When Feeling and Knowing Disagree: Bridging the Gap Between Head and Heart.

Joanna Szczeskiewicz
3 days ago
11 min read

There is a specific moment in therapy, usually around the third or fourth session, that every clinician recognizes. It is the moment the impasse is declared. The client, who is intelligent, self-aware, and perhaps a bit exhausted, leans back in the chair. They have filled out the worksheets. They have identified the cognitive distortions. They have looked at the evidence. And then, with a mixture of frustration and defeat, they say the sentence that defines the dilemma:

"I know, logically, that I’m safe. I know I’m not actually a failure. I know my partner loves me. But I don’t feel it. And because I don’t feel it, I’m still panic-stricken."

If you have ever felt this, welcome to the club. You are experiencing the complex, often contradictory architecture of the human mind. We tend to treat the brain as a single, unified decision-maker—a CEO sitting behind a desk making rational choices. But as modern psychology and neuroscience have revealed, your mind is less like a CEO and more like a chaotic parliament where the members are shouting over each other, and half of them haven't read the agenda.

To understand why we can "know" something to be true but feel the exact opposite, let’s peel back the layers of cognition. We’ll use the work of pioneers like Aaron Beck and Jeffrey Young, but also steal a look at the evolutionary explanations of Steven Pinker and the Nobel Prize-winning economics of Daniel Kahneman.

The High Bridge and the Two Systems

Imagine, for a moment, that you are standing in the middle of a suspension bridge. It is a high bridge—perhaps the Capilano Suspension Bridge in Vancouver or the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado. It is hundreds of feet above a rocky canyon.

You are an educated person. You know about engineering. You know that this bridge is made of reinforced steel cables capable of holding thousands of pounds. You see other people walking across it casually. You see a maintenance truck driving slowly across the far end.

Fact: You are safe. Experience: Your legs are jelly. Your palms are sweating. Your heart is hammering against your ribs like a trapped bird. You have an overpowering urge to drop to your knees and crawl.

Why?

Daniel Kahneman, in his seminal work Thinking, Fast and Slow, gives us the framework to understand this. He describes the brain as having two modes of operation.

System 2 is your logical, slow, deliberative mind. It is the part of you that understands physics, reads safety manuals, and calculates risks. System 2 is the one standing on the bridge saying, "Statistically, the probability of collapse is near zero."

System 1 is your fast, automatic, emotional mind. It is the part of you that kept your ancestors alive on the savanna. Steven Pinker, in How the Mind Works, reminds us that for 99% of human history, heights meant death. There were no safety rails in the Pleistocene era. If you stood on a precipice, the correct evolutionary response was terror.

So, on that bridge, System 1 sees the drop and pulls the fire alarm. It dumps adrenaline into your bloodstream before System 2 can even finish the sentence about engineering.

Layer 1: The Glitch in the Matrix (Automatic Thoughts)

If we move from the bridge to your daily life, we see this conflict playing out in what Aaron Beck, the father of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), called Automatic Thoughts. It's the "System 1" firing the pop-up ads of your cognitive processes.

You send a text to a friend. They don’t reply for three hours.

Rational Knowing (System 2): They are probably busy at work.
Automatic Thought (System 1): They are mad at me. I said something stupid.

These thoughts are reflexive. We catastrophize. We mind-read. We engage in all-or-nothing thinking. But because these thoughts happen extremely fast —in milliseconds—we often don't even notice the thought. We only notice the emotion associated with it: the sudden pit in the stomach, the flush of shame.

In the early stages of CBT, we act like technicians. We use Thought Records to slow the process down. We force System 2 to audit System 1. We ask: "What is the evidence that they are mad?"

But here is the rub: You can successfully debunk the automatic thought. You can look at your phone, see that your friend was in a meeting, and realize you were wrong. But the feeling often lingers. The anxiety hums in the background.

Why? Because automatic thoughts are just the smoke. There is a fire burning deeper down.

Layer 2: The Rulebook (Intermediate Beliefs)

Beneath the surface chatter of automatic thoughts lies a more rigid infrastructure. Judith Beck calls these Intermediate Beliefs, but they are essentially the "Rules for Living" that you wrote for yourself, usually when you were a child or adolescent.

These rules are often conditional "If/Then" statements. They are designed to protect you from pain.

“If I am perfect, then I will be safe from criticism.”
“If I worry about everything, then I won’t be blindsided by tragedy.”
“If I put others' needs first, then they won’t abandon me.”

Let’s go back to our "High Bridge" metaphor. Imagine a person who has a Rule for Living that says: “If I feel fear, it means I am in danger.” Now, they are on the bridge. Their legs shake (System 1). System 2 says "The bridge is safe," but the Rule interjects: "Wait. You are shaking. Shaking = Fear. Fear = Danger. Therefore, despite what the engineer says, this bridge is about to collapse."

This is where "knowing" begins to lose the battle. We trust our internal rules more than external reality because those rules saved us in the past. If you grew up in a chaotic household, the rule "If I am hyper-vigilant, I can spot Dad’s bad mood before he explodes" was a survival strategy. It worked.

Now, twenty years later, you are in a safe relationship, but the rule is still active. You are scanning your partner’s face for micro-expressions of anger. You know they are kind. But the Rule demands vigilance.

Layer 3: The Basement (Core Schemas)

If we drill down past the Rules, we hit the bottom. This is the domain of Jeffrey Young and Schema Therapy. These are your Core Beliefs or Schemas.

These are beliefs that you hold as absolute truths about yourself and the world. They usually fall into three heavy categories:

Helplessness: "I am weak," "I am incompetent," "I am a victim."
Unlovability: "I am unwanted," "I am defective," "I am bound to be alone."
Worthlessness: "I am bad," "I don't deserve to exist."

Here is where neuroscience adds a fascinating layer to the story. Antonio Damasio, in books like The Feeling of What Happens and Synaptic Self, argues that our sense of self isn't just a narrative in our head; it is biological. It is mapped in our bodies.

Damasio coined the term "somatic markers." When you have a traumatic experience or a long history of being invalidated, your brain doesn't just store the memory as a video file. It stores the physical state associated with it. So, when your Core Schema of "Defectiveness" is triggered, you don't just think "I am defective." You experience a visceral, somatic state of shame. Your chest tightens. Your throat constricts. Your posture collapses.

This is why "positive affirmations" often fail so miserably. You can stand in front of the mirror and say, "I am a confident, successful person" (System 2). But if your Core Schema is "I am a fraud," your body will reject the statement like a bad organ transplant. You will feel a "clunk" of dissonance.

Here it is in action:

Sarah is a high-performing architect. She has just won a prestigious award. Her colleagues are toasting her. System 2 knows: "I worked hard for this. The judges liked my design."

But Sarah has a Core Belief of Incompetence/Fraudulence. As she holds the trophy, she spots a tiny error in the program brochure where her name is misspelled. Her brain latches onto it.

The Confirmation Bias comes online to filter out evidence that contradicts her core beliefs—Sarah instantly discounts the award. She thinks, "They didn't really look at my work. If they knew the real me, they'd laugh. I tricked them."

She engages in actions that go against her core belief (accepting the award), but she feels the core belief more strongly than ever. The external praise feels like a lie because it conflicts with her internal "truth."

Layer 4: The Emotional Schemas (The Meta-Layer)

To make matters more complicated, we don't just have emotions; we have thoughts about our emotions. Robert Leahy has done groundbreaking work on Emotional Schemas that explains what we can call secondary suffering. Primary Emotion: You feel sad. Emotional Schema: "Successful people don't get sad. If I am sad, I am broken. This sadness will last forever. I must get rid of it immediately."

Now, you aren't just sad; you are anxious about being sad. You are ashamed of being sad.

This is often where the "Knowing vs. Feeling" dissonance turns into a civil war. You know, intellectually, that "it's okay to not be okay." You’ve seen the Instagram posts. You tell your friends that vulnerability is strength. But when you feel vulnerable, your internal rules scream: "WEAKNESS! ABORT!"

The Glitch: The "Feeling of Knowing" (OCD)

Nowhere is the disconnect between logic and feeling more palpable than in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). This acts as an extreme caricature of how all of our minds work.

Imagine that you are driving. You have an intrusive thought: “Did I leave my phone on the roof of the car?” System 2 checks. You reach over to the passenger seat. You feel the casing. You see it.

It is in your hand. Fact: The wallet is safe. Feeling: The urge to check again is screaming at you.

Why? Researchers call this a deficit in Yedasentience—the subjective "feeling of knowing." It’s that internal click that says, "Okay, task done. You can move on."

In this moment, your logic is perfect. But your "feeling of knowing" mechanism is jammed. You know your wallet is there, but you don't feel like it's there.

So, what do you do? You pull over and check the trunk. Then you check under the seat. This is an Emotion-Driven Behavior (a concept championed by David Barlow in the Unified Protocol). You are acting not to solve the problem of the wallet (which is already solved), but to solve the problem of the feeling of uncertainty. Unfortunately although checking the wallet makes the anxiety go down for 5 minutes, it reinforces the brain's error. You taught your brain: "The only way to feel safe is to check." The next time, the urge will be stronger.

The Solution: Inhibitory Learning (Or, Why You Have to Stay on the Bridge)

So, if thinking can't fix the feeling, and checking (reassurance) makes it worse, what is left?

For decades, exposure therapy relied on the idea of Habituation. The logic was: "If you stay on the scary bridge long enough, your anxiety will eventually run out of gas, and you will calm down." The goal was to feel good. But Michelle Craske, a leading researcher in anxiety, turned this on its head with the concept of Inhibitory Learning.

Craske argues that the goal of exposure isn't to calm down. The goal is to learn. Specifically, we need to create a "Violation of Expectancy."

System 1 predicts: "If I step on this bridge, I will die."

System 2 says: "Step on the bridge." If you step on the bridge and you are terrified, shaking, and crying—that is okay. As long as you stay there and don't die, your brain is forced to process a discrepancy.

Prediction: Death. Outcome: Survival.

This mismatch creates a new neural pathway. We aren't erasing the old fear (the old "Bridge = Death" pathway is still there), but we are building a new, stronger pathway ("Bridge = Uncomfortable but Safe") that inhibits the old one.

Stefan Hofmann, in his work on Process-Based CBT, emphasizes that we can't just think our way to this new pathway. We have to behave as if System 2 is in charge, even while System 1 is screaming. Like always: Action over affirmation.

The Re-Wiring Process

Let's be honest: this sucks.

I am essentially telling you that to fix the feeling of being unsafe, you have to voluntarily make yourself feel unsafe. To fix the feeling of being unlovable, you have to risk rejection.

When you are acting against a Core Belief, it feels wrong. It feels like you are lying to yourself. If your schema is "I must act happy to be loved," and you decide to tell your partner you are depressed, your body will trigger the danger signal. It will feel like you are jumping off a cliff.

But this is the only way the data gets in.

We move from being at a mercy of our conditioned patterns to being the "Scientist."

The Hypothesis (System 1): "If I don't check my email tonight, I will get fired."
The Experiment (Action): I will not check my email tonight.
The Feeling: Terror. (This is the hardest part—sitting with the terror without fixing it).
The Result: I went to work the next day. I was not fired.

When you survive that experiment, System 1 quiets down. Not all at once. It’s a slow negotiation.

Conclusion: The Architecture of Courage

The disconnect between knowing and feeling is not a malfunction; it is the design. Your brain is prioritizing survival over happiness. System 1 doesn't care if you are happy; it cares if you are breathing.

But you are not just a survival machine. You are a human being.

You cannot simply "think positive" to overwrite a Core Schema formed in childhood. You cannot "logic" your way out of a somatic marker. You have to engage in the difficult, gritty work of behavioral change.

No choice, we have to walk onto the bridge, feeling the shake in our legs, and stand there until our brain realizes that the shaking is just a sensation, not a prophecy. You have to keep the wallet in your pocket while your mind screams to check the car. The short-term pain of the disconnect will bring the long-term relief of alignment.

Eventually, after enough disproven predictions, after enough brave actions taken despite the fear, the feelings catch up. The Somatic Marker shifts. The "feeling of knowing" clicks into place. It is a long road, but logically you know that you can walk it.

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy

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Mississauga, Ontario

When Feeling and Knowing Disagree: Bridging the Gap Between Head and Heart.

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