Com101 – Stories Become Our Reality

Communication, Personal Mastery

Update: I just got my pre-order page on amazon to turn this series into a book!

This is an article in the Communication 101 series.  Click here for the Table of Contents.

Let’s talk about how we lie to ourselves about our feelings.  We are going to pick this right up from the previous chapter’s question, “emotionally, where am I at?”  That usually prompts a response that sounds like, “I feel ____.”  When humans fill in that blank, it’s often ripe with pitfalls, self-sabotage, blame, and manipulation.  For example: “I feel unheard and it’s a 5.  I feel jealous at a 7.  I feel cheated.  It’s a 4.  I feel hurt.  It’s an 8.”    

For the rest of this chapter, I’m going to omit the intensity ratings so we can focus on the word rather than the number.

Remember in round 2 of “where am I at?” we ask, “does this emotion describe just me or does it include other people or events?”  Using that question, can you spot the real feelings verses the blame-filled fake feelings in the following example phrases?  I feel sad.  I feel lost.  I feel unheard.  I feel abandoned.  I feel frustrated.  I feel angry.  I feel cheated.  I feel silenced.  I feel tricked.  I feel vengeful.  I feel regret.  I feel guilty.  I feel bored.  I feel cold (temperature-wise).  I feel jealous.  I feel provoked.  I feel embarrassed.  I feel worthless.  I feel overwhelmed.  I feel fed-up.  I feel powerless.

That round 2 question becomes a powerful way to filter out words that give away our power while also provoking others to defend themselves.  Considering how the words we choose will interact with others can help us see which words describe raw, uninterpreted, feelings and which words are mixtures of feelings, memories, and self-serving stories.  We find that blame often masquerades as a feeling.

What’s interesting about blame is that it also implies a victim.  A victim has been somehow “wronged” by someone or something and that other party becomes the one who gets blamed.  I’m going to start using the phrase “victim blaming” to call out that “someone is acting like a victim and that victim is blaming someone else for their current unpleasant feelings.” 

By taking on the role of the victim, we are giving away our power.  We permission ourselves to be helpless because of outside forces.  It’s convenient because being helpless also allows us to shrug responsibility and pretend we have no power over ourselves or our situation.  At the same time, we get to charge someone else with the responsibility of fixing our discomfort for us.

Let’s go through all the example “feelings” from a couple paragraphs ago to really point out the victim blaming words.  I’m going to pass each “emotion” through our round 2 question, “does this emotion describe just me or does it include other people or events?”

Phrase

Round 2 Results

I feel sad. 

Just me.

I feel lost. 

Blaming self or someone else?  Lost from where?  Victim blaming.

I feel unheard. 

By who?  Victim blaming.

I feel abandoned. 

By who?  Victim blaming.

I feel frustrated. 

Just me.

I feel angry. 

Just me.

I feel cheated. 

By who?  Victim blaming.

I feel silenced. 

By who?  Victim blaming.

I feel tricked. 

By who?  Victim blaming.

I feel vengeful. 

At who?  Victim blaming.

I feel regret. 

Blaming self?  Victim blaming.

I feel guilty. 

By who?  Or by which voice from my past?  Victim blaming.

I feel bored. 

Just me.

I feel cold (temperature-wise).

Just me.

I feel jealous. 

Of who?  Victim blaming.

I feel provoked. 

By who?  Victim blaming.

I feel embarrassed. 

In front of who?  Victim blaming.

I feel worthless. 

In who’s eyes?  Victim blaming.

I feel overwhelmed. 

Just me.

I feel fed-up.

With who or what?  Victim blaming.

I feel powerless.

By who or what?  Powerless over who or what?  Victim blaming.

By using words that subtly project blame and allow ourselves to be the victim in our story, we help our story come true.  Our stories become our reality.  We help ourselves become the victim and we help that other party become the reason.  Instead of “I feel _____,” we find ourselves using phrases like, “you made me feel _____.”  “You made me feel,” is a very clear statement of blame where the victim is giving away all their power and handing responsibility for their emotions over to someone else.

The victim wants the world to believe someone else is responsible for their emotions.  It’s convenient because it means the victim doesn’t have to learn, grow, or change in any way.  They simply give away all their power and then make a big stink about it and demand the other person give it back.  Now the other person is to blame because they took the victim’s power away.  Not quite.  The victim gave away their power so they could demand it back.  It was a quick way to make someone else responsible for their discomfort and suggest that the other person needs to fix their behavior or fix the victim’s situation.  They simply blame the world around them for their discomfort and the world is expected to fix it for them. 

Surprisingly, acting like we have no power and blaming others often works for manipulating people into giving us what we want.  We wouldn’t see people using these tactics if they didn’t sometimes give the victim results.  We see adults making big scenes in customer service lines the same way children throw tantrums about not getting what they want in the toy isle.  We take our sad friends out to dinner when their boss is unhappy with them.  We see politicians blaming each other and shrugging responsibility.  Then, we see people pleasures falling all over each other to save these poor victims from their tragic circumstances.

These tactics seem to work pretty well until the day we find ourselves playing the victim in front of adults expecting us to also act like an adult.  We get a dose of harsh reality when we realize we are acting like a cry baby or a bully, and these people simply aren’t buying it.  Crying or yelling at the customer service representative does nothing if the store’s policy is, “we don’t interact with customers who cry or yell at us.” 

Declaring “you made me feel” is a lie we tell ourselves so we can play the victim and absolve ourselves of any responsibility.  What we’re really saying is, “I decided to feel this way because it lets me blame you for my situation and it permissions me to act out until someone fixes my situation for me.”  At first, “you made me feel,” is permission to rial up our own emotions by repeating the story over and over again in our head.  Eventually, it can turn into giving someone a piece of our mind or stomping off in a huff.

Things start to get scary when, “you made me feel” escalates and becomes permission to retaliate.  When unbridled, this can be taken to levels that feel righteousness.  We not only feel justified in blaming, but now we feel justified in seeking to hurt someone as revenge for our unpleasant feelings and unpleasant situation.  The phrase, “hurt people, hurt people,” tends to come true as our stories become our reality.  Hurting people on purpose is abusive behavior.  When “you made me feel” escalates to retaliation and revenge, we are falsely justifying and trying to permission the use of abusive behavior.

Abusive behavior is abusive behavior regardless of the story that was told to allow it and regardless of who is telling the story.  “I get to hurt them because they hurt me,” is a story that allows abusive behavior.  “It’s okay.  I know they didn’t mean to hurt me again.  They have a lot of childhood trauma,” is a story that allows abusive behavior.

Choosing the role of the victim turns into a toxic position where the only way out of victimhood is to force someone else to change.  The bigger our story becomes, the more we act out and try to exercise control over the other person.  As a victim, we claim no responsibility.  We claim to have no power over our own emotions; therefore, the other person must do something.  We believe our own victim story and we act accordingly.  Our stories become our reality.

How do we get out of this trap?  How do we regain our power?  What emotions are we actually responsible for?  Let’s take a moment to look at what real emotions are.

Chemicals and colors

What are feelings?  What are they for and how do they work?  To answer these questions, let’s start with a simple analogy, a color wheel.

Let’s say our raw, uninterpreted, feelings are like the colors that an artist uses to paint a canvas with.  The painter has three primary colors: red, yellow, and blue.  The painter also has black and white.  From here the painter can make a very larger range of colors by mixing these primary colors together.  On top of that, the painter can add black or white to darken or lighten whatever color was mixed.  A simple example would be to mix equal amounts of the yellow and the blue paint to create the color green.  Green is a secondary color.  From there we could add a little black to create a nice dark forest green.

Green is a color on its own, but it’s also a mixture of two primary colors, yellow and blue.  The forest green may be a little darker, but it also has a story attached to it.  We named it “forest” green.  We are taking this dark green and projecting onto it with the idea and the memory of the color of a forest.  We’re not just seeing it for what it is, dark green.  Now we are passing the color through the filter of our mind and our experiences to project some of ourselves onto it with the story, “it looks like the color of a forest.”

Our brain’s emotions work much the same way only with chemicals.  We have a few primary chemicals that create some primary emotions, like joy and sadness.  Then those chemicals can mix to give us more complex secondary emotions, like bittersweet.  All those chemical emotions then pass through the filter of our mind and our experiences to project some of ourselves onto them with a story like, “that time I was crying at my dog’s grave while remembering all the good times we had.”  In an instant, the chemical emotions get replaced by the brain’s interpretation of those chemical emotions.  They are not signals anymore, they are stories.  We begin to use phrases like, “I feel like ____,” and “I think I feel ____.”  These phrases are red flags for someone using interpretations of chemical signals instead of actual chemical signals.

Humans are also able to imagine other people’s stories about interpretated emotions as if they were our own.  We can do this even if we don’t have that particular memory.  Did you recall being at your dog’s grave or an imagined dog’s grave?  Did you imagine your cat’s grave instead?  Did you imagine someone else standing over their dog’s grave?  Did you get a bittersweet feeling regardless of which image your brain conjured up?

In the same way our brain can turn chemical signals into stories, we can also turn stories into feelings.  A story may bring up interpreted emotions and then we will feel the chemical signals from that imagery.  This happens all the time.  This is how we relate to each other every day.  It’s simply part of being human.

Scientists are still working on proving how many basic chemical emotions we have.  Some theories say there are four: joy, sadness, anger, and fear.  Other theories suspect six and add in disgust and surprise.[1]  These emotions are also referred to as our primitive emotions.  Each one comes down to chemicals in the brain that are trying to send us a signal about getting our needs met.  For example, a chemical called serotonin is responsible for feelings of joy. 

Remember, there are no good or bad emotions.  Emotions are just chemical signals where our body is trying to tell us something.  They are trying to communicate a need to our brain so we can do something about it.  Our brain starts making up stories as it tries to figure out the meaning behind the signals.  This is both a blessing and a curse.

Our history, memories, education, mood, perspective, and basically every experience we’ve ever had, all act as a filter that our emotions unconsciously pass through.  Our brain makes up a story as we naturally try to figure out why we are experiencing these chemical signals.  Our brain asks itself, “what is causing these feelings?” and “what do we need to do in response to these feelings?” 

This ability is marvelous.  This is how we humans are able to live from day to day.  It’s why we decide to find food when we are hungry and adjust the thermostat when we feel a chill.  Our brain’s ability to reason why we feel something, and imagine what can be done about it is one of humanity’s superpowers.  Unfortunately, our mind is so good at this that it  has also become a master at pulling the wool over our own eyes.

Our brain leads us astray by viewing our emotions through a lens that is not reality, but rather our assumptions about realty.  This is a version of reality that is very easily warp and adjusted for self-serving conclusions and justifying assumptions that our imagination already decided on.  This lens tints everything we experience as it looks for cause and effect.  Again, this is a blessing and a curse.  It’s also alarming how hard it is to even realize we are viewing the world through a lens.

A simple example of this lens’ affect is the “rose-colored glass” analogy for when someone is in love.  The idea being, when someone is in love, they see everything through a rosy filter that projects an overly positive outlook on everything they experience.  Their view of the outside world is tinted based on their internal state.  In some cases, it’s a blessing, in others it may be a curse.  Either way, it’s hard for the one in love to realize they are wearing those rose-colored glasses.  Meanwhile, the presence of the rosy lens on the lover’s perspective is painfully obvious to everyone else.

Our unconscious brain does this all so fast and so often that we don’t even realize it’s skipped passed the chemical signals and landing on the interpretations of those signals.  Our unconscious brain seems to drop us off on the other side of the made-up story as if it was fact.  Immediately, our focus is on who or what is to blame for our decidedly unpleasant feelings.  Subconsciously, we react to the story by giving it a name that sounds like an emotion but is really just a cleverly disguised criticism or assumption.  From there, that made-up story becomes our perceived reality, and our perceived reality becomes the way we interact with our reality.

I want to repeat that, “our brain’s made-up story becomes our reality.”  That sentence was not an exaggeration.  From our brain’s point of view, “this is clearly how the world works!  This is not my perspective, it’s merely an observation of that facts!”  The story gets treated as if it is a fact and we start to operate as such.  This is our brain pulling the wool over our own eyes.  Our perspective is not a fact, it’s an assumption.  In moments, we start acting on that assumption.  Now we are actively making it into reality.

When we find ourselves in a cold room feeling a chill, do we assume the thermostat needs adjustment or does our mind quickly pass over a list of people who might have changed it on us.  How quickly do we create scenarios of all the people who created this moment where we must stop what we were doing to get up and adjust the temperature?  It would be grand if we could simply feel a little chilly and then adjust the temperature, but we don’t.  We find someone to blame for our state of feeling chilly, even if that someone was our past self who touch the thermostat yesterday.  We can go from feeling a little chilly to feeling blaming-soaked annoyance in less than a second.  Our brain uses our limited perspectives and assumptions to become the victim.

Let’s say, for some reason or another, I feel abandoned.  “Abandoned” is not an emotion, it’s a story.  The idea of being “abandoned” is something that my brain came up with when trying to understand why I’m feeling a particular combination of the sad and scared signals.  My subconscious realizes I’ve felt this combination of emotions before, and my brain replays the stories I’ve collected behind my memories of this combination of chemical emotions.  I project my past experiences onto the emotions, and I recall being “abandoned.”  It’s a story about how someone else left me alone and I felt sad and scared at that time.  I jump from, “I feel sad and scared,” to “I feel abandoned.”  Then “abandoned” becomes my reality as I act like the victim and point at the person who is to blame for my abandonment.  “I feel like you abandoned me,” quickly becomes, “you abandoned me.”

As a small child, it’s understandable to blame someone for our feelings because we are incapable of getting our own needs met.  When we are very young, we are directly dependent on our parents and other adults to get our needs met.  Our parents will, inevitably, let us down.  Growing out of this seemingly learned behavior of expecting someone else to get our needs met for us as we are growing up can be very difficult.  Most adults, including yours truly, fall into the trap of blaming others for our feelings and for not anticipating or meeting our needs.  Saying, “I feel abandoned,” implies a story of how someone did this to us.  It creates blame.  This is how we find ourselves using phrases like, “You made me feel.”  It’s because our mind has already assumed a self-serving story and has attached blame to it.  Then the story becomes our own personal reality.

As adults, we are very capable of meeting our own needs.  The question is, have we grown out of looking for others, like our parents or partners, to anticipate and meet our needs for us.  When our needs are not met, do we still act like children trying to get our needs met by others?  Are we still using temper tantrums and sulking to get our needs met?  What if we did the opposite and acted like mature adults who are capable of meeting their own needs?

Many words that we think are expressions of our feelings are actually labels for stories about our interpreted feelings.  These stories almost always have blame attached to them.  “I feel abandoned,” is a story made up from feeling sad and scared.  “I feel unheard,” is a story made up from feeling frustrated.  “I feel cheated,” is a story about feeling angry, scared, and sad.  “I feel guilty,” is a story about feeling sad and scared.

Voice Emotions, Not Stories

The realization that my brain was mislabeling stories as emotions and blaming others was a scary piece of information for me.  I immediately didn’t trust my own emotions or my own words.  I was suddenly afraid to name my feelings because I realized I had been doing it wrong my whole life.  I had been subtly blaming everyone and everything for my emotions, even when I was very consciously attempting to communicate in “healthy ways.”  Well, at the time, I thought they were, “healthy ways.”

Previously I had been using communication tools and templates from the book, “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work,” by The Gottman Institute.  This included using the phrase, “I feel ____,” instead of the phrases, “I feel like,” “I feel like you,” “I think I feel,”  “I think I feel like,” “you made me feel,” and “you made me feel like.”

However, the phrase “I feel ____,” often backfired on me.  Sometimes, I would state how I felt, and the other person would get offended.  It didn’t make any sense really, I was just stating an emotion, or so I thought.  Meanwhile, the person I just subtly blamed would naturally make an effort to defend themselves.  They would reply with words that felt like an attack to me.  It makes sense to me now.  They were defending themselves because I put them in that position by hitting them with blame disguised as an emotion.

Here’s the thing, “I feel ____,” is a very healthy form of communication when used with chemical emotions.  It can also be a very unhealthy form of communication that can create animosity and damage relationships when used with interpreted emotions.  The question is, how can we tell the difference if they are all labeled “emotions”?

Years later, I found the book, “Nonviolent Communication”, by Marshall B. Rosenberg PhD.  This book also recommended the phrase, “I feel ____,” over all those other phrases I mentioned a moment ago.  However this book also came with a list of valid emotions and fake emotions.  I was floored when I saw that the word “unheard” was listed as not being a real emotion.  “I feel unheard,” was a phrase I was purposely trying to use more often to keep situations from escalating.  Being heard was the number one thing I struggled with in misunderstandings with loved ones.  I routinely felt like I would listen to the other person’s side of things but I would never get my turn to be heard.  I was purposely calling out, “I don’t feel heard,” more often to try to change this pattern.  Unfortunately, it only worked half the time.  Why was this?  Was it because it was, what that book called, a fake emotion?

I found myself using Nonviolent Communication’s lists of real and fake emotions often.  I had a cheat sheet for finding better words to describe valid feelings, but I didn’t really understand why it worked and I didn’t always have the cheat sheet with me.  I questioned why some emotions were labeled real and some were labeled fake.  Today I know better.  I can see the list of chemical signals and core emotions verses interpreted emotions and stories of blame.  Now I know why “unheard” was listed as a fake emotion.  Now I know that feeling “unheard” is a victim blaming story about how the other person is failing to listen.  What a convenient, self-serving feeling.

It wasn’t until I made the connection to primary emotions being like primary colors and how my brain’s stories turn chemical signals into interpreted emotions that things became easy.  Instead of carrying or memorizing a list of real and fake emotions, I can breakdown whatever I’m feeling until I get rid of the story.  Usually this leads to either naming one of the four basic emotions of joy, sadness, anger, and fear, or naming another simple signal like hunger or temperature.

It may come as no surprise, that a lot of the time I end up saying, “I feel sad, scared, and angry.”  Yet, when I find myself saying this phrase once again, I know I’ve found the bottom level of my emotions.  I found the stopping point.  What’s different every time is the journey that I just took through my mind to get to that stopping point.  The journey from story to basic chemical signals reveals what my unconscious mind attempted to do without telling me.  Now it is obvious which signals kicked started my unconscious mind only to drop me off in the land of “you made me feel.”

This is how I landed on the round 2 question of “does this emotion describe just me or does it include other people or events?”  What I’m really asking is, “am I feeling a core chemical emotion or an interpreted emotion?  Is this a story or a core signal?”  When my emotions are elevated, I don’t find much success with asking myself an intellectual question like, “is this an interpreted emotion?”  Instead, I find it much easier to ask myself to identify and remove people and events from my story.  In doing so, blame also gets removed along with them.

I have also found a lot of success in asking, “who am I blaming?”  Then I can remove that person from the narrative. 

Sometimes, I discover that the person I’m blaming is myself.  This still counts as blame and it’s an attempt to shrug responsibility by judging myself.  Now I’m both the victim and the one being blamed.  How is this possible?  Odds are we all have internalized versions of our parents, teachers, and many other childhood authority figures.  The voices from these past experiences end up echoing in our subconscious and set the tone of how we talk to and judge ourselves.  If I find myself blaming myself or coming down hard with self-criticism, I can ask myself, “whose voice do I hear?”  Many times, I can trace it back to someone else’s voice in my head and a moment in my memory where I had an interaction with them. 

For example, say I suddenly feel guilty when I realize I’m talking loudly in the library.  I feel guilty and I’m blaming myself.  “I should know better,” right?  I feel guilty because there’s a librarian in my memory that once punished me by shaming me in front of my friends.  Now my mind has taken on the responsibility of enforcing that librarian’s rules so I don’t risk getting shamed or punished again in the future.  In that moment when I realize I’m talking too loud, I’m afraid of being punished.  My body is sending that core signal, “I’m scared.”  Then my brain jumps in before I even realize it and turns “I’m scared,” it into “I feel guilty and I’m blaming myself for this unpleasant feeling.”

This journey from story to core signals is at the heart of personal mastery over our emotions.  We don’t strive to ignore our urges and emotions, that would be invalidating ourselves and bottling up.  At the same time, when we strive to feel our feelings, I’m not suggesting we replay the blame-soaked story over and over again until our emotions spiral out of control.  When we feel our feelings, we are actively doing the work to take our minds on that journey from story to core signals.  That’s how we can understand what’s really behind our interpreted emotions and all the urges we may be experiencing as a reaction to them. 

Sitting with our emotions is not meant to be a spiral or a victim blaming pity party.  It’s a path with a destination.  The goal is to name our core chemical emotions.  To walk this path, we allow ourselves to feel our emotions by asking, “where am I at?”  Then we ask the round 2 question of, “does this emotion describing just me or does it include other people or events?”  We strip away the blame and release ourselves from having to play the victim who can’t get their own needs met.  We discover our core chemical signals, and on the way, we realize we have needs that are not being met.

Now we have a better understanding of how our brain pulls the wool over our own eyes using assumptions and victim blaming in the form of interpreted emotions.  We also know how to detect and drop this blame by asking, “does this emotion describe just me or does it include other people or events?” in round 2 of “where am I at?”

It’s taken a lot of work to get here.  We’ve faced our emotions, exposed our story, and dug down to our core signals.  Next, I’d like to share a shortcut for all that work with you.  It’s a bit of a mind hack.  It’s a trick that can let us jump through all this hard work when we’re in the middle of an emotional moment using A Caricature of our Emotions.

Reference

[1] “A Model for Basic Emotions Using Observations of Behavior in Drosophila,” Simeng Gu, Fushun Wang, Nitesh P. Patel, James A. Bourgeois, Jason H. Huang.  Frontiersin.org article.

Update: I just got my pre-order page on amazon to turn this series into a book!

What next?

Next article in this series: Com101 – A Caricature of our Emotions

Previous article in this series: Com101 – Emotionally, Where Am I At? (Part 2)

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