"Great" is not a feeling.
Photo by Josh Withers on Unsplash
And just in case you’re wondering, neither is “fine,” “interesting,” or “good.”
Consider for a moment how often you’ve been asked “How do you feel about that?” and responded with non-feeling words, thoughts, descriptions about what what happened makes you want to do, or blame.
You would be surprised by how many people have found ways to avoid feeling their feelings by never uttering them at all.
In fact, the most common thing we’re taught and modeled in society is to think our feelings, or to feel our reactions to our feelings (also known as our triggers), without addressing the feeling at all.
And then we identify with what we think and what our nervous system is doing, instead of our true, felt experience.
Here’s an example:
Your partner comes to you to tell you he has made plans to go on a trip with his friends. The two of you have been talking for a while about going on a trip together, and that trip has yet to be planned despite your nudging and hinting that you’re looking forward to it. When he announces his unilateral decision to go on a vacation without you, you snap.
You are so upset that you can hardly speak, and when you eventually begin to formulate the capacity to think about this news, all you can see is how selfish he is. You storm out without resolving the situation, and later get on a call with a friend to share the news.
Your friend asks you how you feel about it, and you reply: “I think he’s selfish and inconsiderate and I knew this was going to happen. He never puts me first.”
Notice how that sentence begun: “I think he’s…”
“I think” is also not a feeling. It’s a thought.
Now imagine you answered your friend differently. You tell your friend that you’re furious.
It may be true that you’re furious, but it’s also likely that you’re furious because you think your partner has done something to you by choosing to go on a trip with his friends. You’re furious because you’re blaming him. And you’re blaming him because you feel triggered. Fury is the marker of an activated nervous system.
Let’s be clear: it’s not a bad or wrong thing to experience fury. In fact, fury can be quite cathartic, so long as blame isn’t involved. Fury is an incredibly helpful emotion to learn to feel for a person who has repressed their anger their entire lives, particularly for those who have tended toward freeze and dissociative reactive responses to emotionally charged events. It brings the whole emotional landscape online to “shake” the nervous system into rage from paralysis (and this is best done with a trauma-informed guide). And, the purpose of moving through fury when we’re trying to heal our relationship to our anger is to get to what’s underneath fury. The softer, more vulnerable, authentic emotional landscape is the goal. With blame in the game, it’s very hard to do that.
Underneath fury, the feeling is likely something more akin to sadness or disappointment. And underneath that, likely a good deal of vulnerability (because you were counting on him to follow through on his commitment to you, and he hasn’t yet. It’s vulnerable to express desires and not have them met by those we love.)
Now imagine a third outcome. You hear the news from your partner that he’s going on a trip with his friends. You don’t immediately make the assumption that he’s made this choice to personally punish you, and instead, choose to trust that he does in fact care about you even if his actions may not make that so evident.
Did you know it’s possible (and healthy!) to just tell your partner the truth about how you feel?
You might say: “I’m feeling activated by this news and I don’t really have the words to formulate why right now, but I’m telling myself a story that you’re not considering me in your plans. <deep breath> <pause> I feel disappointed that you haven’t planned the trip with me that we discussed. It’s vulnerable for me to share a desire to spend time with you and for that desire to be left hanging.”
Said with energetic openness and a desire to connect, this third scenario has the potential to lead to a deepening of emotional intimacy between you and your partner. Anything else has the potential to drive you further apart.
The foundation of Emotional Intelligence lives in the emotional literacy and discernment described in that third outcome.
Knowing the difference between a thought, a feeling, and a reaction is an incredibly important aspect of mental and emotional wellbeing which very few of us were taught growing up.
And learning to use the words which actually describe how we’re truly feeling — vulnerably and with an open heart — in any given moment, without self-judgment, is a dimension that most people need to learn.
To a degree, we cannot feel what we do not possess language for. (This is especially true at the beginning of a personal growth journey, and becomes less true the more conscious we become, and the more inner stillness we can create space for.) Learning to broaden our emotional vocabulary is an important phase of development, in that the emotional maturity which comes from vulnerably claiming how we actually feel (rather than what we think or what we’re triggered by) sets the stage for everything that follows.
That literacy helps guide us deeper into the intimacy we yearn for, which then guides us in our continued growth.
In that vein, I have a challenge for you:
The next time someone asks you how you’re feeling, no matter how benign the situation, find an actual feeling to respond with, rather than saying good, great, fine, or any other half-baked superficial response.
If you need some inspiration, I highly recommend Non-Violent Communication’s List of Feelings, a resource I share with each of my clients at the beginning of our work together.