How are you feeling?
Unsurprisingly, the question “How do you feel about that?” comes up pretty frequently in coaching.
Given our Western perception of ourselves as intellectual beings, we’re used to talking about what we think. Contemporary neuroscience shows us that the body - our nervous system, our emotions and gut - control much more of our behaviour than we realise, but we’re culturally conditioned to prioritise thinking over feeling, and therefore tend to intellectualise our experiences.
This might explain why I so often find that getting a straight answer to the simple question “How do you feel?” is much more difficult than you’d expect.
Take for example an emotionally charged situation with a partner or family member. Maybe they’ve made a comment that’s delivered as a “joke”, but that in reality feels hurtful. None of us would have any problem describing the situation, the comment itself, and the background of the interaction. But when I ask “How did you feel about that?”, I tend to get a lot of answers that are not feelings. Examples would be “Well I know from their point of view they’d say they’re just being funny”, or “If I say anything they say I’m too sensitive” or “I know that’s the way they go on in their family” and so on.
All of this is useful - it provides context, nuance and background. But it doesn’t answer the simple question “How did that make you feel?”.
The Core Emotions
If I ask again, we’ll hopefully get closer, and we might move into “feel like…” territory. So for example, “It makes me feel like they don’t actually respect me”, or “It makes it seem like I’m being too sensitive”.
We’re getting warmer…
To get us to the emotional truth, it can be helpful to list the core emotions. While there is some debate over what constitutes a core emotion (generally defined as emotions that occur in the body’s limbic system, have an evolutionary purpose, and are universal to all healthy humans), a useful working list would include:
Anger
Sadness
Fear
Disgust
Joy
Excitement
Attraction
Once we start to run through a checklist of any that might be relevant -
“Do I feel any anger, yes or no?”
“Do I feel any fear?”
“Do I feel any sadness…?”
- we can begin to get somewhere. In narrowing the focus of the question, and reducing the parameters to this short list, we can begin to identify what we’re actually feeling, in simple terms.
This in and of itself is a powerful exercise. There is something about accurately naming our emotions to ourselves that at the very least eases the tension of the unexpressed. We can move from an amorphous blizzard of confusion to a more elemental statement of what we actually feel. Our own system hears us say it out loud, and feels at the very least acknowledged.
OUr starting point, which might be “She probably didn’t mean anything by it. Maybe I am being hypersensitive" does not pack the more truthful emotional punch of “I feel sad about it. It was hurtful”. With the simple identification of what it is that we’re feeling, we can begin to process it. Rather than intellectualising the meaning, the right or wrong, or the interpretation, we can simply acknowledge how the experience was to us, and the feelings it provoked in us.
What then?
For bonus points, you could at least consider honestly telling the person involved how you felt in response to their words or actions. If they’re someone we want to repair with, then accurately defining and honestly sharing our true feelings could have deep value to the long-term health and depth of the relationship, even if it’s awkward in the short-term. (I’m learning to love awkward in the short-term). This would involve saying clearly “When X happened, I felt Y”. Rather than making an accusation or debating right and wrong, we’re simply sharing our honest experience, which should also help to disarm the situation. It’s a lot harder for someone to argue against a feeling (“That made me feel sad”) than an accusation (“You shouldn’t have said that”). It moves the conversation to a different territory - one that’s ultimately more honest and constructive.
Ideally, a statement like this would be followed with a clear and reasonable request for what you’d like in future. Even if the outcome is not what we hoped for, simply sharing our experience truthfully can be a deeply empowering experience and a potentially peace-making & connecting gesture to others.
Where you really feel the behaviour is out of line, calling it out for what it is can potentially alter how we’re treated in future, particularly if the behaviour is passive-aggressive. In the above example, if we take the time to work through our feelings, we might be better placed to call out further “jokes” in real-time.
As Nedra Glover Tawwab writes,
Making harsh statements and pretending those statements are a joke is gaslighting… Emotional maturity means thinking before you speak and knowing what might harm another person.
You're not being "too sensitive" when you're offended by a joke made directly towards you.
Relationship therapists often say that the key skill in a relationship is how to fight constructively. Being able to bring an emotional truth to someone we care about is a difficult skill, and one that we’re typically underequipped to do. We’re just not taught how to. In fact, we’re often implicitly encouraged to minimise, excuse and absorb, rather than acknowledge or confront, particularly where power differentials exist. And while there are situations in which it's not possible, safe or constructive to confront someone with the truth of their behaviour, I would encourage everyone to at the very least go through this process yourself, or even better, with somebody safe.
What to do…
To do this yourself, consider a situation that’s caused you some kind of upset, and ask yourself: “When that happened, how did I feel?”
Answer using simple “I feel… “ statements, in as much detail as you can, using the core emotions (such anger, sadness, fear, disgust…) as kicking off points if that helps. The more detailed, body-based and emotionally granular the answer, the better.
Try this with others too. You’ll begin to notice how rare it is for people to say how they feel, even when you ask directly.
This is the simplest of exercises, but I guarantee there’s a release and a reckoning in simply getting the names of our feelings right, even if that’s as far as the process goes.
