People preface their thoughts and opinions with the statement, “I feel…” as a defensive strategy to evade someone challenging them on the give topic area.

I remember the first textbook I read regarding cognitive therapy was Aaron Beck’s Cognitive therapy of depression, a good book.

 Beck, A. T., Rush, A. J., Shaw, B. F., & Emery, G. (1987). Cognitive therapy of depression. Guilford Publications.

FYI: The second edition is coming out this June.

I read this my sophomore year of college. He made a very poignant statement in the book that I have never forgotten to this day. As stated above which is paraphrasing how he put it in the book. People preface their thoughts and opinions with the statement, “I feel…” as a defensive strategy to evade someone challenging them on the give topic area.

What you have to understand is the main thesis of cognitive therapy is that your cognitions control your feelings/emotions/behavior. Basically, all of the major forms of cognitive therapy are simply derivations from this basic stance. Cognitive therapy ala Beck (CBT), and Albert Ellis’s rational emotive behavioral therapy (REBT) are based on the fact that if you change your thinking, you change your feelings emotions and behaviors. So that being said I will continue.

He said when doing therapy with a patient you have to watch out for them, saying I feel. He said many times a patient will say I feel, then they start expressing actual thoughts. They do not start crying or getting angry etc which are feeling/emotive reactions. You have to watch out because people are saying I feel as a defensive strategy so you cannot attack their thoughts. Again, a person will say I feel and then start expressing actual thoughts and do not want them disputed. As an example, if we’re at a dinner party and someone says I feel, then you attack what they then say in front of the group you appear to be attacking their feelings. This obviously makes you look like an absolute jerk. Beck pointed out you have to be very careful about this as a therapist/clinician. Basically, in session ideally you correct the person and say so you think this way about this as a reflective listening technique and it is corrective. There’s any number of different ways of re-orienting the person to use thinking language.

The main point here for this post is watch out for this in your daily conversations with people and for yourself. People will utilize this strategy so that you do not attack their thinking. If you say in general on a day-to-day basis, in daily conversation, I feel a certain way people can’t challenge it. Generally speaking, the average person thinks that if a person feels a certain way, you can’t attack their feelings because that’s how they feel. However, the reality of the situation when you pay careful attention to what they say… I feel and then the words that follow many times will be actual thoughts, opinions, beliefs etc. This is a trick for every one of us to pay attention to. We all will make this minor slip at times in our lives simply due to it being accepted as normal daily conversation. Yet at the same time people do not like to get into debate on certain topics so they say I feel versus, I think, this way about this topic. Then they are avoiding debate or a challenge.

Again, we fall victim to this because it’s part of normal daily non-academic rigorous discourse. Just watch out for it during conversations that may be highly contentious such as religion, politics, sex, education, abortion, dog grooming who knows what area it is given the parties involved.