, or trauma, from the past--something that left her "sensitized" (or over-reactive) to particular situations in which she couldn't help but experience herself as out of control. Possibly, she was physically attacked or raped, or grew up in a home with a father who, unpredictable and/or authoritarian, regularly intimidated or physically abused her.
In fact, any present-day susceptibility to an emotion originates from some past experience(s) that we've never had the opportunity to adequately resolve. In a sense, all of us are "taught" how to feel as a result of prior learning. Because our minds work through analogy and association, whenever a situation reminds us, consciously or unconsciously, of a disturbing event from the past, we're compelled--or better, "cued"--to respond to that situation just as we did earlier.
The here-and-now experience may be only coincidentally related to the past one. There may be no meaningful connection at all between what just happened to us and what we experienced years ago. But if the present-day circumstance "triggers" us, we'll still react to it as though it were a recurrence of the original situation. Regressing to an earlier emotional state, in the moment our rational mind is impaired, unable to function logically. In short, in such instances our emotions do not derive from the current circumstance--and are, therefore, not to be trusted.
So-called transference reactions operate in the same way. In such instances, someone in the present unconsciously reminds us of a person from our past--typically someone with whom we had significant problems. In a sort of temporary "trance," we're beset with an emotional distress linked not to what's going on in the present but to what took place perhaps decades ago. And the person we're now dealing with, regardless of their superficial similarity to the figure from our past (a hook nose? particular inflection? unusual gait? sameness in dress?), may be vastly dissimilar from the person who sensitized us in the first place.
Just as our thoughts govern our emotions, our emotions in turn govern our behavior. So unless we're able to do an on-the-spot reality check, we're in danger of reacting to such present-day "prompts" in a way that may be completely inappropriate and self-defeating. Plainly, we can harm a relationship if in the here-and-now we deal with that person as though he or she were some phantom from our past. It's as though we're presented with one set of stimuli and--because of personal biases we're totally oblivious of--we react as though we'd been presented with an altogether different set of stimuli. Once again, our emotions-however deeply felt-can end up betraying us.
I once worked with a woman who as a young child had been repeatedly molested by her father. Having only recently recovered memories of her past sexual abuse, she still harbored great rage and resentment toward him. At the end of one of our sessions, I inadvertently used an expression that turned out to be identical to one her father frequently employed in talking to her. When I saw her the following week, she shared that in driving home from our last session, she began to experience the most hateful feelings toward me, which she was unable to rationally account for but which nonetheless determined her to call me as soon as she got home to terminate all future treatment . . . that is, until she suddenly realized that in the deepest recesses of her mind she had confused me with her father merely because of the "familiar" (read, family) phrase I had used. As soon as her adult, rational mind was able to regain control and thereby neutralize her vastly heightened (but wildly distorted) emotions--as soon as she could grasp that it was her "child self" that had made this fortuitous, false comparison--she was immediately able, as it were, to "rehire" me.
Each of us has likely had an experience during which another seemed blatantly to misread us, to attribute to us sentiments or motives that we ourselves could barely recognize. Unless we're truly obtuse and virtually without insight into our behavior, it's likely that in such a situation we, too, got mis-identified with somebody from that person's past. In fact, in these instances it's prudent to respond to the other person by saying that no one's ever reacted to us quite this way before, inquiring whether possibly we may be reminding that person of someone else. Just as we ourselves may occasionally need to undertake a reality check to ascertain that what we're responding to does in fact relate to what's actually taking place, at times we may want to request that another perform such a check themselves.
