Putting emotional reasoning in its place

As a woman in my mid 50’s I’ve gone through a number of developmental stages and life transitions, with the most recent being menopause. I never really thought of menopause as a bad thing despite having heard all about the negative side of menopause from women in my life who had already experienced menopause—the changes in memory, hot flashes, increased physiological signs of anxiety, etc. What I didn’t know was that menopause would make me an 'incompetent' psychologist.

One Sunday night, in my now menopausal state, I experienced night sweats. The next day, as I was driving to my office I began feeling anxious. After completing in-car self-analysis I came to the very logical conclusion that I was anxious about my work and that this must be, of course, because “I don’t know what I’m doing.” As you might imagine this just snowballed over time until something wonderful happened--I had these same anxious feelings during time away from the office. This new experience caused me to conduct further self-analysis and share my experiences with some similar aged female colleagues. Imagine my surprise to learn menopause made them incompetent too! Or perhaps had we simply fallen victim to the cognitive error that we help so many others with?

Emotional reasoning is a cognitive process by which a person concludes that her emotional reaction proves something is true, regardless of the observed evidence. For example, even though a therapist has helped numerous people overcome mental health issues and receives positive feedback from clients, she concludes “I’m incompetent because I feel anxious when I’m driving to the office.”

The moral of this story: even mental health professionals can fall victim to cognitive errors! Perhaps we may be even more vulnerable to some, like emotional reasoning, as we may be less inclined to consider physical reasons (e.g., menopause, low iron or B12, hypothyroidism) for our “feelings”. 

We encourage all of you to take a moment and reflect on your own personal experiences with cognitive errors and how to best use the tools you have to help yourself. 

Here's a handy reminder of some of the most common cognitive errors from the Centre for Clinical Interventions.