“Thoughts are Not Feelings” is Shitty Psychological Advice
It’s time to stop spreading unscientific, unhelpful mind-body dualism.
If you have been in therapy before, or have ever picked up a cognitive behavioral or dialectical behavioral therapy book, you have likely encountered the adage that “thoughts are not feelings.”
This observation is often intended to help a therapy client distinguish between their interpretation of a situation (and what their thoughts are telling them about that situation) and the emotional reality of how that situation affected them. Take for example this passage from the Dialectical Behavioral Therapy Workbook for Bipolar Disorder by Sheri Van Dijk:
One difficulty that people often encounter when they begin to examine their emotions is determining the difference between an emotion and a thought.
For example, when I ask a person how she felt in a situation, she may respond by saying, “I felt that I was being criticized” or “I felt that he should have understood how I was feeling.”
If you look closely, you’ll see that she didn’t actually describe an emotion, but instead stated what she was thinking about the situation.
Van Dijk does on to explain that this patient is actually feeling angry or disappointed…
