Before Emily, I never appreciated the power of my heart.

I didn’t turn to my heart to gather strength, to get through tough situations or to more fully experience the great ones. I was living as if my heart had little to offer and might actually keep me from achieving my goals because it was weak.

I was wrong.

When Emily was born, I felt fear. I was ready for a healthy baby, but my second child wasn’t healthy. When she was just a day old, I heard the neurologist’s descriptions of Emily’s congenital brain anomaly and the dire effects it might cause — she may never walk, she may never talk, she may be profoundly intellectually disabled.

I was devastated and sure my life was ruined. “Heartbroken” didn’t seem a big enough word to cover it. For my whole life and career as a psychiatrist, I had assigned so much value to intellect that I couldn’t see any way of having a “good” life without it. For Emily or for me.

Wrong again.

It turned out I wasn’t heartbroken, I was brain broken.

I spent years trying to solve the “problem” of Emily with my brain. There was testing and training, research and regimens, exercises and enrichment. None of it gave Emily a different brain, nor did it heal my sorrow. In fact, the more I chased “improvement,” the more distraught I felt.

My brain had exhausted itself with overthinking, re-hashing, and angling for control. My brain was sure that I didn’t have the strength to take care of a child with special needs. My brain was burned out.

And then my heart stepped in. And I don’t mean my anatomical heart. I’m talking about Heart the way I’ve come to understand the collection of longings and abilities that don’t come from your brain. Heart had faith in me when I had none. My heart saw I could rise to this painful challenge that seemed hopeless to brain. Heart gave me courage and was blind to fear.

Emily, who has long since mastered both walking and talking, has turned out to be the most purposeful, happy, committed person I know. And the most effective. This is a girl who knows what she wants — and gets it.

All this with an IQ that doesn’t get her out of the bottom quartile. My daughter is so much more capable than anyone could explain armed only with the images from her brain scans. I was eventually forced to conclude that Emily’s success comes from something other than brainpower.

This shocking realization overthrew my whole worldview.

Emily draws on an inner resource of superpowers that I have come to call Heart. This is her default setting, and I’ve learned that we all have access to these powers because Heart is universal. We just tend to underuse it or don’t even realize it’s there.

Watching how Emily lives has been quite an education. Without Heart, we’re all the things Emily isn’t: exhausted, distracted, mistrustful, foggy on what we want, unproductive, excessively worried, self-critical, dissatisfied, indecisive, bored, boring, uncreative, and hopeless (to name a few). And we’re at a real disadvantage to handle what life throws at us.

Emily lives the opposite way that many people, including myself, have learned to live. She leads with Heart because she’s never learned that her heart is a liability. Emily trusts her heart (read my post about trusting your heart here).

She has no idea that Heart is a lousy strategist or that consulting Heart will undermine getting what she wants. Heart gives Emily the energy she needs to pursue her big things, be highly productive and confident. It enables her to focus, engage, and be successful in personally meaningful endeavors.

There is much Emily has not learned, and will never learn. While that might make her worse at geography or multiplication, what’s clear to me now is that it also makes her better, in some fundamental ways, at life.

Raising Emily first brought despair and eventually created a deep well of joy.

It also bestowed a truly unexpected gift: the secret to gathering strength to get through the toughest situations and the secret to more fully experience the greatest ones. The same key opens both, as well as the doors to reaching goals, getting rid of fear, and living a more fulfilling life.

It took some time for me to really see and understand Emily’s Heart-first ways, but I slowly learned when, why and how to shift from brain to Heart. The effects were so powerful I started sharing these lessons with my husband and three other children, and with my patients as well.

And now I’m sharing my story with you. It’s about my brain-first life, interrupted, and the lessons in Heart-first living that saved it. Because if a total brain devotee like me can deploy Heart, anyone can.