Feelings aren't facts

If you’ve been around my work for a minute, you know that I talk a lot about feeling your feelings and offering yourself empathy. I stand by that, and always will.

That doesn’t mean, however, that I think you should believe every feeling you have.

In fact, not being able to determine the difference between a feeling and a fact can create a lot of unnecessary pain and disconnection in your life.

Let me give you some examples of what I mean:

You feel lazy about not wanting to do chores and errands after work, so you make it a fact that you're a lazy person.

You feel disrespected by your teenage kid who doesn’t come home on time for dinner, and rather than chalking it up to him being a teenager who was having fun with his friends and lost track of time, you make it a fact that he’s disrespectful.

Your boss breaks her 1:1 meeting with you twice in a row and you feel unimportant so you make it a fact that your boss thinks your contribution isn’t important.

The tricky thing is, your feelings are valid—I can 100% understand feeling lazy or disrespected or unimportant in those situations.

But it’s just not true that you’re inherently lazy. And it may be true that your teenage kid is more oblivious than he is disrespectful.

And your boss may think you and your contribution are very important but had a lot on her plate and thought you’d be more accommodating than whatever she broke her meetings with you to address.

What’s so pernicious about turning feelings into facts is that it can erode connection and cut you off from seeing what may be possible.

For example, if you feel unimportant because of your boss’s actions and you make it a fact that she thinks you’re unimportant, it absolutely will undermine your confidence and/or infuse resentment into your relationship with her.

This kind of thing happens all the time. When we get upset by something, we make up narratives about what happened as if they were true.

OR, we’ve been on the receiving end of someone else making up a narrative about us because of something they feel.

So what do you do if you find yourself turning your narrative about something into a fact?

First, soothe yourself and offer yourself empathy and understanding for how you feel—you get to feel that way! But interrupt yourself from letting that become truth.

If you're not familiar with the phrase, “The story I’m making up about this is…,” then consider it your new best friend. Saying this phrase helps you to identify what feels true even as you’re acknowledging that it may not be true.

Second, if you feel you need to address the dynamic head on, you can use those same words to advocate for yourself with someone else.

For example, you could say, “When you canceled our last two meetings, the story I made up is that you don’t feel my contribution on this project is important.”

I can assure you that any time there’s a difficult dynamic where you feel hurt by someone, using the words “the story I made up about this” is a muchbetter way to address the hurt without blaming or attacking the other person for something that, to them, may not be true.

As you might imagine, giving someone the benefit of the doubt in this way is a better foot to start off on if you’re trying to create or repair trust.

Take a moment to consider this for yourself:

What feeling might you be turning into a fact? Either right now in a situation in your life, or chronically?

Do you need to simply disentangle the feeling from the fact for yourself, or do you need to talk to someone else about the story you’ve been making up in order to make a repair?

Because remember, you can validate your feelings without needing them to be indicative of a larger truth about you, someone else or a situation.

Being able to acknowledge this can free you up from a lot of unnecessary pain. And I want that for you!

Want more tools for how to manage your feelings? Check out my online course.