Clara was a girl who from a young age incorporated negative messages, told her at home that she was useless and incapable of anything, and she even doubted her intellectual abilities. She was often happy, but if you activated that imposed scheme, for example in the face of a small failure, she would sink into the misery of her negative thoughts. She thought life was meaningless, desperately seeking his father's approval, etc. 

One day, something changed everything: their father was diagnosed with cancer, and the mother and her siblings sank into impotence. Clara took care of everything, led the family crisis, addressed adversity during the year and a half of treatment, was the support of the family, taught them to meditate, promoted the healthy habit of expressing their emotions, understood with doctors... She also discovered that she had a "kind fortitude," and many qualities that no one had taught. She just said, "I get out of it." Clara's "scheme of inefficiency" was replaced, through that art of governing difficult and unexpected situations, by an "inner wisdom." It wasn't negative anymore. "There is no worse censorship than self-censorship" (Mauricio González de la Garza). 

Walter Riso says in his book Think Well, feel good that the traps of the mind are three: we lie (because we lack realism in our perception), sometimes we do not learn to lose (it is what we can call "lack of humility", because of an education that entrains us , in search of utopian perfection), and we lack discernment to know what to do (out of ignorance: we need more wisdom). Let it not happen to us what the young man who was able to conquer the prettiest girl of his class only to conclude later, for his neurotic manias that distorted reality, that she had terrible pleasure at having noticed someone like him. "The mind is primarily responsible for our suffering" (Buda).

"Where do I get so much aggression?" one person would ask. How come we find so much violence in people's hearts? Children, as a virgin mirror of what is inside people, capture that, and they are marked. Sometimes it erupts in arguments, other times there is an inner repression, feeling drowned. Today we know that all this generates resentment and the general cause is the system in which we are, rationalist, that imprisons us in some obligations, small things, that drown us as happened to the protagonist of The Bridges of Madison, who anguished in that prison is she feels overwhelmed and does not fill her, her dreams are thwarted, and she escapes with a romance of a few days, from which she then lives in her memories all her life. However, the answer is not to flee towards emotivism, it is necessary to create a new kind of rationality where emotion is included. Sometimes we think badly because we feel bad, or the other way around: we feel bad because we think wrong. What is clear is that thinking bad will make me feel bad (the "cognitive" therapies delve into that). 

Let's say that we cannot limit ourselves to our "real" life, but that we are also, or above all, what we dream of, our projects, even if then we "choose" reality, but freely, without feeling slaves. Perhaps the key is to make sure that reason dominates, but with a "point of madness", to harbor the dreams of the heart, our inner world.