Is that feeling real?
“Becoming aware of faux feelings can help us go deeper.”
Emotional validation – the practice of reflecting an emotion to someone else, and providing reassurance that the experience of that emotion is both real and normal – is one of the foundational tenets of de-escalation and active listening. Nothing is guaranteed to piss someone off or shut someone down faster than telling them that their feelings are not real. However there is also a principle in psychology and non-violent communication called “faux” feelings or “false” feelings. What gives?
Broadly speaking, this category of faux feelings is made of verbs. Feelings like “I feel attacked, I feel betrayed, I feel manipulated,” or even “I feel loved, I feel protected” are all essentially describing an external situation, not an internal emotion. They are actions that happen to someone, that cause an internal response, not helpful words for the response itself.
The best example of this to me is “attacked” – imagine a literal attack. Someone has grabbed the front of your shirt and is yelling in your face. Objectively, a verbal and physical attack that threatens to escalate into more. In that situation, one person might be frightened, alarmed, terrified! All feeling words. But a different person, experiencing that same attack, might feel mostly angry, indignant. And a third person, maybe someone who was spoiling for a fight, might feel satisfied, glad, even anticipatory!
In this way, saying “I felt attacked” doesn’t give us much information about the actual internal experience. It tells us only how the person saying “I felt attacked” interpreted the actions and motives of others. Now, if someone says that to you it is not going to be helpful to say “No, you didn’t, because that’s not a feeling” – you’re likely to hear that you made that person “feel shut down” or “feel invalidated” (more actions!) But it does tell us more information is needed to unpack the situation that was interpreted that way and the impact it had on the people involved.
Now, I’m a writer of fiction in addition to my work in conflict resolution – am I determined to never again use the phrase “He felt betrayed”? Of course not. These phrases have entered deep in our lexicon as evocative, meaningful shorthand to describe how situations and actions impact us. But as I frequently tell clients and training participants, things that are normal and harmless, even useful in our day to day conversations are not always helpful in conflict or crisis!
Becoming aware of faux feelings can help us go deeper – what happens inside you when you perceive an attack? And perhaps more importantly, how does it really feel to be loved?