I spend a lot of time thinking about what we call “wrong.”
Not morally wrong. Neurologically, emotionally, behaviorally wrong. The quiet, pervasive assumption that certain ways of being in the world are the problem to be solved rather than the signal to be read. I think about it in session, obviously. But I also think about it on my own time, because I am not immune to the same cultural bias I help people unlearn. I have also been trained to perform cognition over feeling, efficiency over presence, output over interior experience. I have also had to learn, more than once, that the parts of me I was taught to manage are often the parts with the most accurate information.
So when a guide on a recent trip made an offhand comment about the phrase “right mind,” it landed somewhere specific.
Did you know that “sinister” comes from the Latin sinistra, meaning simply “left”? That the church, for centuries, treated left-handedness as a moral defect, something to be corrected, punished, or prayed away? That children were struck across the knuckles for writing with their dominant hand? The word sinister didn’t start as a synonym for evil. It started as a direction.
What it became tells you everything about what happens when a majority decides that a minority way of being is dangerous. She wasn’t making a political point. She was just noting it. But I couldn’t stop thinking about what it means to build an entire vocabulary of wrongness around a variation that was never wrong to begin with.
Because we do this with emotions. We do this with bodies. We do this with brains that work differently. And we have been doing it for a long time.
Acceptable Mind
We have a whole architecture for deciding which parts of the mind are acceptable and which are problems to be managed. Cognition is right. Logic is right. Productivity is right. Efficiency is right. And emotion? Emotion is the left hand. The inconvenient, historically maligned thing we are perpetually trying to correct, suppress, or at least apologize for.
Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks makes the case that productivity isn’t a neutral value; it is a moral framework, and a relatively recent one. The belief that if you optimize enough, organize enough, accomplish enough, you will eventually feel okay about your existence is not a solution to the human condition. It is a refusal to accept it. We have dressed up efficiency as virtue and then wondered why we feel like we’re failing at being alive.
The “right mind” isn’t just a cultural preference. It has been sold to us as the ethical choice. And when we buy that, we stop treating our interior experience as information. We treat it as a problem.
I’ve started calling this the “left mind.” Not as a clinical term, but as shorthand for the bias we carry into therapy, into leadership, into our own self-evaluation: the assumption that the feeling side of us is the defective side. That wanting to be in your left mind, present to your emotional experience without immediately trying to fix or justify it, is somehow indulgent. Weak. Unproductive.
The problem is we built that assumption the same way Rome was built. By majority vote. By what was convenient for the institution. By what was easiest to measure. And we are still using it.
Always a Bias
Here is where it gets harder to look away: this bias does not land equally.
The “angry Black woman” stereotype is not a cultural curiosity. It is a mechanism. Rooted in the pathologization of Black women during chattel slavery, it has functioned for centuries to reframe justified emotion as a character defect, to silence protest by calling it instability, to dismiss pain by calling it aggression.
Research confirms that Black women’s anger is consistently rated more harshly in professional settings, that the Angry Black Woman stereotype is associated with higher rates of anxiety and depression among those who experience it, and that Black women frequently self-silence to avoid the label, at significant cost to their psychological and physical health. Studies document the outcome: racial battle fatigue, headaches, insomnia, and chronic suppression of emotional expression that is, by any clinical measure, entirely valid.
This is not emotion dysregulation. This is what happens when the cultural script says your emotion is the problem, and you learn to agree.
The same logic operates on neurodivergent people. ADHD, autism, and related neurotypes are frequently characterized by emotional intensity, not as a symptom layered on top of the “real” diagnosis, but as a core feature of how those nervous systems process the world.
Research on neurodivergent adolescents documents significantly elevated emotional burden: more frequent exposure to distressing events and more intense reactions to them. The clinical response, historically, has been to treat that intensity as the disorder. To medicate it, behaviorally extinguish it, or train the person to mask it well enough that it becomes invisible to everyone except them.
Many neurodivergent adults carry forward the message that they are “too much,” “too intense,” “too emotional,” not because their nervous systems are broken, but because their nervous systems were never designed for the particular demands of a productivity-first, mask-your-inner-life culture. The emotional intensity is real. The problem is the framework we use to evaluate it.
And then there is the body. Fatphobia operates on the same sinister logic: the body that exists outside accepted parameters is morally wrong, a sign of failed self-control, a problem to be corrected. Research is unambiguous that weight stigma causes significant psychological harm, including increased rates of anxiety, depression, disordered eating, and avoidance of medical care. The cruelest irony, documented now across multiple studies, is that weight stigma and the shame it produces are themselves drivers of the behaviors it purports to correct. Shame does not motivate health. It motivates hiding.
I know this clinically. I also know it in my own body. The cultural message that a body like mine requires management, justification, or apology is not neutral information. It is the same architecture, the same sinister-hand thinking, dressed in the language of wellness.
I, as well as most of my clients and most of the women I know, carry this with us. Anything other, feminine, emotional, divergent, or outside of the common cultural narrative is somehow sinister. Even when it isn’t.
What Should I Do?
Here is what Marsha Linehan, the psychologist who developed Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), actually says about emotions: they are functional. They communicate. They motivate. They are not noise in the system; they are part of the signal. Fear tells you something has your safety in question. Grief tells you that you loved something real. Anger tells you a boundary has been crossed. The goal of emotion regulation, in DBT, is not to get rid of emotions. The goal is to reduce emotional suffering by understanding what emotions are actually saying and responding to them skillfully, rather than riding them like a wave you’re certain will drown you.
This is not soft. This is not “just feel your feelings” as a substitute for thinking. It is the recognition that an emotional response carries information, and that discarding it without reading it first is not wisdom. It is data loss.
What we call “being too emotional” is often, clinically, someone who learned that their emotional communication would not be heard. That they had to escalate to be taken seriously. That the volume knob was the only tool available.
When you grow up in an environment that consistently invalidates your internal experience, whether that environment is a family, a school, a culture, or a body of people who decided your particular brain or body or skin means your feelings don’t count, you do not learn to regulate emotion. You learn to either suppress it until it detonates or amplify it until it cannot be ignored. DBT calls this the biosocial model. I call it what happens when we treat the left mind like the sinister hand.
Without emotion, we don’t have intuition, or gut instinct, or vibes – and we use these to make decisions all the time. We should. It is what they are for.
What Next?
Brené Brown has been making a version of this argument for over two decades, and it still has not fully landed in the places that need it most. In a recent conversation on What Now? with Trevor Noah, she returned to something she’s been documenting across her career: that we are not cognitive beings who occasionally have inconvenient emotions. We are emotional beings who, on occasion, use cognition to explain ourselves.
In a separate interview with Fortune, she put it plainly: “If you are a leader and you do not have the capacity to understand and discuss people’s fears and feelings, you will not be leading in the future.” The brigadier general who told her that when your life is on the line you have to deal with fears and feelings is not a surprising exception to military culture. He is someone who never got the memo that he was supposed to pretend emotions didn’t exist.
Vulnerability is not the opposite of competence. The research, consistently, says it is a component of it. And yet we keep calling it a liability, the way we called left-handedness a moral defect, because it makes the people in charge of institutions uncomfortable to be seen not having all the answers.
Being Left-Minded
So what does it actually feel like to be in your left mind? Not the crisis version. Not the flooded, can’t-think-straight version that gets pathologized. The version you’d want.
It feels like knowing something before you can explain it. Listening to your gut. It feels like the moment in a conversation when your chest tightens, and you recognize, before your brain has caught up, that something important just happened. It feels like being able to sit with another person’s pain without immediately reaching for a solution. It feels like being alive in a way that efficiency culture has very little use for.
And when you accept, as Burkeman argues, that we have approximately four thousand weeks on this earth and that no amount of optimization will change that, the calculus shifts. The interior life stops being an obstacle to get through and starts being the point. The left mind stops being the problem and starts being the place worth inhabiting.
That is what I want. Not to be dysregulated. Not to be “led by emotion” in the way the phrase is used as an insult. But to stop treating my interior experience as the thing to get through on the way to the real work. To let the left mind be a place worth being, not a problem to be managed into silence.
Bias + Acceptance + Mindfulness
The guide who mentioned “right mind” wasn’t trying to make a point about neuroscience or therapy. She was just naming something that had calcified into language without anyone deciding to keep it.
That is usually how bias works. It doesn’t announce itself. It becomes the default. It becomes the word you reach for. It becomes the thing you believe about yourself before you’ve thought it through.
We are not too emotional. We were told to be less emotional by systems that benefited from our compliance. There is a difference.
What would it look like to stop correcting for the left hand? To treat the emotional information you carry not as a defect in the machinery but as a reading on the instrument panel? You wouldn’t pull the warning light out of your dashboard because the light is inconvenient. You would want to know what it’s trying to tell you.
And even if you do not get a flashing light telling you something is wrong, that does not mean anything negative. Sometimes we cannot process our emotions in the moment. We do not have to DO anything with them. They can just exist, neither positive nor negative, good nor bad. They are just information.
That is all emotion regulation is. Not suppression. Not performance. Not the wellness-poster version of “feel your feelings.” It is learning to read the instrument panel accurately, tolerate what it shows you, and respond to the actual situation rather than the story you’ve been told about why feeling things means something is wrong with you.
Nothing is wrong with you. The vocabulary was wrong. The church was wrong about the left hand. The productivity culture is wrong about the emotional mind. And any system, clinical or cultural, that treats your body, your brain, or your feelings as the problem to be fixed before you get to deserve care, got it exactly backwards.
You are not the sinister one. You never were.
If you’re ready to start reading the instrument panel instead of fighting it, Wind Over Water Counseling works with people navigating emotion dysregulation, burnout, trauma, eating disorders, and the particular exhaustion of performing “fine” for too long. Reach out to learn more.
Resources:
- DBT Emotion Regulation Skills – Therapist Aid
- Brené Brown: The Rage Bucket Theory – What Now? with Trevor Noah
- Brené Brown on Leadership, Fear, and Feelings – Fortune
- Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
- The Etymology of Sinister – Merriam-Webster
- The Impact of Weight Stigma on Mental Health – National Eating Disorders Association
- Angry Black Woman Stereotype and Counseling Considerations – JMU Scholarly Commons
- ADHD, Hypersensitivity, and Emotional Intensity – Millennial Therapy