TRAP #9 - EMOTIONAL REASONING
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional roller coaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 74.
Hello, my friends. I am back with another episode on Mindset Traps, but I want to start by first saying thank you for listening and for sharing that this podcast is helpful for you. I love hearing from you and hearing about the impact these words are making in your life.
It's actually so interesting that when I started this podcast about 18 months ago, I felt so self-conscious and awkward. Have I ever shared that I'm actually an introvert? Many people are surprised when I share this, particularly now that I'm sharing some pretty personal stuff on this podcast and in social media. You know, even before this chapter in my life as a life coach, I've held jobs and leadership positions that have actually required me to put myself out there.
I still remember one of the first post-college jobs I had. Well, now that I'm thinking of it, it was probably my third job out of college. I was in the second half of my mid-20s, but this was the first job that ever required me to pretend to be somebody.
Here's what I mean. I was working in New York at a private equity company. We invested in technology companies and I was an associate, which basically meant I did all the grunt work.
I did the analysis and the research so the partners could make decisions about what type of investments they wanted to make. So here I was in my mid-20s. I'd become pretty decent at PowerPoint and Excel spreadsheets.
Give me a task and I was reliable and hardworking, but I hadn't developed any confidence in myself as a leader or a decision maker. So one of the parts of this job was that we had to meet with CEOs of technology companies so that they could give us a pitch about their business. And then we'd take that information, I'd do some analysis, and the partners would then make a decision about whether or not to make an investment.
It was kind of like they were coming to us with a commercial about their business, why they were the best and why we should put money into them to help them grow. So when you think about it, our firm as the investor had the power in this dynamic. So when these CEOs would come to meet with us, there was always a part of these meetings where we, the investment firm, had to tell them a little bit about our fund.
It was a 90-second spiel. We talked about how much money we had to invest, and believe it or not, it was in the billions. It was a pretty canned speech that I'd heard the partners of the firm deliver countless times.
Well, at some point, my partner started asking me to take these meetings on my own, or they would come late to meetings and I was left to deliver this 90-second spiel on my own. The first time it happened, I was taken totally off guard. I remember expecting the partner to join me, but then he didn't.
And there were two older men staring at me, these gentlemen who were from the technology company. I remember this whole scenario as if it happened in slow motion. I started to speak, but my mouth started going dry.
I just couldn't get the words out. I felt like I couldn't breathe. At one point, I just stopped talking, and then I fled the room.
This had never happened to me before. I was completely overwhelmed, paralyzed with fear. For the next year, I avoided taking these meetings on my own.
I was humiliated and deathly afraid that I would be in a position to croak again. I didn't admit what happened to my partners, of course. I just simmered in silent fear of being put into this position again.
You might be wondering why I'm sharing this story, so let me tie this to the topic of today's podcast. The mindset trap I want to explore today is emotional reasoning, a thinking error where we believe our emotions reflect reality, that we believe that our feelings represent the truth. And so then we go on to make decisions or judgments based on these feelings rather than objective evidence or facts.
So in this situation, I took my fear as evidence that I was entirely incapable of being confident and presenting myself professionally in these meetings. Without a doubt, I took this to mean I was terrible at public speaking, and so I'd shy away from any situation that might put me into the same position, humiliating myself again. I share this particular example for a few reasons.
First, I thought I'd share something not connected to our lives with our kids for a moment, because we can be so emotionally triggered by the things that happen with our kids that it can be tricky to know what reality is. So I thought this example might be safe in a way. Looking back at the situation, it's easier to see.
I was a young woman sitting in a room with two older professional men, and I was thinking I was in over my head. I remember distinctly thinking that they must be thinking I'm ridiculous. Who is this girl? And who does she think she is? I felt like a total imposter.
Whatever derogatory thoughts those men might have been having about me, if they were having any at all, I was having even worse thoughts about myself. So of course I felt petrified. The problem was I used my fear as evidence that there was a problem about me, rather than just acknowledging that my fear was 100% valid based on my perception of the situation.
My thoughts about myself created my feelings. My feelings were not an indication of me being incapable, but rather an indication that I thought I was. Do you see the difference? And let's fast forward to me launching this podcast in my 50th year on this planet.
I had zero podcasting experience. I think I had about a hundred followers at the time I started this podcast. Mostly my friends and family, thank you for continuing to listen.
And many of the same thoughts were actually available to me as I embarked on this podcasting journey. Okay, maybe I wasn't a young woman anymore, but now I'm a middle-aged woman in over my head. I definitely had thoughts that people listening might think I'm ridiculous.
Who is this woman? And who does she think she is? I definitely felt like an imposter sometimes. But here's the big difference between the two situations. Other than 25 years, this time around, I had absolutely no expectation that I would be anything other than petrified.
Of course I was embarking on something new, putting myself out there. I was scared, but also I decided this fear didn't mean anything about me. It didn't prove I was incapable or that I couldn't figure it out.
The fear was just something I was going to have to live with until I stopped thinking about putting myself out there as scary. So emotional reasoning is when we use our feelings as evidence that there's a problem. I actually think this mindset trap is one of the most insidious thought areas we can fall into.
Unlike some of the others that I've been exploring in this series on mindset traps we fall into as moms of teens as we approach the empty nest, this is a trap we don't hear much about. Others in the series are maybe a bit more obvious, at least in terms of their broad definition. When you hear the phrases perfectionism, catastrophizing, or validation seeking, you probably have a pretty good idea about what those traps are and why they can be a problem.
And if you've been following along with this series, one of the most interesting parts of what I'm exploring in these traps is how they are our brain's way of protecting us, trying to keep us safe from danger, a way for our brains to sift through the information we perceive in the world. You could call it an attempt at mental efficiency. It can even be our brain's way of seeking pleasure or at the very least feeling better.
Emotional reasoning is a trap I've found that we often think is just the truth. I feel something and therefore I think that must mean that those feelings are based on some objective reality, something true out in the world. I want to explore a few simple examples and then I'll go into how this trap plays out in our lives with teens.
Let's say I feel hurt. Maybe I feel offended or ignored, maybe unappreciated or taken for granted. What we typically do is that then we decide that the person with whom we associate that hurt has hurt us.
In other words, we might say, they hurt me or they hurt my feelings. Look, we've been talking about people hurting our feelings ever since we were little kids. Kids on the playground hurting our feelings, girlfriends being mean and hurting our feelings, old boyfriends hurting us, maybe not physically but emotionally.
He hurt me when he broke up with me. We feel this negative feeling and then we associate it with some other person who caused that feeling and then we blame that person. Sounds very reasonable and almost obvious, right? But here's where the trap of emotional reasoning comes in.
We feel hurt and we take this feeling as evidence that there's a problem. In this case, evidence to support our belief that the other person has hurt us. Let me ask you something.
Has anyone ever accused you of hurting their feelings? Now it's possible that you are a very nice person and this has never happened to you, but even under the best circumstances, when you've done everything in your power to be a nice person and do the right thing, nevertheless, it's entirely possible that another person could say to you that you hurt them or let them down in some way. Maybe it's a girlfriend, a sister, a co-worker, your mom, almost definitely your kids. You've tried your best and despite all of your best efforts, this other person has said to you, you let me down.
You hurt my feelings. You made me feel unappreciated. Okay, so in this example, you didn't try to hurt the other person and yet they feel hurt.
So who's right? Did you hurt the other person because they say you did or did you not hurt them because you know you didn't try to do anything wrong? As moms and honestly as women, we so often find ourselves taking the blame even when we didn't intentionally do anything wrong, even when we've been honestly trying our best. But as we explore this mindset trap of emotional reasoning, I want to invite you to separate the feelings from the facts of what happened. Let's say, just as a crazy example, that you don't text your kid who's at college for a few days.
Let's say you spoke to them on Sunday but then you didn't text them and suddenly it's Thursday. So your teenager texts you, mom, I'm hurt you haven't to check in on me. You don't even care.
Strike a knife to the heart, right? I share this example because at least in my experience, I am much more likely to be waiting on a text from my son than for him to be waiting on one for me. But bear with me as I work through this example. So the facts are mom hasn't texted in four days.
The college kid feels hurt and is using this as evidence that mom doesn't care, which we can all imagine is so not the truth. Who knows why mom didn't text? Most likely because she didn't want to harass her child at school. It's so hard to judge the right amount to reach out to your kids when they're away.
So now the teenager's hurt. Most likely mom's feeling guilty. But here's all that's happening.
The fact is mom hasn't texted for four days. That's it. Until you make that fact mean something, there's no intention, no actual meaning.
But the college kid is interpreting this fact to mean that mom doesn't care and therefore they feel hurt. They don't feel hurt because of the lack of texts. They feel hurt because of what they're making the lack of texts mean.
The trap of emotional reasoning has that teen feeling justified in their belief that mom did something wrong all because they feel hurt. Now it may be more common for us as moms to feel hurt because our kids don't text us or leave us on read as our kids might say. I can't tell you how many texts I've sent to my boys that have gone unanswered for some period of time.
Now if I were to feel hurt by this, I could either blame my sons for hurting me or I can take responsibility for how I'm interpreting the facts of the situation and understand it's these thoughts, my interpretation of the situation that's causing and creating my hurt, not my son's lack of texts. The bottom line is other people can't hurt us without our permission. People say and do all sorts of things all of the time and none of it has any impact on us until we have a thought about it.
Let's take a different example. Let's say we feel loved. Now I want you to imagine back in time in your life when you found yourself falling in love for the first time.
You know those heady, exciting early days of love when it almost takes your breath away. Now of course you associate this feeling with the person with whom you're falling in love and because of this feeling you might decide that this person is really special. You might even have thought that they're the one, a soulmate.
Now that we're in midlife, we may have fallen in love with more than one person. Many of us might be divorced or separated from the father of our children. So for whatever reason, this person we presumably loved deeply early on in our relationship, we feel very differently about now.
And let's face it, even those of us who are married may still love our partners but that love feels like a very different emotion than it did when we first fell in love with them. So does the fact that the love has changed or even ended mean that the original feeling of love, that falling in love feeling, wasn't real? I mean think about this. It's the same person.
Maybe they've changed a little bit over time but at this person's core they're still the same human being. If they were the ones who caused the feeling, why has our feeling changed? The reality is it's actually not the person who caused the feeling of love. Your thoughts about that person caused the feeling.
So in the beginning your thoughts were, this is exciting and new, being with this person is amazing, I can't wait to see him. You had exciting thoughts which created that exciting feeling of love. As time went on, your thoughts about the person changed.
It could be that your thoughts changed because of some behavior you witnessed or some change in the way your partner was acting. But still, the love was created by you, by your thoughts. Just like with hurt, someone can't make you feel love without your permission.
So crazy to explore this, right? How much actual power we have in creating our own emotional experience. Today we live in a culture where people like to talk about the validity of their feelings. And look, yes, feelings are always valid because we feel them.
I don't think it's ever useful or helpful to debate with someone else about how they feel. If I feel hurt, I feel sad, I feel love, whatever I feel, that's valid and true for me right now. But there is a difference between feelings being valid and our feelings being true.
Said another way, your feelings are valid but that doesn't mean they're true. Now some people might hear this and want to respond, you're gaslighting me. In other words, when we gaslight someone we might challenge or make someone doubt the way they think or feel.
So I want to be very clear, you get to feel whatever you feel. But also know that your feelings are based on your own perspective about the situation. And that perspective is not the truth.
It's based on your subjective point of view. Now emotional reasoning involves thinking our feelings are evidence that our perspective is true. And guess what? You also get to think whatever you want to think about a situation as well.
If you want to feel hurt because you think your child should text you more, it's entirely up to you. If you want to feel unappreciated because your kids don't say thank you and you think that they should, you get to have that point of view. This conversation isn't about your feelings being wrong or about the way you think about your life being wrong.
Instead it's about taking responsibility for the way you're thinking. It's building an awareness that your thoughts create your emotional experience. Now as I've explored with the other mindset traps in this series, there's a reason that our minds use our feelings as evidence to confirm our view of the world.
Emotional reasoning is fueled by our brain's subconscious desire to keep us safe. Our emotions, including fear, anxiety, and other negative emotions, serve as signals or alarm bells that alert us to potential threats or dangers in our world. Now as you can imagine, this was very important in the days of early man when our fears alerted us to dangers in our environment and then led us to take measures to protect ourselves.
Still today, the subconscious work of our brains keeps us safe. When it's raining or snowing, you don't have to spend a lot of time thinking about driving safely. You just notice a lump in your throat as driving becomes treacherous and you slow down.
You put on your hazard lights. You take actions to keep yourself safe. Now there are absolutely times when our feelings are based on very reasonable interpretations of the facts.
For example, when we experience a negative emotion, it can be a sign that our brain is perceiving a potential threat or a problem. And when we have these negative emotions, our fight-or-flight response gets activated and we get prepared to respond to those dangers. You can even think about it as our fight-or-flight response empowering us to make decisions quickly.
And this is an incredibly powerful skill set to have when we're in a dangerous or problematic situation. But not every situation involves danger or is a threat or a serious problem. So while emotional reasoning might protect us in these situations, when we're not in danger, emotional reasoning involves a subjective evaluation of situations based on how we feel in that moment.
So here's how emotional reasoning acts as a trap. When we're not taking responsibility for the thoughts that create our feelings, we can find ourselves acting on the feeling alone, which can lead to errors when our emotional response or our reaction to the situation is out of line with the circumstances of the situation. Now in our lives with teens, there are so many ways emotional reasoning can get the better of us.
I've said many times before that with our kids, we feel so much. Of course we do. And so the emotions we have about our kids run deep.
The hopes and the fears we have for them, the love we have for them, these are some pretty serious, powerful emotions. And so of course we have powerful reactions and responses at times to these emotions. But if we're not careful, we're likely to believe that our emotions reflect objective reality or the truth.
We then make decisions, form judgments, or take actions based on how we feel, rather than taking the time to evaluate whether our feelings are based on a reasonable, well-informed interpretation of the facts. Let's say your teen gets a low grade in class. We go immediately to anxiety.
We think the low grade is causing our anxiety, and so we jump to action. We start questioning our child about getting extra help. We might remind them to study.
We suggest that they talk to their teacher. And this isn't to say that any of these reactions are wrong, but if we step back for a second, we can take responsibility for our anxiety. We feel this fear, not because of the low grade, but because of what we're making that low grade mean.
Most likely we're making it mean that our kid is struggling, that they're likely to get more bad grades if we don't do something now. Emotional reasoning has us reacting to our anxiety as if our assessment of the situation, that our kid is struggling, is true. But what if it's not? Here's another example, something that's come up for a number of my clients as our kids settle into the new school year and work through homecoming dances and other school events.
Sometimes our kids sit out. They don't go to the dance or go out to the parties. Again, this can bring up anxiety for us.
The underlying thought we have is that our child might be lonely, that they're missing out, that they're struggling socially, and don't have a close group of friends. This can feel like a big problem, particularly if we're the kind of person who might have been really involved socially when we were growing up. Our kids' experience might not match our own, and we can feel really worried.
Emotional reasoning has us feeling anxiety about our kid's social life and taking this as evidence that there truly is a problem. We start to encourage our kid to go out. We ask them about their friends.
Honestly, we can even go so far, harping on our child's social life, to the point where they start to realize we think it's a problem that they're not social. We use our fear as evidence that there's a problem, rather than considering that the only thing that's happening is that we have an expectation around what our child's social life should look like, and their experience doesn't meet our expectations. That's it.
Could it be our child's lonely? Sure. But this conversation is about taking responsibility for your feelings about your child's experience, and making sure that those feelings are based on a thorough exploration of what's really true. Have you taken time to ask your child how they're feeling about their grade? Maybe they're already taking steps to address it.
Does your teen really feel left out, or would they honestly rather hang out at home than drive around aimlessly looking for a party? With our kids, our emotions run high. I say often that we find ourselves on a literal emotional roller coaster, and many of my clients will tell me that they have a hard time not feeling anxious or sad if their child is going through something. And let me be clear, I don't think the goal of life is to not feel.
Every emotion—love, fear, guilt, shame, happiness, anxiety, joy—all of these feelings are a part of the human experience. And when we feel these feelings, they're always valid. They're always what's true for us at that moment.
But understanding that our feelings are based on our view of our lives can save you from feeling like you have no power to feel better or to control your reactions and responses to the way you feel. When one of my sons is in pain, I can also feel emotional pain because of course I don't want them to be in pain. But the truth is, sometimes they are.
I can fight the reality of that, try to control their emotions so that I can feel better. Or I can just feel sad that they're hurting and trust that they know I'm here if they need me. Emotional reasoning would have me trying to control the world just so my sons will never feel hurt or sad.
I've learned that this is not in my power. Not anymore. Maybe it never was.
My sons, our children, are interpreting the world in their own way, with their own perspective. And that point of view is creating their feelings. And sometimes they may even also fall into the trap of emotional reasoning, blaming their feelings on others, the circumstances of their lives, even blaming us, their moms, who would do anything to take away their pain.
Except we can't. The only power we have is to take responsibility for how we perceive the circumstances of our lives. And this is a powerful skill.
And it's actually also what I teach in my one-on-one coaching program, MOM 2.0. This mindset trap, emotional reasoning, is one of the most insidious traps. But once you have the skill of getting out of this trap, a whole new world of emotional freedom and acceptance becomes available to you. Your feelings are valid, but it doesn't mean they're true.
A coach's job is to help you decide what you want to believe on purpose, so that you can live the life you want to live, experience the emotional life you want to experience on purpose, with intention, and without feeling totally out of control of your emotions.
Until next time, friends.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program, MOM 2.0, at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
