The Caring Counselor

In an effort to sharpen my counseling skills, I recently turned over to audiobooks. I might as well take advantage of my hour-long drive to work. My first download on Audible was titled Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Principles of Becoming More Flexible, Effective, and Fulfilled by Dr. Steven C. Hayes.

So far, I enjoy the audiobook because Professor Hayes presents the information in a way that makes sense to the average person and provides exercises to put ACT principles into practice. One specific concept he described put logic and emotional reasoning into perspective – literal vs functional coherence.

Literal coherence encompasses our logical thought. It is our problem solving. When we need to work towards a concrete resolution, our literal coherence takes over. Of course, this is fine and dandy when dealing with day-to-day issues. If you need to fix a broken pipe or balance your check book, then feel free to fall back on literal coherence.

However, we as human beings aren’t robots and have these things called feelings. Whether we like to admit or not, feelings feed into our decision making. It should not be our sole source to do so though. We often do dumb shit when we rely on emotional reasoning. This is where functional coherence comes in. At this point, logic and emotion come together to help us determine which decision will serve us best. How useful will this decision be? How much will it impair or improve my well-being?

What I love about this is that it does not reject the importance of our feelings. This idea acknowledges how emotions play a part in our daily lives and partly fuel our decision making. Although we cannot solely depend on our emotional reasoning to guide appropriate behavior, feelings make us human.

Take a moment to feel. Incorporate those feelings with your rational though to develop a wise understanding. Then, use them to guide your behavior based on long-term benefit and workability.

-The Caring Counselor