How many times have you proclaimed, “I know better than that!” or, “What was I thinking?” immediately after making a bad choice?
This relatively common occurrence is due to the powerful influence of our two minds. Our rational mind can obviously make its own miscalculation but nothing seems to perplex us more than when our emotional mind overwhelms our rational mind and well, we do something stupid. We like to think of ourselves as rational beings, but we are also chock-full of subjective experiences and emotions. Our mind stores all kinds of academic factual knowledge but it also stores everything we’ve ever experienced and how we felt about it. So, we have two distinct minds, our rational mind and our emotional mind.
When we make decisions we may make them based on how we think or how we feel. A problem can arise when these two sources of influence are not in agreement and begin to battle each other. Typically, when the emotional mind wins, we end up in trouble, but the power our emotions have over our reasoning is sometimes compelling and persistent. Consider someone with a phobia of spiders. They usually acknowledge that spiders can’t really hurt you. For example, when they see a spider in a room they may run out of the room themselves, but they don’t grab anyone else by the arm and try to pull them to safety. On the contrary, they more often demand that others go and kill the beast. However, even though they rationally know that spiders are not that dangerous, they feel overwhelmed with fear. The decision to run is compelled by the emotional mind.
This type of emotional and irrational behavior often embarrasses us because we don’t understand it. Moreover we don’t seem to have a very effective remedy. Our rational mind is employed to help us overcome our fears with facts and reality testing yet, this approach often times fails. Feelings can be impervious to a rational attack. The solution must be applied within the emotional mind. Those emotional experiences fueling the fear, anger or sadness must be neutralized, healed or processed to disarm this powerful influence over our rational minds. This emotional software program is the point of intervention for Enlight and once these emotional obstacles are reduced, the rational mind can regain adequate influence and feelings and behaviors improve.