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Relationships
Sharing Your Feelings
12 myths you'll be relieved to debunk.
Posted July 24, 2019 Reviewed by Ekua Hagan
If you’ve hoped that sharing feelings would solve your relationship problems and been a little disappointed by how it plays out, it may be time to kick the tires on this supposed magic-bullet solution.
Myth 1: Sharing your feelings is easy to distinguish from other kinds of communications. Psychologists debate the difference between feelings and emotions. In everyday life, we blur the distinction. Some psychologists distinguish feelings as sensations without interpretations. Feelings would include sensations, for example, pain and pleasure of various kinds. Anger or gratitude are already on their way to interpretation and so, by this standard, closer to emotions.
To understand this distinction, consider the difference between what a fish experiences when caught on a hook and what you would experience. Having no language by which to interpret its feelings, the fish isn’t likely to be going through the emotional changes that you would be. The fish can’t say or think, “That damned angler, he caught me! I hate him. Why does he take pleasure in catching me? It’s so unfair! This is the end of me. Death too soon. What’s going to happen to my offspring now?”
Having language, it’s hard for us humans to keep from leaping from feeling to language-based emotional interpretations. And yet “sharing feelings” is what we call this supposed secret to successful interpersonal communication. We don’t call it “sharing emotions.” For the rest of these myths, I’ll use “feeling” as we do in everyday conversation, as a blur between sensations and emotional interpretations.
Myth 2: “I messages” are always clean because if you’re only talking about your feelings you can’t be accusing. Again, to the extent an I message is tinged with interpretation it can be accusatory. When someone says to their partner that they feel disappointed, discouraged, unsatisfied, frustrated, etc., there’s an implicit accusation in this “expressed feeling.” To pretend otherwise by saying “Hey, I was only sharing my feelings with an I message,” does not increase trust, but distrust.
When we pretend we’re neutral referees and not emotional interpreters, it doesn’t put others at ease. It stirs in them to an often-unconscious wariness. Being attacked outright can be threatening. Being attacked by someone who is confident that they aren’t attacking is more threatening.
Myth 3: Declaring your intentions is sharing your feelings. “I didn’t mean to hurt you” or “My intentions were good,” is not sharing your feelings. Rather, it’s claiming to have stepped so far away from your feelings that you are a neutral observer of them. It’s a false claim to interpret with neutral authority.
Consider what goes into declaring our intentions. We might ask ourselves “Did I mean to hurt them?” and then do a ginger exploration of our intentions, coming to a conveniently quick conclusion that we don’t intend to hurt them. Does that count as a thorough inventory of one’s intentions? Can we do thorough inventories of our intentions? Should our claims that we have put people at ease?
Furthermore, meaning to hurt someone is not the point. People can have no direct intent to hurt someone and yet still tolerate hurting them as a side-effect of something else they’re trying to do. “I didn’t mean to hurt you” doesn’t mean one wouldn’t risk hurting them to get what one wants.
Myth 4: You are the authority on your feelings: People will say “Don’t tell me how I feel!” But really, does everyone always know what they’re feeling? We each have a visceral, immediate connection to our sensations but we each can also be the most biased in how we interpret them. We don’t always want to admit to what we’re feeling — for example, turning our sadness to anger, or vice versa as it serves us.
Not being authorities on what we’re feeling doesn’t mean that other people are the authorities either. No one is the authority on what anyone is feeling. We are each entitled to our interpretations of what we and other people are feeling. Others may psychologize you as though they’re the last-word authority on what you’re feeling, and you may claim that you are the last word authority on what you’re feeling, but no one is.
“Don’t tell me how I feel” denies this reality. It will be read as an attempt to take control of other people’s interpretations of what you feel.
Myth 5: If it would be irrational to feel something, you wouldn’t feel it: “Why would I feel that?!” may be a useful rhetorical device for throwing people off the scent of their interpretation of what we’re feeling, but beyond that, it’s nonsense. It suggests that feelings are always reasonable when obviously that’s not the case. Claiming one can’t feel something because it would be irrational is to shift attention away from feelings to supposedly neutral rationality. It will and should raise unconscious wariness in those you’re trying to convince.
Myth 6: It is impossible to have opposite feelings at the same time. “Look, I only have love for you,” is another red flag to the gut. What starts that red flag flapping is the word “only” which, like the word “just,” means “ignore all other possibilities.”
No, people are often ambivalent. As the song says, and as the anger of many an ex demonstrates, “there’s a thin line between love and hate” — so thin that love and hate can be felt simultaneously, as can be many other pairs of opposites. A person can resent you simultaneously for pestering them and not giving them enough attention. We’re certainly more complicated than to feel only what is reasonable to feel.
Myth 7: Sharing your feelings is always the kindest way to interact. “I’m just sharing my feelings,” has become, in some circles, license to talk. As these debunked myths show, it’s not that simple. Sharing feelings has its place but its place is not everywhere any more than “just being honest” is the best policy everywhere.
Myth 8: In a healthy partnership, one should always be receptive to hearing what your partner is feeling. What to say and not say is a tough judgment call in all relationships and especially in intimate ones. We must be honest with our partners since the negative consequences of dishonesty can cause pain for years to come. But in equal measure, we have to be dishonest with our partners since the negative consequences of our honesty can cause pain for years to come.
In recent decades, many have assumed that sharing feelings could move relationships toward a far deeper harmony and intimacy. We’ve assumed an ability to tailor to each other so well that we fit like a glove. But that’s not how it really works.
Sometimes a commitment to sharing feelings opens a can of worms that can’t be closed and makes a mess. Sometimes sharing feelings just causes ever-deeper digging into the same old ruts.
Sharing feelings can be like trying to tailor to each other by both partners becoming increasingly sensitive and picky connoisseurs of their partnership ideal. Sometimes couples discover that it’s often better to let sleeping dogs lie.
Myth 9: If sharing feelings doesn’t bring about greater harmony, you should part company. There will be matters on which neither partner is likely to budge. There’s no room for greater harmony and it’s still worth staying together.
Some couples settle into a routine of almost ritualistic declarations that they wish their partners were different. They share their feelings of disappointment. It goes nowhere. They go back to making do.
Maybe they need the occasional reminder that there’s no room for improvement so they go through the motions of sharing feelings that have nowhere to go. Other partners learn to accept the differences without sharing their feelings. Either strategy can work. Or fail.
Myth 10: Sharing your feelings is positive which means that other people shouldn’t have negative feelings about what you share. “Sharing feelings” is a bit like free speech. They’re both conveniently misinterpreted as one-way streets, as though, for example, you are owed not just free speech but the silence of others in response to your free speech. If you get to share your feelings others get to share their feelings about what you feel. If you try to block them you won’t stop them from having their feelings in response. You’re basically inviting them to keep you in the dark about what they’re feeling.
Myth 11: You should always take as long as you want to share your feelings. Given the tendency for feelings to blur into emotions and interpretations, sharing can easily become an act of persuasion, a way to vent, pressure, induce guilt or solicit pity. The longer you go on, the more likely you’ve moved on from sharing your feelings to persuasion. Persuasion dressed up as feeling-sharing can work in the short run, but in the long run, there’s that unconscious wariness that sets in, such that when one partner wants to share feelings, the other partner feels “uh-oh.”
Myth 12: Sharing feelings should feel safe and if it doesn’t, someone is doing it wrong. No matter how tactful and talented we are at expressing ourselves, sharing feelings can’t always feel safe. To take just one source of unsafety, consider the role of psychologizing in human communication. Many if not all of us enjoy psychologizing about people not present. We often bond with people by talking about the biases of people not present. But turn that analysis on the person you’re talking to and things get dicey.
We don’t like to be confronted with our biases and distortions. We’d rather be seen as unbiased straight-shooters. To be confronted about our potential biases feels confrontational, scary. Still, when you’re talking to someone and notice in them a pattern of thinking that feels inconsistent with your standards, you will tend to wonder less about what they’re saying than why they’re saying it. Should you share your feelings about their possible bias? It’s not going to feel safe, yet there you are, suspecting their motives, psychologizing their biases.
Sharing feelings is a useful skill to have in your repertoire but it’s not the cure-all it’s sometimes made out to be.
