I Feel Therefore I Am

Why feelings beat thoughts

Do you like my clever title? I’ve tweaked René Descartes famous statement of “I think, therefore I am.” It might seem strange that I’d do this because I’m a therapist and a coach. And both professions are very interested in thoughts.

In fact, there are whole schools of intervention based on what thoughts are rattling around in that brain of yours. Are thoughts irrelevant? No. But feelings are faster than thoughts. Perhaps we need to focus more on feelings.

Whenever we get data from the outside world, it reaches the brain twice. Once to decipher the level of threat, and secondly, via a longer route, that adds some thinking.

A friend of mine once hid behind a door for the sole purpose of leaping out at me as I walked unwittingly past.

I was mid scream and jump even as I realised it was just him.

The threat response moved by body before the thought response had even reached me.

Here’s another question. Have you ever been very activated by a situation, maybe a dispute with a loved one? Your nervous system goes into fight or flight and you have all kinds of thoughts about what’s happening in that moment.

Then several hours later, from a more regulated nervous system state, you reflect back and think of it completely differently.

Isn’t it interesting how changes in the nervous system change our thoughts?

Increasingly therapists are beginning to recognise the primacy of the feeling over the thought. Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory stressed the leadership of the nervous system. Writers like Bessel van der Kolk write about how the body keeps the score.

It’s an interesting shift from the brain to the body, and one that I champion in my own work.

Whenever I work with a client, I explore by following a model I created called The I Feel Triangle.

As you can see it covers three bases in response to a given situation:

1. What are the body sensations? This tells us how the nervous system shows up in the body.

2. What are the emotions? This tells us if they feel sad, angry, scared or something else.

3. What meaning is placed on it? Notice how we use the phrase “I feel” in ways that refer neither to sensations or emotions, but to our felt sense of what is going on.

This lets me delve into the implicit, limbic system responses being played out. In turn, this helps me begin the deeper discovery of why these responses seem necessary.

The I Feel Triangle helps to reveal knowings that the cognitive brain wasn’t aware of.

I suppose this is why the French wisely have two words for knowing. Savoir is for knowing a fact. Connaitre is to know by experience. Savoir is to know that Paris exists. Connaitre is to have walked through its streets and smelled the aroma of the bakeries.

Memory reconsolidation is the only known brain mechanism that can overwrite implicit memory responses that originate from emotional learning. The formula for doing so is: ACTIVATION + MISMATCH + REPEAT.

The I Feel Triangle helps me connect to the Activation so helps me then explore why this response is essential. It shifts from the shallow knowing of the mind, to the deep experiential knowing of the body.

Discovery is deeper here and delivers quicker breakthroughs.