Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a Project of SIMHA, the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness. Yesterday, Dr. Katzenstein spoke about emotional reasoning, a cognitive distortion (thinking the wrong way) in which you inaccurately evaluate yourself, your circumstances, or people, based on your emotions. . This a very important point in our Avodat Hashem, as it impacts our service to God, not just our mental health.
How so? I'll go back 40 years to my second Elul as a Yeshiva boy. Elul is a time when we work hard to prepare ourselves for the high holiday season. whether by saying Selichot, or, in Yeshiva, by working on Middot/character traits, to get ready for the great judgment day.
I told Rav Wolbe, who was my Mashgiach, “I don't feel Elul…I'm not feeling it.” And his answer was, “Elul is not about feelings.” What he was trying to say was, you can't measure your success or failure in your service to Hashem based on feelings. We don't have that barometer. People make a mistake and think they have some kind of internal barometer where they can tell where they’re holding. They say,
“I had a great Yom Kippur. I really prayed good…” Based on what? Based on your feelings? Feelings are not reality. Feelings are just that. Feelings. And a feeling, Rav Wolbe says, is a little bit illusionary. It's fantasy. It doesn't necessarily mean anything. It's not an indication of anything. You could have a great feeling about something and be totally off.
For example, sometimes when a lady is pregnant, everyone thinks they can tell that she’s having a boy, or a girl. They have a feeling…
Well, yeah, it’s 50/ 50. A lot of times, they’re l wrong, but they just had that feeling…based on what?? Feelings are really illusionary. We give them too much credit. “I feel that person's honest.” Why?
It’s important to start realizing that our feelings are often totally inaccurate.
We sometimes have a good feeling about a something that’s wrong, and a bad feeling about something that’s right.
And specifically regarding our service to God, we can never measure anything based on feelings. You could stay up all night on Shavuot and not feel anything. And it doesn’t always help people when we push feelings. What do I mean? Rav Wolbe says that it's not helpful to raise someone to expect that learning is enjoyable. “Wow, learning's just great. It's such a great feeling when you finish learning,” because what happens to the person doesn't have that feeling? He may think, “Uh oh, I'm not having that feeling. It must be that something's wrong with my learning, because they're telling me that you're supposed to feel great when you're learning, and I don’t.”
Therefore, he says, that's an improper hinuch. It’s an improper way to raise people, because we don't all necessarily feel great when we learn.
You're supposed to realize, “When I’m learning, I’m productive. The world is becoming a better place because of my learning. I'm becoming a better person because of my learning.” But it's not something we can necessarily feel right away. People can feel great, dancing on rooftops, singing all kind of songs. They might feel terrific, but that doesn't mean they're doing anything. You don't measure by that. You could take a pill and feel great, or drink a glass of wine and feel great. But what just happened? Did your life change based on the substance that you ingested? It’s all fake. But we’re raised on feelings, and that gets us into a lot of trouble.
So how do we know if we what we feel is right or wrong? Its based on whether what you did is right or wrong. If I prayed, I did a good job. If I went through a Yom Kippur, I did a good job. Feelings? It's nice to have feelings; we're not void of feelings. It's definitely a cherry on top, but it’s not necessarily a realistic or accurate way of measuring something.
Have a wonderful day.