It’s tempting to think that we know how we’ll feel when a certain thing happens. We imagine the moment. We rehearse it in our heads. We decide in advance how we’ll respond. But honestly, the old saying, “You don’t know til you get there” really is true.
We may think we can predict, we may want to, but we can’t really know.
Why?
Because things change. Life changes. We change.
And that makes predicting our emotional reactions far less reliable than we think.
The Illusion of Knowing
When my father-in-law passed away, it happened quickly and unexpectedly. My husband was very close to him and watching him decline in the hospital was traumatic. He was hit hard — understandably so.
In the aftermath, he made a quiet pact with himself: When his mom passes someday, he won’t let himself get that upset. He tells me he knows exactly how he’ll feel.
I don’t challenge him — not really. I understand what he’s trying to do. He’s trying to protect himself. He’s trying to control the pain in advance.
But there’s a difference between deciding how you’ll handle something and assuming you know how you’ll feel.
Because you don’t.
What if something else is happening at the same time? Another loss? A health issue? A life transition? We don’t just have one emotion at a time if multiple things are going on. So they amplify each other. As much as you might want to, you can’t account for all the variables ahead of time.
There’s Actually a Name for This
Psychology calls this affective forecasting; our attempt to predict our future emotional reactions which involves anticipating our emotional responses to future events, which is what my husband is trying to do. This process can sometimes lead to unintentional inaccuracies because people may overestimate or underestimate how they will feel based on biases and past experiences.
Biases, which are tendencies or inclinations, can get in the way and that’s why people often struggle with accurate affective forecasting.
Research shows we’re often wrong.
We overestimate how happy we’ll feel when we reach a goal. We underestimate how painful something will be. Or sometimes we assume we’ll recover quickly — and we don’t.
Not because we got it wrong, but because we’re human. We might imagine the event but don’t factor in all the surrounding conditions.
When my dad passed away, it was really hard, of course it was. Two months later, the world shut down for COVID. My grief was interrupted and complicated in ways I could never have anticipated.
Five years later, when my mom passed, it hit me even harder. I knew it would be sad — of course I did. But it was much worse than I expected. Grief doesn’t happen the same way every time. We sometimes wish it would so we can control it, but every loss affects us differently.
Controlling Emotions Vs Predicting Them
It is true that I’m an emotional person and my husband is not. That’s just the way we’re wired. But I think what my husband is really trying to say is it hurt when his dad passed so he’s going to keep his emotions in check when his mom goes so he doesn’t have to feel so sad. I totally get that. That’s different than saying for sure you’ll know how you’ll feel. Cuz you don’t. You can contain your emotions when you get there, but it doesn’t mean you won’t be sad.
My husband isn’t wrong for wanting a plan. It makes sense to think, “next time, I’ll stay steadier. I’ll keep myself together.” That’s about keeping your emotions in check.
But saying “I know exactly how I’ll feel” is something different.
You can decide how you’ll try to respond. You can build coping tools. You can strengthen yourself emotionally. But you cannot pre-experience an event and lock in the emotional outcome. Emotions don’t work that way. Hence the correctness of that old adage I mentioned, “You can’t know til you get there.”
This Is Why Advice Is Tricky
It’s also why advice that begins with, “If I were in your shoes…” can be misleading. They don’t know how they’d feel in your situation. They’re forecasting. And forecasting is unreliable. Just think about how wrong the weather forecast can be at times!
We all like to believe we’d fight back if attacked. Or stay calm in a crisis. Or feel pure joy when our child gets married. But until you’re actually in that moment you don’t know. Maybe you freeze. Maybe you make different decisions. Maybe the situation feels completely different than the one you imagined. Maybe your child picked a partner you don’t really care for but yet you want to be happy for them. There are always variables you can’t know in advance.
You Can’t Pre-Compartmentalize Either
But back to the grief example because that is something all of us sadly experience at one time in our lives as we lose parents or other loved ones. When it happens, you can compartmentalize your emotions, so it doesn’t hurt so much. You can tell yourself you’ll get back to them later when life isn’t so hectic. But when it actually happens? It might be different.
If you fall to pieces and you don’t want to, then you can try to compartmentalize. But you can’t compartmentalize ahead of time. That’s all I’m saying.
You can’t schedule your grief. You can’t decide the intensity ahead of time. You can’t control how deeply something will affect you.
It all goes back to expectations. If you expect you’ll react a certain way when something happens, then it gets here and you don’t, don’t be deflated. Or if you’re like my husband and want to pre-plan your emotions, what’s really happening is you’re trying to control them before they get here.
Have a Game Plan but Be Flexible
It’s ok to have a game plan and it’s ok to stick to it. But don’t hold onto your predictions. If you react differently than you thought you would — don’t shame yourself. Don’t feel disheartened. Don’t assume you failed. You didn’t. You just hadn’t gotten there yet.
And until you’re in the moment —with all the variables in play — you simply can’t know. Because as cliché as it sounds: You don’t know until you get there.
Your intuition is speaking — are you listening?
What you’re feeling isn’t magic or panic — it’s your brain trying to process clearly.
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