Don't Believe Everything You Feel: Emotions, Truth, and Marriage in a Culture of Emotional Reasoning

Do your emotions ever feel like the ultimate truth? In this episode of The Voyage Cast, host Eddie Eccker, LMFT, unpacks why our feelings are powerful signals, but terrible dictators. Drawing on years of clinical experience, Ed explores how emotional reasoning shapes marriages, friendships, and even our culture online.

You’ll hear:

• Why emotions matter—but don’t always equal reality.
• How couples get stuck in the “pursue/withdraw” cycle and how to break free.
• The hidden attachment cries underneath anger, silence, and defensiveness.
• How influencers, celebrities, and the halo effect sway our emotions and distort truth.
• Practical steps to test feelings, name needs, and aspire to truth together.

This episode blends humor, real therapy room stories, and grounded wisdom to help you navigate love, conflict, and culture with more clarity and connection.

👉 Perfect for anyone looking to strengthen their marriage, relationships, or emotional health in a world where feelings often shout louder than facts.

Transcript

0:00  
Hey, welcome back to another episode of the voyage cast. This is Eddie bringing you help beyond the office for the days when you need just a skosh more than just a session. Today, we're going to talk about emotions, their beauty, their power, and the trouble they cause when they start calling themselves truth. If you've been married longer than, let's say, a week you've seen this, a feeling shows up with a crown and a scepter, and suddenly we're certain we know what's real. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't. Well, this episode is called Don't believe everything you feel emotions, truth and marriage in a culture of emotional

0:39  
reasoning. Let's get into it.

0:49  
Psychologists have a name for what we're going to unpack today, and it's in the title of this episode, emotional reasoning, the move where I feel it. Therefore my feelings are now true. I feel ignored, so clearly you don't care about me. I feel anxious, so disaster must be coming. I feel betrayed, so you have lied. You son of a it's persuasive, because emotions arrive with conviction. They feel like airtight evidence, but they're signals, not verdicts. Think of the check engine light on your car. It means something needs attention, not your car is done abandon ship. Although, let's be honest, some of us do treat the light as more of a polite suggestion than an actual warning that something might be wrong with your car. In my clinical work with couples, over the many years, I've been doing this job, I've watched emotional reasoning quietly rewire marriages. A wife raises an issue because she feels unseen. Her husband hears failure and shuts down. She sees the shutdown and concludes he doesn't value me. He sees her intensity and thinks I've never been enough, and nothing I'll ever do will matter. The emotions are real, the conclusions, well, they're often not and it's not just couples. Our whole country runs on this same kind of fuel. Online outrage outruns accuracy. The posts that move us the most often feel the most true until we pause, check context, scratch our heads a little bit and realize we've been carried away by a wave instead of anchored into reality. Part of this comes from something psychologists call the halo effect. If someone is attractive, successful, famous, influential, we tend to assume they're wise in every area. So when a celebrity or influencer shares an emotional story, it's easy to treat it like solid truth, because their glow makes the message feel very credible. But charisma doesn't equal clarity. Let me say that again, charisma does not equal clarity. I've watched couples quote relationship advice from pop stars or influencers and others, these people who know how to sing about heartbreak or pose in the perfect light, but not necessarily how to build a marriage. That's the halo effect at work. Their shine blinds us, and before we know it, we're dragging their untested truth into our arguments, into our lives, into our hearts, into our homes. And here's the cost when we don't challenge these emotional narratives, whether they come from our own feelings or from a viral reel, they harden us on the inside, distorted, incomplete, sometimes flat out, wrong, and inevitably, they spill onto the people we love the most. You

3:45  
so let me give you a new way to think about this. Emotions are built in signals that deserve our respect, but they make terrible dictators. Wisdom is the humility to say, I feel this strongly, and I might not see it clearly. That posture is what I want to call aspiring to truth, honoring the emotions, but testing the story. Now let's get practical for a minute here. Emotions are signals, not judges. They point to what matters without telling the whole story. In session, I'll ask people, what's underneath that emotion? What is the emotion alerting you to? And what story are you attaching or creating because of that emotion? Anger may alert you to a need for fairness. The story my partner is selfish might be a stretch. Fear may alert you to the need for reassurance. The story they'll abandon me may be yesterday's wound speaking today. So when was the last time you mistook a feeling for the whole truth, and how did that shape your response? Now through an emotionally focused lens like aft therapy, a raised voice can mask a deeper question, do I matter to you? Withdrawal can hide the quote, unquote, I'm scared to fail you again. Now, let me give you an example the pursuer. Take Rachel and Mark. These are made up vignettes. Okay? RACHEL felt invisible when Mark came home from work and immediately looked at his phone. Her frustration would spike and she'd lash out. You don't care about me at all. Mark would retreat, overwhelmed. On the surface, it looked like nagging and avoidance, but when we slow it down, Rachel admits her anger was really about longing. I just want to know I come before your screen. And Mark admitted his withdrawal was actually just fear. When you come at me like that. I'm afraid I can't ever get it right. Beneath the reactions were two people crying out for reassurance.

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The withdraw. Then

5:51  
there was David and Anna, again, made up story, just a vignette. David rarely spoke during conflict, Anna felt abandoned and told herself he doesn't even love me enough to fight for us. But in session, David finally named the truth, I go silent because my chest locks up. I don't want to say something that makes things worse. I'm scared of failing you or I'm scared of getting it wrong. Might be another way to put it. That single admission reframed years of hurt, Anna saw that his silence wasn't rejection, it was fear. Now she probably didn't see it right away. Probably took a few sessions to get there, but that's the point when emotions get reframed as cries for connection instead of accusation. The temperature changes. Now I tell couples this all the time, the cycle is your enemy, not your spouse. Most couples aren't battling each other. They're stuck in a pursue, withdraw or blame defend. Kind of loop. The loop convinces you that your partner is the problem. Naming the loop gives you a common enemy, US versus the pattern. Think of it like background music in a restaurant. Nobody asked for it. But if it's bad enough, it ruins the meal. That's what the cycle does to marriage. It sets a mood that turns every interaction sour, no matter how good the actual meal is. Now let me give you another example of something couples often experience when they're in that negative cycle. It's like walking into a courtroom, every conversation they have is this debate. One would bring evidence of the other's neglect. One would mount a defense in response. They thought they were fighting about chores, but really they were both locked into a prosecutor, defendant cycle. Once they realized, Oh, the courtroom is the enemy, they could finally see each other again.

7:53  
But what's required for change? Well, it's corrective emotional moments. Insight is helpful, but couples heal when they risk new experiences, naming the vulnerable need and receiving a responsive answer. I'll sometimes invite partners to risk saying the thing under their breath or the thing that's clearly behind their eyes, like I'm not actually mad you didn't take out the trash. I'm scared. You don't think about me when I'm not in the room. When the other responds with presence instead of defense, it rewires the whole story. We're no longer misinterpreting the bid for attachment, the bid for connection. Now this doesn't just happen in marriage, these issues. It happens all over the culture online. We live in a constant pursuit, withdraw, cycle, outrage, defensiveness, withdraw an echo chamber and nuance of what's really going on all kind of disappears. Add in the halo effect, and we're even more vulnerable. A celebrity can give us a fitness tip, then pivot to politics or marriage advice, and because their image glows so big, we believe them, we let charisma and emotion stand in for wisdom. Now I want you to take a minute and just reflect you probably know right away, but who are the voices you give weight to because of how they make you feel, rather than the truth of what they say you

9:23  
so now I want to provide you a practical practice for aspiring to truth. When a big feeling hits, try this. Name, the signal, the feeling state, the thing, the tingling in the back of your neck, the chest tightening the stomach, the heart race all that. Name it. Name the signal. I feel angry, I feel afraid. Name the need. What is underneath that, what I'm really longing for is reassurance, respect or closeness. Name the story, the story I'm telling. Telling myself is you don't care about me. Can we check that together? Is that true? And the last part here, risk the deeper truth. Say the vulnerable need out loud and give your partner the chance to respond. If you don't give people a chance to respond, they will never learn how to respond in a way that's conducive for a healthy relationship. Now, with these tips, you can turn emotions from dictators into guides and transform fights into opportunities for intimacy. So let's land this. Don't believe everything you feel your emotions are real and worthy, of course, but they're not the whole story. If you don't challenge them, they will calcify into distortions and spill onto the people you love most. If you hold them with humility, if you aspire to truth, they'll guide you toward connection instead of away from it. Now here are four moves you can take this week to help move the needle. Name it honestly. This is how I feel. Test it humbly. Does this fit the facts, or is this my fear? Speaking, fight the cycle. It's us versus the loop. It's you and me against the world. Babe, not me versus you. Risk the deeper truth, say the need beneath the reaction and stay present for the answer, even at the point of risk of being hurt again, because again, your needs will never be met unless you take the risk. Now, over my many years of doing couples counseling, I've watched these small practices change the weather in a home, not overnight. Of course, nothing works like that, but steadily enough to trust that feelings can point us to truth when we're humble enough to seek it together.

11:55  
All right? Well, thank you so much for joining me today. If this episode stirred something in you, challenged or encouraged, or maybe even pause to think for a moment. Give us five stars and share it with a friend. Share it with someone you love, share it with someone you're mad at, someone you hate, or anybody in between. Also subscribe, because subscribing is free. It's like a free gift to me for the work I put in. How nice isn't isn't that nice? I think it's nice. It keeps us visible to the algorithm overlords, and more importantly, it helps this conversation reach other people who might need it. So thanks again for being here. I am Ed your host, and this is the voyage cast, bringing you help beyond the office until next time. Eddie.