Paying Attention to Feelings Helps

Do you sometimes think you’d be better off without feelings? Without the sharp grief when someone important leaves your life, without the fear of losing your job, without the irritation about your mother-in-law, but then also without the joy of playing?

All these feelings signal how your needs are doing, what matters to you for a healthy and happy life. Without those signals, it would be impossible to steer your own course and take the necessary steps. Whether they’re pleasant or unpleasant, you need them to stay attuned to your surroundings. And everyone is capable of feeling!

Why then draw special attention to feelings?

When I look at myself and the people around me, I notice that people handle feelings very differently. Personally, I tend to withdraw when feelings get intense. Around me, I hear plenty of people who believe feelings have no place at work. They put all their energy into maintaining the image of the rational employee who wants to be right at all costs, colleagues and clients aside. That’s exactly the risk, I think: if we can’t or aren’t allowed to feel, we just keep building a wall of judgments about the other person, the environment and the act of feeling itself. We decide it’s not appropriate to express dissatisfaction, that you shouldn’t complain… But all those considerations drain far more energy than the original disappointment we were trying to protect ourselves from. Ronald J. Frederick puts it well: “Feelings have a natural course. Like a wave in the ocean, they start small, grow to a breaking point and once they’ve fully run their course, they disappear again. When feelings are allowed to be felt and endured in all their intensity, they actually last very briefly. Sometimes minutes, sometimes just seconds.” And in that time, they fuel the motivation that gives our lives direction. It’s only when we push feelings away, or when we lack the help and support to experience intense feelings, that we end up in a kind of frustrating no-man’s-land where we can keep wandering.

Doesn’t all this attention to feelings make things worse?

It’s not the attention to feelings that makes things worse. What you do and think to avoid your feelings is what causes problems. Of course there are moments when you need to park your feelings or simply can’t attend to them. But generally speaking: if you suppress your feelings, even just a little, you’re stopping a natural process in your body. As humans, we’re built to feel and to make emotional contact with others. Emotions can be much more powerful than thoughts and can take over our thinking at certain moments. Trying to control feelings is like swimming against the current. We’re better off learning to accept that feelings are there and letting them work for us, rather than fighting them.

Expressing feelings brings your message to life

Do you recognise this? Someone is telling a story and you can barely keep your attention on it, no matter how hard you try. And then someone else starts speaking and suddenly everyone is all ears. When people are close to their feelings and express them, their message sounds powerful, clear and alive. Even when their vulnerability becomes audible. Feelings inform us about what we need. When we can express this, we also make sure we communicate it clearly, vividly and powerfully to others. And that works!

But if I express my unpleasant feelings, things will blow up!

There will always be people who aren’t waiting to hear about your unpleasant feelings. But consider the quality of your connection with them if you can’t let them know you’re worried or unsettled by their proposal, or that you’re disappointed a certain decision was made without taking your advice into account. It’s not the unpleasant feelings that make a message hard to hear. It’s the judgmental thinking and the reproaches woven into our message (which we often don’t even say out loud). In this judgmental thinking, we place responsibility for our feelings on the other person instead of seeing them as signals of our own needs, which we can share as information and ask the other person to consider.

An example

In a small organisation, a decision is made to introduce performance reviews. The manager announces this, and when an employee asks what this changes about the current way of working, the answer is “it’s a formalisation of the follow-up conversations that already exist.” If the employee who didn’t really get an answer to their question feels uneasy about this step, they can choose to 1. share this feeling: “Hearing your answer, I still feel uneasy because it’s not clear to me what the purpose of this change is. Would you be willing to share your perspective on this, even if at another time?” 2. keep this feeling of unease to themselves, with the risk of losing a lot of energy judging this decision. “Are they trying to force something here?” “Will we have to sign commitments while in practice our work demands a lot of flexibility?” “Why can they never just say what the intention is?”

Expressing feelings and making contact in a culture of judgment

The example already hints that talking about feelings requires some self-awareness and the courage to make yourself vulnerable. At the same time, expressing feelings makes it possible to truly meet each other. Our language and culture, however, are steeped in judgmental thinking. From a young age, we learn that you can be good or naughty and that you should feel ashamed when you don’t do what’s expected of you. This cultural baggage causes us to become disconnected from the feelings of others and from our own. What makes someone find it difficult when your homework isn’t done? What makes you uneasy about change? Nonviolent Communication invites us to reconnect with these feelings and the life force that lies beneath them. Paying attention to feelings in yourself and others helps you stay in dialogue and on course.

Poem by Rumi: The Guest House

Being human is like a guest house. Every morning, new arrivals. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as unexpected visitors. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they are a crowd of sorrows that violently sweep your house clean of all its furniture, still treat each guest with honour. It may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, welcome them laughing at the door and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.