Imagine walking into a store not exactly sure what you’re looking for. In fact, you’ve gone to store after store, looking for “it” but not sure what “it” looks like and not even sure if you’d recognize it when you see it.
But this thing that’s missing from your life is very important. It’s central, in fact. And no one out there is “selling” it.
That is unfortunate. Because the thing that people in relationships need most is to discover what they FEEL. And why. That “why” is a biggie. How many times have you found yourself in a bad mood and not known why? You just could not pinpoint it. So how in the world are you supposed to get out of it if you can’t figure out what caused it? Yet that is exactly how must of us live. We feel miserable and don’t know why so we take it out on the people we love – or on ourselves. Or we go off and escape with additions. It’s all the same thing: It’s an effort to get out of our bad feelings.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could immediately figure out what caused us to feel as we do? Imagine knowing exactly who or what circumstance caused the emotion, when it happened and what exact feeling it caused. And further, knowing what the exact remedy is if the feeling is bad or what to do to stay in the good mood and not let anything spoil it if the feeling is good.
But there’s MORE: *Emotions are the single most valuable source of all decision making.* Here are some facts to support this:
*In his book, Incignito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, David Eagleman relates that the left hemisphere of the brain – the part that governs language acquisition – has to make meaning out of our actions. So, researchers asked subjects to read a paragraph from a book. Half of the subject were given a pencil to hold between their teeth while reading. Note that they all read the same paragraph. Here’s the clincher: People who had the pencil in their mouth thought the material was funnier! Why? – Because the pencil made them smile. Their brain therefore “decided” the information was funnier.
*In another study, in the Annual Review of Psychology, people were studied who suffered injuries to the part of their brain that integrates thinking and emotion. These subjects were found to make riskier financial decisions because they were not getting “emotional signals” that healthy people would get which would feel like a fear of high risks. When researchers talked to these people, they cognitively understood the high risks, but this understanding was not experienced at a feeling level.
*The reviewers point out that this is quite common among people without any brain impairment. For example, although the death rate for auto accidents is higher than it is for plane crashes, people with a fear of flying will choose to drive to their distant destinations.
*And here’s one that’s super applicable to our topic from the same journal: “Anger triggered in one situation automatically elicits a motive to blame individuals in other situations even though the targets of such anger have nothing to do with the source of the anger.”
So let’s review everything we know about the role of emotions in our behavior:
- Most of it is unconscious. We don’t know what motivates us but we find ourselves making choices anyway.
- We explain, justify, or rationalize these choices because we need to make sense to ourselves – even when the rationalization is quite irrational.
David Hume summarized this in 1738 when he said, “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”
How about that?
Now think about the decisions that YOU or your loved ones have made:
- to divorce or separate
- to blame, criticize or become angry
- to be angry at YOURSELF, often hatefully so
- to choose a career path that is not at your skill level because of fear of success
and so many more things we do.
Any approach to saving your marriage – and saving your own sanity – must take into account the world of emotions. It must help you get past the unconscious barriers to understanding yourself so that you can be free to choose what is REALLY in your best interest rather than something irrational supplied by your brain that scrabbles to make meaning out of chaos and doesn’t always serve you well in that process.
Not only that, it must help you to understand the emotions of your partner who ALSO is functioning under the same restrictions of irrationality that all of the human species does. She or he is no different from the rest of us in that respect. And if it is tricky to understand yourself, it is clearly harder to understand another person. And that is especially the case where that other person doesn’t even understand themself!
Yet, without that important skill, all communication breaks down. There is no way around this requirement. And that is where Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is at a loss. Cognitive therapists try hard to break down irrational beliefs. But without understanding the underlying feelings and where they come from, this task can and often will fail. In the realm of cure for broken marriages, no one else out there – no other coach, mentor, or therapist – teaches you how to read your own and your spouses’ feelings. To learn more about this, book a call, https://drdeb.com/book.