Notes On…Emotional Predictions
What if I told you that your emotions aren’t just reactions to what’s happening right now, but predictions your brain makes, often before you’re even aware of it?
That what you feel in a given moment isn’t just about the present, but a projection shaped by your past experiences, your expectations, and the patterns your brain has quietly learned over time?
The first time I truly understood this, it shifted something big for me, not just in how I practice therapy, but in how I make sense of my own inner world. Like most people, I used to believe emotions were reactive. That fear was a response to danger. That sadness followed loss. That joy arrived when something good happened. Simple, right? Then I encountered the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett and everything cracked open.
Barrett, a neuroscientist and author of How Emotions Are Made, makes a compelling case: our brains are not passive observers. They are active predictors. We don’t just feel emotions. We construct them. Every moment, our brains are pulling from memory, experience, and sensory cues to guess what will happen next. And those guesses shape how we feel, often more than the event itself. “Your brain is not reacting to the world—it is predicting the world,” she writes. That line stuck with me.
In the therapy room, I see it all the time. A client enters a new relationship already bracing for rejection, already preparing for the betrayal they’ve known before. Another flinches at a partner’s frustration, not because anything unsafe is happening now, but because they learned long ago that anger meant danger. The brain isn’t waiting for proof. It’s anticipating harm. And in doing so, it often shapes the very outcome it fears.
But here’s the part I return to again and again: if emotions are constructed, they can be reconstructed. We can update the predictions. We can help the brain learn that not every silence means abandonment, that not every mistake leads to rejection, that safety can exist even in unfamiliar forms. That’s what healing often is. It’s not just feeling better. It’s teaching the nervous system that new possibilities are real.
This is why the work is slow. Because we’re not just changing thoughts or managing symptoms: we’re reshaping the way someone’s entire system interprets reality. And that, while challenging, is also full of hope. Because if the brain can learn to expect pain, it can also learn to expect care. To expect space. To expect love.
