It is crucial to allow yourself to explore and acknowledge your feelings, even if you don't feel ready to identify them. By giving space to your emotions and sharing that understanding with those close to you, this is the key to successful relationships.
The difference between “I feel that ____” and “I feel___”
People often do not know how they feel. “I think that...” means you had a thought, you identify that there is a thought and now you are expressing that thought. “THAT” is a very useful pronoun when wanting to identify something else or more in depth.
For example, I went to the store that was down the street.
But those of us who study human behaviors and emotions have noticed that this word is often used to mask a thoughts with feeling or blend the two in ways that are really unhelpful and technically inaccurate.
I often people say, “I feel that you…” and very often, what follows is a thought and not a feeling. A feeling is clear and a sentence expressing it would be shorter.
I feel enthusiastic.
I feel insecure.
I feel usually one word. It’s not complicated.
It might sound true that
“I feel that you are mean”
if you behave like a bully with me. However, the accurate feeling behind my emotional response is not anywhere in that sentence.
“I feel that you are mean” is a statement about “you” that is hidden behind a feeling, at best, inaccurately and at worst, manipulatively. If you behave like a bully with me, I could feel hurt, angry, shocked, overwhelmed, embarrassed, sad and a million other feelings, which would be appropriate emotional responses to your behavior. But often times, we feel discomfort and we do not know how to name it so we intellectualize it and share a thought or conclusion like, “...you are mean.” That may be true but that is not sharing with you what I feel.
It is problematic that we walk around disconnected and unaware of what we actually feel.
When we try to tell someone else that we feel that XYZ, more often than not, people will take that as an attack and they will want to be defensive. That is the natural response.
Telling your spouse, I feel that you don’t listen, is an attack on their ability to listen.
You feel unheard, you feel invisible, you feel unacknowledged and it may be because of your partner’s inability to listen but that does not tell your partner what you feel, but rather what you think about them. When we are able to name a feeling clearly, then we give your partners an opportunity to meet the need. “I feel unheard…I feel invisible” could invite your partner to say, "what can I do, to get it right?" It also invites your partner to say to you that it was not their intention. It invites your partner to maybe apologize. It allows your relationship to not get lost in translation between your heart and brain and your loved-one’s brain and heart. It is easy to feel alone even in the middle of a crowd. It is common to be under-slept and over-tired and that makes us less able to make good decisions and communicate effectively. You deserve the love, connection, and belonging that you desire. Invest time in getting to know your true feelings and slow down moments where you feel things might be moving too fast to gift yourself and your loved-ones with truth and vulnerability, which are the foundations for connection.
There are many tools out there, including a feelings wheel, that identifies feelings so you can have appropriate language. It is appropriate to say:
I feel unsure about what I feel.
I feel uneasy.
I feel uncomfortable.
I feel upset and don’t have words yet.
If feeling-words are hard to identify, try to share with your loved ones what physical-feelings might be in your body. I feel my stomach turning as I hear this news. I feel my mouth drying up, I cannot
even speak right now. I feel a heat rising to my face as I listen… Our bodies can be incredibly informative and often more clear about what what “it” feels – just recall the body’s reaction to food poisoning or an allergy.
It is also okay to communicate that maybe you do not feel ready to identify a feeling but it is really important to give yourself an opportunity to sit with the feeling, identify it so that you can bring it out of you, and put it in the middle with the people with whom you have relationship with, the people whom you love. This is key to having successful relationships.
Article written by Alexandra Zareth
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