“How Does That Make You Feel?”

I once interned with a clinical therapist (when I was a college student) – her specialty was working with adolescents and families who were facing a variety of problems. Some of those problems could be behavioral issues, communication issues, improper parenting techniques, drug abuse, domestic violence, and sexual abuse.

Her goal was generally to help resolve some of the problems they presented but also to help bring families closer together so they could communicate better and solve their own problems.

In seeing this therapist in action, I realized that she had a catchphrase that worked quite well for her. After someone presented a problem or issue in their lives, she would ask:

“How does that make you feel?”

People naturally wanted to discuss the problem, which usually involved other people being wrong, and them being right. But the therapist always brought the conversation back to feelings. It was important to figure out the feelings that had made people so upset and led them to take certain actions in their lives. It was important to look more closely at which feelings may have led to growing conflicts and problems rather than resolutions. The feelings by not having been properly processed, acknowledge, and directed, had led people into toxicity, maladaptive states, and chronic troubles in their lives.

By not processing or understanding our own feelings, we can get stuck at one station in life.

I must note that she had a compassionate, delicate way to ask this question. It wasn’t just the question itself but how she asked it that helped people open up to her. She was truly empathic and cared deeply, and surely this helped her to open up communication channels with her clients.

Understand that when we communicate, many of us are mostly paying attention to our own feelings. We tend to get absorbed in this and forget that the people we communicate with also have their own feelings. We have to be open to communicating with our true feelings to open up someone else’s feelings and then come to a meaningful understanding. When someone’s feelings are not heard or acknowledged, they tend to become aggressive, or they may want to avoid you, or they may ignore you. None of these provides a proper path toward fruitful communication.

Of course, opening up our true feelings is not always easy, but we must learn to do it if we wish to communicate openly, rather than set up walls that shut down communication.

This simple question, “How does that make you feel?” has made me realize over and over that many of us have a lot of room to grow when it comes to our communication skills. We have gotten used to only surrounding ourselves with people who we agree with. Being around people we agree with makes us feel good, but unfortunately, it can stunt our personal growth. In this age, we also surround ourselves with social media or news feeds that only provide us with the viewpoint we already agree with. Again, this makes us feel good but does not necessarily help us to grow as a person.

What happens when people agree with us? This may make us feel smart, liked, or special in some way. And when they disagree with us, we may feel dumb, disliked, and useless. So when people disagree with us, rather than allowing ourselves to have those negative feelings, we may jump into rationalizations and justifications and bitterly defend our positions. Even if, at times, our position is not actually reasonable.

Feelings are important to how we communicate, but at the same time, it should be obvious that just because I feel good about an idea does not make it true.

Why are feelings important to communication, then? Feelings are about finding a pathway toward understanding and resonating with people. Feelings get at the core of who we are. We own our feelings as a part of ourselves more than we own our facts or rationalizations. Facts and rationalizations are available to all. But we see our feelings as uniquely something that we are experiencing. Even if I am sad and you are sad, we are still sad in different ways, so we always know our own experience to be a unique marker of who we are at a point in time. To deny my feelings is to deny me and to say that I do not matter. When someone debates rationally while completely ignoring how I feel, I feel as if I do not matter.

“Well, our budget is smaller this year than last year, and we needed to cut something somewhere. There’s no other way. Sorry, we’re letting you go. I need you to pack your stuff up and be out by the end of the day.”

Anyone faced with hearing the above would probably feel completely denied as a human being. There is no interest in hearing how you feel. The decision is made about your life without actually factoring in your life, feelings, purpose, and will.

Of course, this denial of who we are makes us angry, depressed, anxious and provides us with a full spectrum of negative emotions. The denial of our feelings makes the situation seem worse than it had to be, somehow.

Here is another scenario to consider. For whatever reason, you may find yourself seated next to someone who holds opposing viewpoints on big life issues. Well, what if instead of bitter debates, personal attacks, and building up our anger and hatred for each other, we instead focused on our feelings?

What if the conversation went something like this:

Robert: “I hate how liberals are always trying to control us.”

Martin: “Well, how do you feel when that happens? (Notice that rather than fueling the fire or resisting this potentially antagonizing idea, we ask a neutral question.)

Robert: “It feels aggravating and like we always have to fight just to keep our basic rights.”

Martin: “I’m a liberal, and I feel aggravated too like we always have to fight to make any basic progress toward something better. It sounds like we feel the same, doesn’t it?”

From there, perhaps the conversation could grow in a direction where both people realized that they both feel aggravated, they both feel misunderstood unheard, disregarded, treated unfairly, etc. Both sides are probably experiencing the same feelings, but they are processing them differently, and they have formed different belief systems or worldviews.

We could choose to focus on the common human factor here, which is our feelings, rather than what splits us apart. When we argue, even with facts, all either side truly hears is:

“He disagrees with a plainly obvious truth that anyone with basic intelligence and human decency should be able to see – so he is obviously ignorant at best or a wretched person at worst. I should give him a piece of my mind so he knows how ignorant and wretched he truly is.”

And, of course, such thoughts cannot possibly go anywhere productive.

The way we tend to behave isn’t as a person who is calmly evaluating facts and weighing them against each other. Rather, we are more concerned with our feelings. We tend to react to the way things make us feel.

In our real conversations, of course, it will be a challenge to have a calm, reasonable conversation with someone from an opposing group or belief system. This is a great challenge because we must connect to our emotions while not letting them rule us. Connecting to our feelings will help us see that we share something that unites us with even people from opposing groups.

While we can reason logically through the facts, the reality is that most people do not think in this way. Most people have a feeling or emotion about something, and then they pick the facts or arguments that support their position. There is a confirmation bias – meaning that we only pay attention to evidence that confirms what we already believe. After you believe something, it becomes quite a challenge to change someone’s mind.

So instead of trying to change minds, why don’t we aim to respect our differences and build connections with people? Ask how people feel and encourage them to tell a story about what got them to that point. If you open your mind and listen to people’s pains, you will see that we can’t argue with feelings. We can argue by using logic, but implementing logic successfully is an overwhelming challenge when we live in a world with more and more misinformation, misinterpretations, and biased information. Also, new research is constantly identifying that what we thought was true becomes false overnight, as new “truths” replace the old ones. And of course, when you argue with logic, people tend to get quite emotional about their “facts,” which defies the point of using logic in the first place.

Understand that when we argue from the point of needing to be right, we can’t convince anyone.

The more you feel the need to be right, the more that the other person will feel the need to be right. And the situation we end up creating is of locking horns (such as with bison, antelope, or moose). And sometimes, in nature, both animals lock horns so tightly in a gruesome battle that both sides end up losing their lives. If that is not the future we want to create for ourselves, then we should reconsider our need to be right and instead look for ways to open ourselves up to others and get them to open up to us.

Debating the people we disagree with in an angry, hate-filled way is not the path forward.

Ignoring that the people we disagree with exist is not the path forward.

Treating the people we disagree with as less than human is not the path forward.

Instead of closing down, we must open up and invite people into our hearts, minds, and souls.

If we open up and explore people’s feelings, we create an open window of communication—a channel between souls where true understanding may develop.