Why We Believe and What We Believe on Emotion, Cognition, and the Hidden Structure of Mental Health
- Mar 10
- 7 min read
Updated: Mar 19
Lance Kair is a Licensed Professional Counselor and founder of Agency Matters Mental Health, His You Are Mattering orientation upon psychotherapy integrates trauma-informed therapy with a rigorous philosophical approach to understanding human experience. His work sits at the intersection of psychology, existential philosophy, and lived reality, offering a perspective that moves beyond symptom management into the deeper question of what it means to live a life.
Philosophy sometimes begins with very ordinary things. A chair. A stone. A table. This might seem strange at first. Why begin a discussion about mental health, belief, and the structure of human experience with something as mundane as a table? The reason is simple, ordinary objects reveal how our experience actually works. They appear obvious, stable, and unproblematic until we look at them closely.
When we ask what a table is, the question quickly becomes surprisingly difficult to answer. Every explanation leads to another layer of explanation. The object that seemed so simple begins to dissolve into smaller and smaller parts, and eventually, we encounter a curious realization, the stability of the table is not coming from our explanations alone, and we might also begin to wonder about what we think about things.
This small exercise exposes something fundamental about the human mind. Our thinking can analyze the world endlessly, but our experience of the world remains stable. Psychological theories abound as to why we are the way we are, but these too seem to change very often. It seems something holds our understanding together long enough for life to proceed despite all the great, albeit changing, ideas.
That “something” turns out to be deeply connected with emotion, belief, and the ways we justify ourselves within reality. The humble table, therefore, becomes an entry point into a much larger question, "How do we hold our world together, and what happens when that structure begins to strain?"
Ask yourself a simple question, "What is a table?" At first, the answer seems obvious. A table is a flat surface with legs used for placing objects. But if you pause and examine that answer, difficulties immediately appear. What counts as a flat surface? Does a stump function as a table? What about a rock used for eating? And if the surface and legs define the table, are those pieces themselves the table, or merely parts?
If we continue asking these questions, the problem deepens. Perhaps the table is wood. But wood is made of fibers. Fibers are made of molecules. Molecules consist of atoms. Atoms consist of particles. And particles, according to physics, dissolve into fields and probabilities. The more carefully we ask what the table is, the more it seems to dissolve.
Eventually, we reach a strange point. We cannot locate the table itself in a final way. Instead, we encounter layers of explanation, each one reducing the previous answer into something supposedly more fundamental.
Yet, despite this endless reduction, the table clearly exists in our experience. We eat on it, write on it, and move it across the room. So, where and what exactly is the table?
We might be tempted, as some psychologists might propose, to reduce things to our personal meaning. Yet if we stay with what we have begun noticing, the realization is not that the table exists because we think it does or because it means something, but also not that it exists entirely apart from our thinking. When we include “psychology” as a thing that we know, and that has meaning for us in the same way as the table, the difficulty we are finding reveals something about the limits of how we think about things. Our explanations continually reduce the object, something else always explains what it should be, yet our experience of it remains stable.
The issue is not that reality depends upon thought, nor that reality stands completely outside it. The issue is that our thinking reaches limits beyond which explanation no longer stabilizes what we encounter. Often, the reductive approach that psychology promotes can create more problems than it solves.
The deeper question, therefore, becomes, "What holds together the pieces of our explanations so that something like 'a table' appears stable at all?"
And equally important, "What brings our questioning to a halt?" While we might be tempted to say it is an ego or something similar, in light of what we notice about things, this seems equally inadequate and problematic. We might feel like something is wrong, but then overcome it with a strong assertion of arguments, which leads to more and more problems, just like when we are trying to find out what the table really is.
These questions lead us directly into one of the most fundamental tensions in human thought, the relationship between cognition and emotion.
The endless reduction of knowledge
When we investigate objects intellectually, knowledge tends to dissolve what initially seemed solid. Every explanation reduces a phenomenon into more parts. Biology reduces organisms to cells. Chemistry reduces substances to molecules. Physics reduces matter to particles and fields.
This process can continue indefinitely. At no stage do we encounter something that definitively stops the questioning. Philosophers call this the problem of epistemology. It is the search for the ground of knowledge. What ultimately justifies our understanding of things?
Yet even though explanation can continue endlessly, our experience does not dissolve in the same way. The world remains structured into recognizable objects and stable distinctions even as they intellectually exist “probably.” What is leading the way?
A table continues to appear as a table. The question, therefore, becomes, "Why does the reduction stop in practice even though it does not stop in theory?"
Reason alone would continue asking questions indefinitely, but in a specific way. We regularly avoid the regress into nothing by orienting our experience back through our sensory experiences, the philosophical term for the school of thought that relies upon this circular motion is phenomenology. Many philosophers over the centuries have offered arguments about this kind of correlative experience, which routes everything through cognition and its secretarial reason.
The answer cannot lie purely in reasoning, though. When we consider that mental health appears to be able to commandeer the phenomenological reason to sometimes make what could be considered very strange decisions, or is otherwise involved with an experience that reason apparently cannot solve on its own, we have to admit something that is generally disturbing and guarded against in experience. This isn’t mere psychology, because psychology is a very coherent and systemized method based on empirical phenomenology, i.e., a system of reason, which, though it tries and is useful for its offerings, apparently does not understand what is happening.
In other words, something else intervenes, something that stabilizes our experience long enough for the world to remain coherent. That stabilizing force is emotion.
Emotion is the ground of real stability
Emotion often appears secondary in discussions of knowledge. We tend to assume that thinking comes first and feeling follows afterward. But a closer examination suggests something different. Emotion functions as a force that resists the endless dissolution produced by cognition.
When we ask what a table is, we could theoretically continue questioning forever. Yet we do not. We accept the object as a table and proceed with our lives. Why do we stop?
Because something within us resists the endless reduction. That resistance is not intellectual, it is emotional. What we land on cognitively is due to a feeling we get, we might want to say it is because something has been logically proven, or that the logic causes the feeling, but it is more correct to say that there is a feeling that amounts to support for the meaning of our thinking, “It has been proven.” Emotion works behind the scenes, as it were, driving us to resolution in ways specific to how we know things, our own personal method for making sense of things. For sure, there is nothing wrong with believing that I am cognitively controlling my emotions, and often that approach works really well. But emotion anchors us to the distinctions that cognition continually and typically unsettles. It is part of existing in the world with all its changes and challenges. Feelings stabilize the boundary between self and world, between object and explanation, and between meaningful things and analytical fragments.
Yet, this is not to suggest that emotion creates reality, nor determines what ultimately exists. Instead, it stabilizes how reality appears within the limits of our thinking. But emotion performs another role as well.
Emotion does not merely stabilize experience, it also functions to hold our beliefs in place, sometimes even when the world itself pressures those beliefs to change. This tension between belief in reality and what we could call the truth of the universe’s operating as it does is where the psychological problem often begins.
Belief, truth, and human reality
What is true is not identical to what is believed. Truth concerns the world itself, the way things actually occur, the universe doing its thing. Belief concerns how we human beings organize our understanding of the world and the universe. Belief is, therefore, foundational to human life. Through belief, we organize language, institutions, and shared meanings. Human beings talk about objects, identities, values, and systems of order, and through these conversations, a shared world becomes possible.
But belief does not have to imprison us in an endless circle of interpretation. We are not required to be totally defined by our cognitions.
Beliefs can be open to correction by what is actually happening, allowing for our interpretations to shift when reality is not aligning with them. This concerns becoming aware of our emotions and not merely the content or meanings of our thoughts. The adjustment is not merely a subjective opinion or personal meaning. It arises through involvement with events themselves, through encounters with the world that do not conform to what we expected.
In this sense, belief and truth are not enemies. Belief organizes our understanding, but truth can still break through that organization. Yet emotion complicates this relationship. Because emotion stabilizes belief, it often prevents belief from easily adjusting to what reality presents. Emotional investment in an interpretation can maintain it even when events suggest otherwise. This tension, between what we believe and what reality presses upon us, is central to psychological distress.
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Lance Allan Kair, Licensed Professional Counselor | Founder | Mental Health Philosopher
Lance Kair is a Licensed Professional Counselor and founder of Agency Matters Mental Health, His You Are Mattering orientation upon psychotherapy integrates trauma-informed therapy with a rigorous philosophical approach to understanding human experience. His work sits at the intersection of psychology, existential philosophy, and lived reality, offering a perspective that moves beyond symptom management into the deeper question of what it means to live a life.
Drawing from both clinical practice and philosophical inquiry, Lance is the originator of Mental Health Philosophy, an emerging framework that examines the underlying assumptions of modern mental health while centering the individual’s capacity to live their own life. His approach is informed by thinkers such as Žižek, Badiou, and Kierkegaard, while remaining grounded in real-world therapeutic work with individuals facing anxiety, depression, addiction, trauma, and existential distress. This deep philosophical consideration is at the heart of the “YAM” orientation.
