Emotions and reason: Who is in charge?

Who hasn't struggled with the attempts to consciously let go of the certain parts of their past in order to create a new, better future? Analysing our past situations, going over the conversations and interactions with others - thinking about what and how could have we said and done things better, plagues most of us for days and months at some points in life. We often blame our emotions for finding ourselves in difficult situations. Yet, simply understanding the past and deciding to ignore our emotions does not guarantee that we will not repeat the same mistakes again. I often hear from my clients: "I know it in my head, but I simply can't change how I feel about it." Why is it that even when we set out to change things consciously and walk the new path, we often find ourselves in the same situations over and over again? Therefore, when we want to make new, better decisions in the future, should we follow our emotions or our reason?

            Life includes feeling things as much as knowing and understanding them. And although we are often well equipped and comfortable in using our reason, when it comes to emotions, only few of us know what to do and how to utilise them. The truth is: if our reason, our emotions and our values are not aligned, we find ourselves running in circles and making poor choices depending who is in the driver's seat, our reason or our emotions. Until we look at our life with broader lenses and see patterns and quiet inner beliefs about ourselves and the world that we have concocted early on in childhood and still hold onto, not much can change. This includes allowing yourself to feel, sometimes very painful and distressing emotions, and then deciding to understand and learn from them instead of spend lifetime avoiding them. Emotions hold crucial and valuable pieces of information about our inner worlds: the more we learn to treat emotions as information and work with them in conjunction with our minds to broaden understanding of ourselves, the faster we will be able to create lives that we enjoy now.

            However, when we want to change, moving away from what is familiar is the most difficult part. Familiar ways of relating to others always have a very strong pull and yet, they often do not equate to what is good for us. It is easy to fall back into it: interplay of our own assumptions and people’s propensity to eventually step into roles that we provide for them is a very powerful dynamic. Therefore, in order to allow a different future to unfold we need quite a different set of skills: we need to explore our inner worlds, see ourselves in a new light, understand our emotions and our thinking and change our own tendency to rely on the protective, old narratives and patterns drawn from the past experiences that no longer serve us well anyhow.