Head and Heart

Many clients have a clear understanding of their issues, but find themselves behaving in ways that they know are inappropriate or unhelpful to them and can’t seem to stop themselves. In this week’s blog we will be looking at how therapy can help with this dilemma.

I use a simplified concept of head and heart to represent these two aspects of a person. This does not relate to the physical organs. It is merely a way of helping the client to understand that they hold within them two perspectives which disagree. This is most often a thought process versus one based primarily in the emotions. E.g. “I want to eat more even though I know I've had enough”.

In my experience, the emotions have their own logic – what I term crudely as “heart logic”. This may be more subtle and harder to uncover than “head logic”.  At its core, “heart logic” usually has an underlying message. All emotions may be thought of as messages from ourselves, to ourselves. For example, anger is a prompt to action, hence we get all fired up in readiness for that action.  Fear is a prompt to take defensive action in anticipation of some threat.

Babies need their caregivers, usually their parents, to help them learn how to manage their emotions.  No parent is perfect, so there can be issues for the child in this learning process. For example, anger or sadness, crying or complaining may be seen as “negative emotions”. The implication is that such emotions are not desirable. The child may infer from this that such emotions threaten their relationship with their parents on whom they are dependent for survival. This can make it a matter of life and death. Little wonder they try to swallow their anger, or feel ashamed if they are sad. “There must be something wrong with me”.  All of this typically happens outside of their awareness. In addition, Western society privileges an objective stance, which typically means logical thinking without emotions.  Thus, the emotions may be seen as irrational. 

Once the client has learnt that emotions are irrational, unhelpful, to be suppressed, kept within a particular range (no outbursts), then they are likely to respect their head logic at the expense of their heart. This means that the messages of their emotions are not being received. When they are not received, then those emotions try again and again to find a way to be heard.  It is at this point that the dilemma is born. As an adult, the client is not under the same threat as they were as a child, but now the “heart logic” has been buried in the unconscious, they don’t know that. So when a desire surfaces the client has no idea why it is so powerful.

Helping the client develop a compassionate understanding of the underlying logic of their emotions is an important part of the process of therapy. For example, they may realise that they hold a profound shame about some aspect of themselves that they are unloveable, too sensitive, too much, too needy, spoilt. They yearn to soothe this deep wound by any means. If the values in which they were brought up associated food with caring, then perhaps overeating is the heart’s “logical” response.  The next step is for the client’s compassionate understanding of their heart logic to enable them to work with processing the difficult emotions which prompted its necessity. When the emotional wound is healed through a loving relationship towards themselves, the message of the historically unacknowledged emotion is finally delivered. That emotion is satisfied and can now withdraw. Thus, the heart logic becomes redundant, resolving the dilemma.

This sounds all very straightforward. However, it can take time in establishing the therapeutic relationship to such a depth that a lifetime of unconscious and subtle defences dare to relax. Then they can start experimenting with expressing their most vulnerable parts of themselves. In becoming open to their whole being (head and heart) they can become more fully engaged with others.

If you have any questions about this blog or any of the issues raised please feel free to contact me via my website: http://www.garycooktherapy.co.uk