This is the second in a series of Expressing Feelings, the first installment being on theory, this one on the practice. In brief review, Expressing Feelings I: Theory we discussed:
–There are four basic feelings:
o Joy, when I have something I love; sadness when I lose it
o Fear when I fear losing something I love; anger when I have lost it
–It is important to know what you feel, value what you feel, express what you feel, and eventually communicate how you feel
— Words are not feelings; they are one way to communicate feelings. Art, music, drama, and body movements are other means of communicate feelings
— Children normally express feelings without restraint. Repression of their feelings leads to depression; undue expression of their feelings leads to immaturity
–Expression of feelings, especially strong feelings, often offends
While the theory of expressing feelings is quite simple, practicing expressing feelings is much harder. Let’s briefly look at why this is true.
They never taught me to do it
In an ideal relationship the people who share that relationship know how they feel and value how they feel. In other words, they are emotionally mature. Emotionally mature people can access and express their feelings fluently without defensiveness or judgment. They know how to use words that successfully communicate their feelings. They grew up in environments that gave them permission to feel what they felt without shame, so they gained confidence in their expression of feelings. As these ideal people continued to grow, and continue to mature emotionally, their social development also advanced so that they not only knew how to express their own feelings they could just as easy hear other people’s feelings as well. Not only were they emotionally mature, they were socially mature. People who are both emotionally mature and socially mature comprise about one per cent of the population, maybe even less. Emotional awareness and emotional expression are so central to communication, and yet very few people know what they feel, much less how to express their feelings.
The other 99% is the rest of us. Many of us were not raised in families where emotions were understood, expressed, and accepted. We may have been raised in intelligent families where there were political, religious, the philosophical conversations, where opinions were discussed but where there was little or no expression of emotions. Or we may have been raised in families where emotions reigned, but so much so that nobody was listening to anyone else. Or we may have been raised in very under spoken families where no one expressed anything much, and everyone went their own way. Whether or not these were loving families is not the question. The issue here is that we were not raised with a good understanding of what we feel and how to speak of these feelings and hence, most of us are not very good at understanding what other people feel when they say something emotional. This whole array of difficulties in expressing feelings led to a good deal of shame coming to be associated with expressing our feelings, or for that matter, even having feelings at all.
Shame
Shame is the feeling that something is wrong with me. It is caused by someone suggesting that I have some personal flaw. The universal result of feeing shame is to hide. So if I was shamed for having feelings and expressing feelings, I will hide these feelings. My feelings won’t go away; they will just stay under the surface. When my feelings are not acknowledged and expressed, I do not develop emotional maturity: I do not learn how and when to express my feelings. And if I do not develop emotional maturity, I will not develop social maturity. In this state I am unable to tell people how I feel, much less hearing how other people feel. Nothing deters the development of character like shame. And nothing deters development of character more than an inability to express feelings. So why would I be shamed for having feelings and expressing them?
Most of us experienced a fair bit of shame surrounding the expression of feelings. This shame occurred mostly in childhood, and it came from parents, siblings, teachers, friends, and enemies. The core result of having been shamed was always the same: “there is something wrong with me for having feelings and expressing these feelings.” Shaming comes in two forms: statements of attack of one’s person, or rhetorical questions that imply an attack on one’s person. Shaming statements are like, “Stop crying or I will give you something to cry about,” or “Don’t cry over spilt milk.” Rhetorical questions are those like, “Why are you crying about this?” or “What is wrong with you?” Statements and rhetorical questions like these give a child the feeling that there is something wrong with feeling sad. Children raised in homes where these things are said come to believe that feelings shouldn’t be expressed, or worse yet, they shouldn’t be felt. If I am ashamed of feeling emotions, I will hide them. If I am ashamed of being myself, I will hide myself, and I will not develop self-esteem and character. (See further reading recommendations at the end of the blog.)
There are many reasons that we are less than good at communicating our feelings:
— Parents are not good role models for emotional expression
— Children are shamed by their parents, friends, and siblings for expressing feelings
— Middle school and high school social “drama” makes it hard for teenagers to express feelings without being criticized, ignored, or gossiped about.
— Social media and electronic communication, like texting and emails do not help kids learn how to communicate feelings
— The American culture itself does not enhance emotional expression
–People do not spend enough time expressing their feelings to get good at it
–We enter romantic or other intimate relationships wholly unprepared for engaging in emotional communication
So how can we re-learn how to express our feelings adequately? There is no quick start to expressing feelings. This blog isn’t intended to cure all that ails you growing up…just to introduce to the basic components of how to express your feelings. We want to give you just two essential tools: practice and vulnerability.
Practice makes imperfect
It takes time to learn to communicate feelings effectively, just like it does learning anything in life. We don’t learn to swim the first time we get in the water, and we don’t get better at swimming just because we want to be able to swim well. We need a lot of practice to get good at anything: swimming, writing, reading, or baking bread. The expert chef has had many flops before she becomes familiar with quantities of flour and minutes in the oven. The same is true of learning how to communicate feelings. If right now, you commit yourself fully to learn how to communicate your feelings, it will probably take you at least a year to become fluent at it. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and I (Ron) didn’t learn how to express feelings effectively in a day. It has taken me years. Hopefully, it will take much less time for you.
Don’t expect to do this expertly. You will never be perfect in expressing feelings. Feelings are never wrong, but the words we use to express them are never perfect. The mistakes you might make could include the following:
- You will say things that you don’t really mean…because you are using imperfect words when expressing feelings
- You will begin by making judgements of the person you are talking to
- You will say something and the next day you will realize that what you said wasn’t quite right.
- You will contradict yourself and have to start over
- You will ask your audience to agree with you before you are finished talking
- You will feel defensive when you are challenged by what you say
- You won’t even know what to say because you don’t know how to identify what you feel. You will just know you feel something, but find it hard to solidify
In summary, you won’t be good at expressing feelings when you start, and you will feel awkward in the process. It takes a lot of “my bad; that wasn’t what I really wanted to say”, and “I am sorry, I really miscommunicated. Please let me try again” or similar mea culpa expressions. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could just tell you how to express feelings and then you just do it? No such luck. You have to try. You have to fail. You have to admit to your failure. And you have to try again. Just like swimming and baking. You get good at it…eventually. In the meantime, be prepared for mistake after mistake. You will eventually make fewer. But to start with, most of what you say when expressing your feelings will be less than good, but it will be a start. You will need to agree to be patient with yourself. And you will need to be vulnerable.
Being vulnerable
If you are going to make an effort to express your feelings, you will make mistakes, and in the making of mistakes, you will find yourself vulnerable to people’s challenges, judgments, and criticisms of what you said. They may even criticize you. Your vulnerability, both to your own mistakes and to the judgments of others, is essential for you to become successful at getting beyond expressing your feelings to the point of communicating your feelings.
Learning to express feelings is much like opening Russian “nesting dolls” you think you have it and then you discover there is more yet to explore. If you are going to uncover your feelings, find words for your feelings, correct the words, and possibly be challenged by the people you are talking to, you will have be truly committed to the process of learning about feelings.
We resist vulnerability because we resist shame. Know that when you are doing the hard work of finding your feelings, and finding words for your feelings, you will want to avoid the whole process and give up. You will want to run away and hide. You will feel very defensive. You might even get angry. You will certainly be afraid. This defensiveness, anger, fear, and hiding is the direct result of your having been shamed for having feelings and expressing feelings. This defensiveness will incline you to be negative in what you say about your feelings. This is unfortunate but unavoidable.
The negative appearance of expressing feelings
When we are learning to adequately express our feelings we tend to say something bad about the person we are talking to. We say that we don’t like the way the person behaved, or how the person spoke, or how the person ignored you at some time. This way of talking about your feelings is essentially negative. Remember, that feelings are never wrong, and they are never really “negative;” they just sound negative. We want you to learn how to be positive about your feelings, but you won’t be able to do that at the start. You will sound critical to your audience, to your friend or spouse. There is no way around this because you have probably bottled up angry resentful feelings for a long time, and you have to get them off your chest. This, of course, asks a lot of your listener, but we need to defer the hearing part of this process to Feelings III: Hearing Feelings.
When we speak of “negative feelings,” I mean feelings of hurt, offense, or fear that usually end up with some kind of expression of anger. Fear and anger are not truly “negative,” but they erupt because there is something in front of you that you don’t like. Given all the hurdles to expression of feelings that we have noted, it is no surprise that when people say that they want to express their feelings, they usually mean they want to say what is wrong…usually, what is wrong with you. Unfortunately, people express the defense-based feelings of fear and anger, more readily than the love-based-feelings of joy and sadness. Most people who say, “I just want to tell you my feelings,” are not happy about something. They don’t like something. They are angry about something, usually what you, the listener, has done or said. It would be good to have people first learn to express the love feelings of sadness and joy, but this isn’t where most people have to start. They have to start with their anger and fear feelings because these feelings are the ones that trouble people the most. We have to start where we are in learning to express feelings, and where most people are is feeling of dislike, angry or “something wrong” about something. Actually, they’re hurt.
Hurt is central
Interestingly and importantly, feelings are always about “something is right,” rather than “something is wrong” but this is hard to explain. The dislike, disappointment, and anger that people express when they “have to tell you their feelings” is about hurt first, not anger. So, what is hurt? Hurt is a “positive feeling.” Hurt is positive because that is what we feel when something important to us, something we love is s lost, demeaned, or assaulted. When something we love has been lost we feel sad. So, when we are attacked in any way, we have been hurt and hurt makes us sad. We discuss this at length in our book, which we would suggest you peruse for a more cogent explanation. Sadly, when most people “have to express their feelings,” they skip over the hurt, which is love based and makes us feel vulnerable, and express the anger, which is defense based.
This hurt piece is what makes communicating feelings so difficult. Though it is best to communicate the positive feeling of love and loss, most people have to start with their defensive feelings. And hearing defensive feelings is even more difficult because defensive expressions are offensive. If you are going to work at communicating the breadth of your feelings, you have to start with the ones that most trouble you: fear and anger. You also have to start knowing that you are not good at emotional expression, much less emotional communication. Your listener might even be worse at it. Just keep in mind that anger and all that goes with it, criticism, challenge, and correction, are essentially defensive, while the real task is to get to the place where you can express the love feelings. It is rare that people can start expressing feelings with these love-based feelings because most of the feelings that are bottled up are angry feelings.
Expressing anger and resentment is the beginning of the line, not the end of the line. The end of the line is expressing your love-based feelings. Think of learning to emotionally communicate is like walking into a tunnel. As you enter the tunnel, you have to pass through the defensive feelings before you can get to the end of the tunnel: the love feelings. It might feel like the whole tunnel is anger and fear, but these are just the first feelings you encounter. If you start with fear and anger, and allow yourself the freedom to say these feelings, you will ultimately find that the more basic and important feelings of joy and sadness will eventually come. Then you will have successfully communicated the breadth and depth of your feelings.
Let’s consider some examples of people trying to express their feelings where “negative” feelings usually start the ball rolling.
- The car seat heater
A couple I just recently began seeing gave me a perfect example of what usually happens when people express their feelings. More accurately, when they think they have expressed their feelings. I had been working with the man for a few minutes trying to help him learn to express his feelings, particularly helping him value his analytical nature, which is understanding a problem and fixing it, but also tends to be perceived as critical by the person who is being “fixed.” Then the wife said that she thought she was quite good at expressing feelings and gave a recent example. She noted that her husband got in the car on the passenger’s side after she had just pulled out of the garage. He proceeded to turn on the seat warmer for himself, but not for her. She said that she expressed her feelings plainly enough saying, “Thanks a lot, partner, for thinking of me instead of just yourself” as she aggressively pushed her seat heater. She thought this was a good example of expressing her feelings. I told her that she expressed “feelings” (anger), but she hadn’t expressed her feelings in a way that her husband could possibly understand her. She had expressed anger, and in so doing, had expressed the fact that she thought her husband was an insensitive jerk. More importantly, she had not expressed the more important feelings about herself.
So what did she really feel if it wasn’t anger? Certainly, she was angry. But more importantly, she felt hurt. More important than that, she felt sad. More important than that she felt love. Yes, she was offended, but this offense came because she has what we call a “love problem”: she loves her husband, she loves their relationship, she loves herself, she loves the comfort of a warm car seat, and she would love her husband to love her by turning on her seat heater. I asked her, “How could your husband know all these love feelings when he just heard the “You’re a jerk statement”? I didn’t mean to suggest that her anger was wrong. I meant to suggest that her anger was a secondary feeling that occurred because she loved something (actually many things), lost these things, felt hurt, and felt sad. But to turn this situation around so that she can really express her feelings, and her husband could really understand her, is very hard. I won’t be able to help this couple until I can teach them about what they really feel, and then how to express it. Let’s look at a couple other examples before we get to the “how to” of this expressing feelings lesson.
- Shoes in the house
Let’s say that you like the fact people to take their shoes off when they come into your house. We used to live in Newfoundland, Canada, where everyone always took their shoes off at the entry door. It amazed us that when people left, they left wearing their own shoes! I remember hearing from a Newfoundlander living in Florida that the only thing she didn’t like about Americans is that they didn’t take their shoes off when they came into her house. So let’s say that this is your preference, whether you learned it at home, in your Newfoundland culture, or just came to it yourself. Your spouse, however, doesn’t have that value, so he just walks right in the house without leaving his shoes at the door. You might have said something like:
— “Look at the mess you created on the carpet!” Or…
— “I’ve told you a thousand times that I don’t like you to wear your street shoes in the house.” Or…
— “I can’t get the kids to take their shoes off at the door if you don’t set an example.” Or…
— “Take your g… d…. shoes off when you come in from outside!”
Or you might have asked a rhetorical question. Rhetorical questions are those that have an implied statement. So you might ask rhetorical questions like these:
— “What is wrong with you that you can’t take your shows off when you come inside?”
— Do you think we live in a barn?
— “Why is it so hard to remember to take your shoes off when you come in?”
— “Why can’t you simply take your shoes off when you come in the house?”
— “Do you expect me to clean up after you make this mess?”
If you were to have said one of these statements or asked one of these rhetorical questions, you would have communicated to your spouse that:
— You are angry at your spouse
— Your spouse is stupid, irresponsible, and disrespectful
— You don’t like living with your spouse.
— You know when and where to wear shoes better than your spouse does
These statements and rhetorical questions are what most people say when they want to tell someone their feelings. People speaking these judgmental statements and rhetorical questions have communicated anger but they have not communicated the more important feeling that underlies anger: hurt. Let me explain. Let’s consider that I am the offended spouse and my wife has come into the house without stepping out of her street shoes. What have I felt? I have felt hurt. Why have I felt hurt? I have felt hurt because of what I value, of what I love. In such a case I have loved a clean kitchen floor or living room carpet. My wife has hurt me because her behavior has violated my value system. So the really important feeling I have is hurt, not anger. And the even more important fact is that I have been hurt because of something I love: a clean floor; I love my spouse, and I love my spouse respecting my value of a clean floor. I have what I call a love problem, not really an anger problem. So, how might I express the positive, love-based feeling of love? I might say something like,
— Deb, I would like to tell you something that is real important to me. I would like to communicate something that has been a part of me all my life.
— I just love having a clean floor. You know how I always am picking up scraps of paper and sweeping up the crumbs on the floor. I do this because it gives me great joy to see a spotless floor.
— And when I see crumbs, or paper, or mud on the floor, it seems that something has been taken away from me that I truly love.
— I know this sounds silly, but believe me, a clean floor is one of the most important things in my life. Somehow, I can leave the dishes in the sink all day or leave the car dirty for weeks, but a dirty floor offends me.
— So, I will ty to communicate to you better about the clean floor value that I have.
— And by the way, I am sorry for griping at you about your wearing your street shoes in the house. I just didn’t know how to tell you what was really important to me.
Nobody speaks like this. But they should. If I would communicate this value system, i.e. a clean floor, I would be communicating what I value, what I love, and I would be communicating who I am. If I indulge myself in expressing anger at Deb, I will not be communicating me. I will be assaulting her. Most importantly, she won’t understand me any better. She will just think I am angry or bitter about something as silly as street shoes in the kitchen. It is up to me to communicate what I love. It is not up to her to somehow know what I love by reading between my angry words.
It must be obvious that someone on the receiving part of this scenario would have all sorts of thoughts and feelings. We are deferring any discussion of how one hears someone’s feelings to Feelings III: Hearing Feelings. Before we stop, consider how you might start to express your feelings under the following circumstances. Note how you could start with the negative feelings of anger and fear or the positive feelings of hurt and love.
— A sexless marriage
— Your spouse buys a 30” TV that costs $1500 to replace the 25” TV,
— Your friend is always late for things
— Your friend speaks ill of your favorite politician
— Your spouse disciplines the children too harshly
— Your spouse fails to discipline your children harshly enough
We wish you the very best in learning how to communicate your feelings. We can’t all be musicians, poets, and sculptors who express feelings so well. But we can get better at the process. If you engage in this process, you will feel awkward, insecure, and uncertain. You will feel childlike because you are learning to do something that you couldn’t do as a child. Now is the time to grow up, but growing is painful. It is painful to make mistakes, fumble around when trying to speak, and generally feel stupid. If you continue to experiment with it, you will get better at it. And you will eventually enjoy it. And your relationships will improve drastically. We have talked mostly about expressing hurt feelings that erupt into anger. We will elaborate on how to express feelings of joy and excitement in a later blog.
Further Reading
See Expressing Feelings I. Wait for Expressing Feelings III, IV, and V
Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Author speaks of different ways men and women speak. Men are “agenic” (self-oriented); women are communal (together)
Johnson. R. and Brock, D. The Positive Power of Sadness. Los Angeles: Praeger
Johnson, R. and Brock, D. The 4-8-12 Child (in press, prepublication print available in our office).
Lerner, H.G. (1985). The dance of anger. New York: Harper and Row. Also an older book. Much valuable, however the author has an early feminist who is speaking primarily in defense of women standing up for themselves.
Powell, J. (1969). Why am I afraid to tell you who I am? Allen, TX: Tabor Publishing. An older book written by a priest. Not bad. A bit dated