observations. Similarly, the Feeling Brain makes value judgments based on
those same facts, data, and observations. The Feeling Brain decides what is
good and what is bad; what is desirable and what is undesirable; and most
important, what we deserve and what we don’t deserve.
The Thinking Brain is objective and factual. The Feeling Brain is
subjective and relative. And no matter what we do, we can never translate one
form of knowledge into the other.^33 This is the real problem of hope. It’s rare
that we don’t understand intellectually how to cut back on carbs, or wake up
earlier, or stop smoking. It’s that somewhere inside our Feeling Brain, we
have decided that we don’t deserve to do those things, that we are unworthy
of doing them. And that’s why we feel so bad about them.
This feeling of unworthiness is usually the result of some bad shit
happening to us at some point. We suffer through some terrible stuff, and our
Feeling Brain decides that we deserved those bad experiences. Therefore, it
sets out, despite the Thinking Brain’s better knowledge, to repeat and
reexperience that suffering.
This is the fundamental problem of self-control. This is the fundamental
problem of hope—not an uneducated Thinking Brain, but an uneducated
Feeling Brain, a Feeling Brain that has adopted and accepted poor value
judgments about itself and the world. And this is the real work of anything
that even resembles psychological healing: getting our values straight with
ourselves so that we can get our values straight with the world.
Put another way, the problem isn’t that we don’t know how not to get
punched in the face. The problem is that, at some point, likely a long time
ago, we got punched in face, and instead of punching back, we decided we
deserved it.