Why Do We Know Something is True but Not Feel It’s True?
Have you ever known something is logically true but not felt it’s true? It’s actually one of the most common things I hear from clients. For example:
I know my boss isn’t mad at me, but I feel like he is.
I know my partner said the right thing to soothe me, but it doesn’t feel like she did.
I know I’m not in danger every time I drive, but I feel like I am.
I call this the difference between head knowing and heart knowing. Some therapists might refer to heart knowing as a “felt sense” of knowing. People are often annoyed at this experience and with themselves, but there’s a very good reason it happens – and it’s all about the brain.
Knowing something is true, but not feeling it’s true, is a symptom of trauma.
Let’s do a quick neurobiology lesson:
We have two hemispheres of our brain. We call these the left and right brain. They are connected by the corpus callosum, which allows the hemispheres to talk to each other.
The right brain is more associated with emotion, affect, and our physical senses of sound, smell, and touch.
The left brain is more associated with rational thinking, logic, and analysis.
This is a bit of an over-simplification, and previous theories about specific people being left-brained or right-brained have been debunked as pseudoscience. Both hemispheres of our brain are always active to some extent, unless there’s been physical injury.
However, here’s what we do seem to know based on recent research in posttraumatic stress:
During a traumatic event, the right hemisphere of the brain is more activated than the left, meaning there will be an increased imprint of emotions and sensory experience.
When the left hemisphere is deactivated, a person cannot integrate an experience as a memory with a cohesive story. This means that a person experiencing a traumatic event won’t have a memory of the event that has a beginning, middle, and end. The memory of the event will be a fractured, confusing jumble of imagery and associated emotions and bodily sensations.
The hippocampus, part of the system responsible for memory consolidation becomes less active, making it harder to form connections between the past and present. Memories from the past get isolated, or stuck.
Additionally, the amygdala (the fear center of the brain) is more active during a traumatic event, and the prefrontal cortex (associated with planning, logic, and thinking ahead) is much less active.
In mathematical terms: More right brain activation + amygdala activation + prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, and left brain deactivation = a fragmented trauma memory encoded primarily as feeling, sensation, and isolated images, without the full narrative story.
After the trauma, our left hemisphere and prefrontal cortex will jump in to create sense out of something that was beyond our ability to really understand and deal with in the moment (i.e., the trauma).
What does this have to do with knowing something is true vs. feeling it’s true?
Trauma memories, though they are stored differently, don’t disappear. They stay stuck, with their own associated beliefs, emotions, and body feelings. So, while your left hemisphere is reading this right now in 2024 or beyond, you may have stuck trauma memories from the past that are encoded with more emotion and more bodily sensation via the right hemisphere of the brain and your amygdala. The trauma memory (right brain) screams, “This feels true! My body is telling me it’s true!” while your logical brain is confused, “But I’m looking at the facts, and the facts are telling me otherwise!”
It’s confusing and frustrating, and also one of the main reasons I don’t use therapy models that focus solely on thinking patterns as a way to work with PTSD and cPTSD. Healing from trauma is only effective when we’re working to incorporate and integrate the experiences of both hemispheres of the brain into a cohesive memory that you both feel and know is true. Meaning, a bad thing happened in the past, it felt bad then, and now you know, in your head and in your heart, that it’s over.
Of note, it’s more accurate to say that both sides are true once you learn that past traumatic/wounding experiences time travel to the present. Your feeling that something is true results from the experience of it actually being true in the past, though it may contrast with what is true right now in the present. So how do we get all parts of ourselves on the same page?
Hemispheric Integration: Feel what you know.
If you’re like me and grew up in the 90’s, you learned in 7th grade science class that the brain cannot heal or change after a certain age. Unfortunately for Mr. Pennella, but fortunately for all of us, that is just not true. We now know that the brain can change, heal, and adapt for as long as we’re alive – and good trauma therapy uses this concept of neuroplasticity to its advantage.
We help your brain heal with therapy that incorporates more than just talking, or what I like to call “the right kind of talking.” Essentially, we want to be doing therapy that targets places in the brain that are storing trauma and engages both hemispheres to allow the full range of your experience – past and present – to come together.
EMDR refers to this as having “one foot in the past, one foot in the present.” In practice, this means having your present self (left brain) helping the parts of you stuck in the past (right brain) with perspective, wisdom, and compassion. Therapies that do this, like IFS and EMDR, help integrate trauma into our collective sense of self and the narrative arc of our life.
It’s all about hemispheric integration, so you can truly feel what you know.
But I don’t relate to having trauma.
If you relate to the idea of knowing something is true, but not feeling it’s true, there’s a neurological process getting blocked. This only occurs when something hard has happened. We don’t have to use the word trauma – not everyone likes that word! But you may relate to the idea of having some difficult childhood experiences, or experiences of being unseen or unheard. We have all experienced some level of adversity in life. In fact, the folks I see who most strongly experience a disconnect between head knowing and heart knowing are those with histories of emotional neglect – and emotional neglect is trauma.
Additionally, the more childhood distress and less emotional attunement we have, the harder we’ll lean on our intellectual capacity to cope. I’m planning a post in the near future to explore this.
Please note: This blog post is for general informational purposes only and should not be considered a substitute for professional therapy. But good news - we do offer professional therapy. So if you liked what you read, consider checking us out and scheduling a consultation today.
