The third pattern is trying to figure life out instead of feeling it. Joe tells of finding a childhood photo of himself crying—taken by his parents to mock him—and realizing it was why he hadn’t cried in 14 years. He relearned to cry by going into the woods and pretending until the real tears came, and the result was striking: clarity, less resistance, less shame-talk, less fighting.
“Just allowing yourself have feelings creates a tremendous amount of clarity.”
The neuroscience backs it. Drawing on Descartes’ Error, Joe notes that decision-making happens in the emotional center of the brain. Remove it and IQ stays intact, but choosing a pen color takes half an hour.
“We make decisions based on how we’re going to feel. We might use the intellect to try to discover how we’re going to feel, but we make the decision on how we’re going to feel.”
We’re constantly making decisions just to avoid feeling something—jumping on the phone to dodge an inner itch of “I’m not good enough.” So clear decision-making doesn’t come from logic; it comes from welcoming emotions, discovering they don’t destroy you, and letting them stop clouding the system.
Related Concepts
- All decisions are emotional, never purely rational
- Feel your way to freedom
- Bad decisions come from fear of emotional consequences
- You can’t think or shortcut your way past an emotion — you have to let it move
- Anger reaches clarity only after it moves through
- Willingness to feel any emotion is the key to clear decision-making
- Confirmation bias protects us from emotions we won’t feel