Emotional Rationalization: What Is It And What Are The Consequences?

Do you know what it’s like to feel a reality with intensity, without any basis for it actually happening? If not, find out below what it is. If so, then you know firsthand what is one of the most complicated psychological problems – and also a frequent problem – known as emotional rationalization.

Emotional rationalization is a term that describes a particular type of cognitive distortion. This term was first used in the 1970s by Aaron Beck, the founder of Cognitive Therapy, a therapeutic line of psychology.

According to Beck, every time someone arrives at some conclusion of reality based on their emotional reaction, what is happening is precisely an emotional rationalization. In this way, any fateful evidence observed is discarded or left in the background to the detriment of the supposed “truth” that the feelings themselves define. Beck believed that this rationalization stemmed from chronic negative thoughts, which are often involuntary, uncontrollable, or automatic.

feelings are not facts

Emotional rationalization assumes that what you are feeling is necessarily true. If you feel jealous, for example, it’s because someone did something to make you that way, and anyone or anything can be the recipient of that guilt. While there is usually a relationship between what is happening and what we feel, it can often be quite different things.

The strength of the feeling creates a conviction, which normally holds until the emotional storm begins to subside. When we use emotional rationalization, we believe in some automatic thoughts that cause emotional discomfort, and then we try to create reasons for the basis of our feelings.

To do this, emotional rationalization often distorts and colors reality with a negative bias – it may also occur with a positive bias, but in this article we won’t focus on those cases. Our view of the world at that time is fully integrated, seamlessly, without us noticing the influence. In this way, at no time do we question whether what we understand is happening is really in accordance with reality, and not being manipulated by us.

Thinking emotionally can sabotage your gift

Emotional rationalization is a type of misleading rationalization, because it is based on feelings and feelings reflect our thoughts and beliefs, not always consistent with reality. For example, everyone has felt cheated at some time in their lives. But does that mean we were necessarily deceived? Not always.

It is a distorted feeling, and therefore the derived emotions are not valid as a justification for immediately and directly reaching any conclusion. The same happens, for example, when we feel hopeless or discouraged about something. These feelings do not imply that the problems we have are impossible to solve and that all is lost.

Emotional rationalization also has a very common side effect: procrastination. If you feel like you’re going to fail at something, you’re probably putting it off, or not even trying to do it. Procrastination gets in the way of making healthy decisions that have to do with taking care of yourself.

Faced with the certainty of something, the natural reaction is not to fight to avoid or eliminate what is happening. We generally accept, happily or not, the reality perceived and assumed to be real. As a result, this invented reality often becomes, in fact, reality.

Emotional rationalization and depression

Emotional rationalization plays a key role in almost all depressions. Because some people feel the world so negatively, a depressed person assumes that life really is like that. It does not occur to the subject to challenge the validity of his perception, and he ends up believing completely in the feelings.

Depressed people, moreover, often emotionally rationalize situations in a two-way street. For example, they can focus on filtering life and focus on the negative of even a very positive result. This is precisely because they live in a very negative mood. To make matters worse, it doesn’t matter if there really is a reason to generate this situation, because even if there is an opposite reason, this fact will not be valued, so emotional rationalization ends up prevailing.

One of the problems that comes up is that emotional rationalization actually becomes a learned pattern, because many people end up thinking that way. While emotional rationalization is not the culprit of depression, this way of thinking makes it very difficult to fight the cause of the disorder when someone has this illness.

On top of that, emotional rationalization is still extremely common. We like to think that we make pretty logical decisions, but in fact most of the time we get carried away with our feelings. It’s easier that way.

In fact, if we look at existing brain connections, it’s much easier to make a decision based on feeling than it is to ponder facts. We are not inclined to look for facts to support our conclusions. We just accept it because it’s just easier.

Change your limiting beliefs to curb emotional rationalization

The main problem with thinking errors – like the one that occurs in emotional rationalization – is that once we make the decision that our emotions are facts, we stop looking for alternative explanations to understand any situation. So our beliefs become terribly limiting, becoming accusatory.

To avoid this situation, every time you realize that emotional rationalization is taking over your thinking, try to stop and think for a few seconds, considering the following:

• Make a note of your thoughts and, if you notice the mechanism of emotional rationalization, consider that your feelings may have little to do with what’s going on around you, and think about it objectively.

• Put on your “lens of tranquility”. Ask yourself if you would be able to see the same current situation differently if you were in another, more peaceful stage of life. Try to examine the evidence and decide whether the emotions you are experiencing are appropriate and understandable within the real facts at hand.
• Allow time for emotions to dissipate. Emotions can go away reasonably quickly. So give it a little time and leave it to assess the facts and draw conclusions later. It could be that the emotional hurricane will go away. It’s easy to look at it from another perspective when you’re calmer.

Keep in mind that this mechanism is a delusion of the mind, an illusion that appears when we have difficulty managing our own emotions, on which our feelings feed. Emotions, however, as negative as they are, are not bad by themselves, as they have adaptive values ​​that help us survive.