Fear

My aunt gave me the book The Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker, and so far it's fascinating. I was a little worried in the beginning that the book would attempt to justify irrational fear on the basis that fear is a good survival instinct. However, it's much more nuanced than that, and includes a lot of scary stories about people being victimized and how the victim was able to read their intuition after the fact--the author laments that if only people could learn to trust their intuition in the moment rather than attempting to rationalize away sudden fears or concerns, they may be more likely to come to correct predictions about a person or a behavior that unnerves them.

There's a lot about understanding your body and your actions in context of things: my favorite example was one of a man who avoided getting into bed with his wife while she was still awake. He asked his wife if he was unconsciously avoiding sex with her. His therapist responded, "What is unconscious about that?" Looking at the man's actions in the context of the situation, it was clear what he was doing, but it was much harder for him to recognize it.

I've always been of the opinion that logic and rationality are far superior than emotion and gut feelings. This book is starting to make me wonder, and I'm thinking back to all those times I spent around people who made me feel slightly uncomfortable, and I'm suddenly able to understand why I acted in ways I did, due to feeling threatened or fearful or just plain uncomfortable.

I don't know why I never trusted my gut. It's sad really. I had lunch a couple weeks back with a good friend and she listened quietly to my rationalizations and arguments about whether or not I should leave everything behind and go to North Carolina on a whim, then informed me that sometimes it really is best to follow your gut. Looking back, I see that I was speaking from a place of pain, where a lot of things in my life were changing and I'd just realized how unhappy I and how much I felt that I needed a blank slate and a new start. I have no question that my gut feeling was right and that I eventually made the right decision to leave. But it's scary how much I haven't listened to my gut in the past several years. Terrifying, really. It's like going through the world attempting to be a computer, weighing pros and cons of everything and making the decision that is expected, the decision that is logical, not the decision that will make me happy.

Making an emotional decision is often considered wrong. Only logic should prevail. But why is that?

I don't really know. I'll probably be exploring that for the next few days.