“Thinking and Feeling”

Last week the therapist talked about how there’s a thought process behind feelings. This reminds me of something another therapist had tried to tell me before that I never could quite buy into. I’ve always thought (felt? Ha!) that emotions are just what they are, that they come up and that’s that. They can be dealt with or not, action taken or not, etc.

This is the second good therapist in a row to tell me that emotions aren’t just there, that they’re the result of a brain process, and that there’s thinking that happens first before the emotions come into play. Like, as in that’s how the brain itself is structured.

In my session, we got to talking specifically about what was the thinking behind all my uh shall we stay strong emotions about work. A bunch of stuff came up and out, but in the time that’s passed since then, I’ve been thinking about how I’ve been more relaxed, how work hasn’t been getting to me nearly as much, how I’ve been feeling good/better/etc.

Before I left last week, she talked about me working on that, interrupting that process. Like, that feeling of being angry about work is a well-travelled, well-worn path. It’s easy for me to do, feels good in that it’s so familiar, and also because of that, that’s why it’s so easy for me to fall into that rut. So the therapist gave me a suggestion for how to start breaking out of it. She said whenever I start to go down that emotional path, like where everything is intense and volatile, to examine the thinking behind what I’m feeling.

So I have been trying this in the week since my last appointment. It may have something to do with my feeling better. But mostly today when I see her I want to talk about the being let down by authority figures. Or I think disappointed was her word last week. It felt like something huge that we just hit on like right at the end of the appointment.