Last week we went underneath the argument and looked at identity, at what happens when something we believe gets tangled up with who we think we are. Emotion lives in that same territory. It can arrive before we have had time to decide what we think, and once it does, it changes what we hear, what we notice, and sometimes what we are capable of saying.

You can enter a conversation intending to listen well and feel anger rising before the other person finishes a sentence. You can want to stay curious while hurt quietly changes the meaning of every word. You can be trying very hard to see clearly while fear, embarrassment, disappointment, or resentment is already shaping the conversation.

We have a complicated relationship with emotion in serious conversation. Sometimes we treat it as the thing that needs to be cleared away before the real work can begin. Calm down. Take a breath. Be rational. Come back when you can talk about this sensibly.

I was reminded of that very recently. I was exchanging texts with someone I respect enormously when a message came back:

“Angela, with respect, take a breath.”

I knew what they meant. They had read something in my texts and concluded that I was emotionally activated and needed to regulate myself. I did not experience myself that way. I was clear about what I was feeling, clear about what I wanted to say, and deliberate about saying it.

And I cannot get around the fact that clear and deliberate is also what activated can feel like from the inside. I have no way to fully audit myself in the middle of an exchange. Neither did they, about me. Both of us were sure.

That stayed with me, because it is remarkably easy to locate emotion in the other person while experiencing our own as something else. Their words sound heated; ours feel urgent. Their response looks defensive; ours feels necessary. They are emotional. We are simply seeing the situation clearly.

Sometimes, of course, the other person really is overwhelmed or reactive. But we are not especially reliable judges of someone else’s internal state, particularly when our own emotions are involved. The more interesting question is not Who is being emotional?

What is my emotion doing to my ability to see clearly right now?

That question does not assume that emotion is a problem. Feelings carry information. Anger may tell you that something important has been crossed. Hurt may tell you that a relationship matters more than you realized. Fear may tell you that something feels threatened. Shame may tell you that a moment has touched your sense of who you are.

The feeling is real because you are feeling it. What is less certain is the story you have attached to it.

I feel dismissed tells me something true about my experience. It does not yet tell me whether you intended to dismiss me. I feel attacked tells me something important is happening inside me. It does not settle whether you attacked me. I am furious may be completely honest without proving that my interpretation of what happened is complete.

In Solid Ground, the inner-work companion to the Practice of Dialogue, we put the distinction simply: a feeling deserves attention, but it does not automatically deserve authority.

Dave and I stumbled onto a way of making that distinction long before I had language for any of this. We came into marriage from two very different but equally dysfunctional parental marriages. Neither of us had watched people handle conflict particularly well. We were madly in love and spectacularly underprepared for what happened when two actual human beings tried to build one life together.

Money. Chores. Families. Expectations. Probably what to watch on television. Calling that first year an emotional roller coaster undersells it. I also spoke sarcasm with a fluency that suggested it was my first and native language.

Somewhere in that first year, we developed a rule. When one of us was upset and needed to say what was happening, we could begin with:

Right or wrong, this is how I’m feeling.

We still use it more than three decades later.

I don’t think I understood then why the sentence helped. I do now. Right or wrong is not an apology for having the feeling. If I am hurt, then hurt is what I am experiencing. If I am angry, I am angry. Pretending otherwise does not make me more rational.

The humility is about what I think the feeling means. Maybe I am reading the situation exactly right. Maybe you really did dismiss me. Maybe something you said landed on an old bruise and I heard more in it than you intended. Maybe some of both is true.

Right or wrong leaves room to find out.

Then comes this is how I’m feeling. The sentence keeps the feeling with me. I am telling you something true about what is happening inside me without requiring you to accept my explanation for why it is happening.

That is different from you made me feel this way. It is different from any reasonable person would feel this way. And it is different from turning the intensity of my feeling into a closing argument: Look how upset I am. Clearly you did something wrong.

Instead, I am putting something important on the table and leaving you free. You can hear me. You can take my experience seriously. You can even decide that I have misunderstood you. And we can keep talking.

That last part matters. Naming the feeling is not the conclusion of the conversation. It is often what makes the rest of the conversation more honest. The feeling was already there. Now neither of us has to work around it or pretend it isn’t affecting what is happening.

Sometimes the sentence can be even shorter: I’m getting defensive. That hurt more than I expected. I’m angry right now. I’m afraid of where this is going. There is a kind of freedom in saying one of those things without immediately following it with a prosecution.

You do not have to prove the feeling. You do have to notice what you are asking it to do. Is it information you can examine? Is it alerting you to something you need to say? Is it changing the story you are telling yourself about the other person? Has it begun writing your next sentence for you?

This is one reason Beam 4 matters so much: you can’t defend a position and examine it at the same time. Defending can feel like clarity from the inside, which is part of what makes it so difficult to catch.

Emotion can work much the same way. What feels to me like obvious truth may be truth, or it may be truth mixed with fear, hurt, history, interpretation, and a very strong desire to make sense of what just happened.

The Practice of Dialogue is not an attempt to have conversations with the feeling taken out. The work is to become more honest about what the feeling is doing while it is there.

There is a small space between this is what I am feeling and this is what I am going to do because I am feeling it. Naming the feeling can open that space.

And a great deal of the Practice happens there.

This week

Try the sentence once. It does not need to be during the hardest conversation in your life. Choose something real but manageable: a disappointment, an irritation, a moment when you notice yourself becoming defensive. Something that matters enough that you can feel it without making the exercise itself overwhelming.

Before you explain why you feel the way you do, try saying what is true:

Right or wrong, this is how I’m feeling.

Then tell them. Stay away from proving your case for a moment. Let the feeling be information. Let the other person remain free to understand the situation differently. Then stay in the conversation and see what becomes possible.

Afterward, ask yourself:

• What was I actually feeling?
• What story was I telling myself about why I felt it?
• What did I know, and what was I assuming?
• Did naming the feeling change what I did next?
• Could I leave room for the other person to see the situation differently?
• Was I more aware of what emotion was doing in them, or what it was doing in me?

If there is a conversation you have been carrying where this would be considerably harder, the One Conversation Challenge is a place to practice. Seven short days, one real conversation, and a little help getting from avoiding it to having it.

Part 11 of 14