by William Taboas, M.A.
There is always a part of us that thinks: “because I feel it, it’s true”. We even have expressions that reinforce this notion in the English language. Instead of stating “I think that so-and-so doesn’t like me”, we tend to say “I feel like so-and-so doesn’t like me”. When we express the “I feel like”, instead of the “I think that”, we communicate to others that our feelings make the thought true. And this is the part we need to defuse: emotions are emotions, but not facts.
Emotional reasoning is a cognitive process when a person concludes that because the emotion is present, the perceived reasons for having the emotion are true. For instance: “I feel anxious, therefore the threat is true and terrible.” The notion of emotional reasoning is simple, but preventing it from happening is an impossible endeavor.
To be clear, having an emotion is a fact. There is no denying the presence of an emotion. But we as humans tend to be pretty inaccurate in our fact checking and perspective taking when we are in an emotional state. Even those among us who think we are the most intuitive, our hit rate tends to be less than chance. There is plenty of evidence out there substantiating that cognitions (thoughts) can be state-dependent. And when we give in to emotional reasoning, we then reinforce and perpetuate the emotional response, for better or worse. Our challenge is to let the emotional dust settle, so to speak, in order for mental clarity to take place.
