Bracing for Impact

On crawling out of my emotional reasoning empire

Did she get upset? I must have done something wrong. Often, emotionally turbulent moments of my life have followed this logic. My first break-up and the ocean of guilt I felt afterwards; my mother being deeply upset about my low scores in 11th grade; S being a bit visibly sad when I didn’t want to hang out. Causing harm is morally bad. I seem to have caused harm (re: upsetting someone else). Hence I must have done something morally bad.

People can be upset because of me and yet I may not have done anything wrong. That these two things can be true at the same time is news to me, and I am still in shock; it has not settled in yet. I have come to realize, somewhat painstakingly, that invoking negative emotion in another person is not proof of doing something bad.

The reason I am writing about this today is to fully grasp the concept of “bracing for impact”. My therapist has told me repeatedly across many sessions, “When you make a decision and communicate it, the other person may not like it. They may react badly. You have to brace for that impact.” For me, this felt like it should not be allowed. It’s as though the teacher had left the hall and we were all allowed to cheat in the exam. If I can brace for impact, I am free to do anything. I am no longer restricted in my actions by how others around me feel. I am worried this might sound obvious to you, but I am trying to explain just how much of a paradigm-shift it has been in my life.

Emotional Reasoning

When I was reading a book about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, in the chapter on cognitive distortion, one of these listed distortions was called “emotional reasoning”. In that chapter, Dr. David Burns describes the distortion as such:

Emotional Reasoning is when you reason from how you feel. “I feel guilty. This means that I did something bad.” Emotional Reasoning is a distortion because your feelings all result from your thoughts. And if your thoughts are distorted, then your emotions / feelings will not reflect reality.

This is the only distortion out of nine that I read and could not identify what was wrong in thinking that way. If I feel guilty, I must have done something bad. Isn’t that why, evolutionarily speaking, guilt exists? To point us towards moral goodness? In the same way, if I have upset someone else, isn't that some sort of foolproof evidence against my actions?

I think emotional reasoning is the main kind of reasoning in my life. Most of my day, I am a calculator of emotions. How will I feel if I play another game of Fortnite? How will S feel? How will our maid feel if I ask her to do a little more work? Feelings, you might say, are the grounding force in my life - something real that I can base action on. But if I shouldn’t reason based on emotions, what else is there?

Do No Harm

Perhaps one way to make life decisions is based on values and principles. My training in philosophy meant that any such principle I’d come up with was up for questioning. Don’t lie. What about lies that grant a teenager a bit of freedom in a conservative household? Don’t murder. What if it is to save a hundred people, like Agamemnon did? Everything became context-dependent, and I started to find general life principles to be useless. Emotion seemed to be the only real thing that existed.

So by default, the only principle I end up operating on is “Do no harm.” My worst nightmare is being the villain in someone else’s story. Disappointing someone, putting someone in a bad mood, making someone angry - these are the only kinds of impact that seem real, so that is what I end up basing my actions on. (As an aside, I also think “Do no harm” is less of a principle for me than a survival mechanism. I am afraid of provoking people or upsetting them, because it might have bad consequences for me - anger directed at me, strained friendships etc.)

Self-Sacrificing

I guess you’d call what I’m describing as people pleasing. I think a more accurate term at least for myself, might be self-sacrificing. “Do no harm” (with a very flexible and all-encompassing definition of harm) led me to make myself very tiny, so as to not even be a factor. It was always other people who could be upset, never me.

Bracing for impact is a challenge. If I can do that, what more can I get away with? It makes me feel as though the world is open for play. I can build whatever kind of life I want, unencumbered by the weight of other people’s emotions about it. If I really did that, what kind of life would I want to build? This is a question I feel like I’m only asking myself for the first time now.

There is fear that this type of thinking is too selfish or self-centered. Is it giving in too much to western ideas of individualism and giving up on the communal ways of living I’ve seen growing up? Maybe those two things don’t always have to be at odds. The life I want to build might still have community at its heart. It just would be a choice made from a free place, and I imagine that is what makes all the difference.

Reflection Prompt:
What's a decision you want to make but are afraid to communicate? How  can you brace yourself for a bad reaction before communicating it?

📖 What to Read

Is Life A Game?

From this article by The New Yorker, I learned about value capture, and it was a concept that seemed deeply relevant to my life. So often, we start out doing a thing for its own sake, and then get trapped in external incentives we didn’t care for to begin with.

If you’d like to support my work, please share this with a friend who might find it helpful.