If I am good at anything, I am good at emotional reasoning. This mentality is where the last vestiges of my childhood thinking has taken up residence, and it continues to be my most consistent cognitive distortion. At its most basic emotional reasoning means the following: “If I think something is true, it is.” This is a terrible thought, but it is a thought every person has experienced because it is how we all moved through our earliest years.

We had imaginary friends. We thought monsters hid in the closet. We believed in Santa Claus.

It took time to learn that our thoughts were not always true. Eventually, we stopped talking to our imaginary friend. We quit asking mom and dad to check the closet. We started saying, “thanks Santa” sarcastically when reading who a gift was from.

I’ll wager that most of us grew out of our more obvious childhood thinking patterns, but very few of us managed to escape the negative consequences of emotional reasoning. Believing that our thoughts are true is an easy fallacy to fall into. Humans, by our nature, are built to be lazy. No, that’s too harsh a word. We’re built to be economical with our energy and we evolved from pack animals. Where there is a trail, we will take that worn route because it is easier to travel. This is why Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” resonates with people on a deep level.

We also walk the same, well-trodden path in our thoughts.

“If I take a break then I am a lazy person.”

“She broke up with me so I must be broken.”

“No one likes me so I’m not worth anything.”

These types of thoughts could also be categorized as other distortions, but if I have a thought that resists categorization then I always label it as emotional reasoning because every distorted thought is emotional reasoning to a degree. This is also the most persistent cognitive distortion that I have because it’s the original thought distortion from childhood. We grow out of the more obvious version of it, but emotional reasoning sticks with us because we like to think we’re right.

“A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessment of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.” - Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

Being wrong is a miserable experience. We always want to have the correct answer when the teacher or our boss calls on us, but if we’re not 100% most will shy from raising their hands and volunteering their ignorance. Kathryn Schulz makes an indelible point in her talk when she explains that it isn’t being wrong that bothers us; it’s realizing we’re wrong that hurts our ego.

So we believe we’re right more often than we’re wrong, we resist the idea that we could be wrong, and we constantly listen to an internal voice that sounds like us so we’re less likely to discredit the source. All of this demonstrates why emotional reasoning is so powerful and lasting throughout the human lifespan. Fortunately modern behavioral therapies work nicely in combating this type of persistent thinking, and I’ve found a tool that helps young kids manage their negative thoughts works equally well in adults. Learn more about Cartoon Voice Replacement in the video below from one of my workshops. I now offer Mental Agility Online Workshops for organizations of all sizes. If you’d like to schedule a training please contact me at gcorsetti@mentallyagile.com or visit mentallyagile.com/contact.