This is a continuation of Discursive Stages.
I have three rules that I’m rolling out to my friendships:
- Feelings are facts, as such they are valid by default, without justification or explanation.
- Stories are all wrong but useful.
- Consensus and execution have consequences. Feelings and stories do not.
These may seem simple, but there’s actually a lot of experience, experimentation, and reasoning compressed into this, which I want to explain explicitly.
In this framework, emotions and stories exist exclusively within the domain of speech and language. This is intentional, because it de-risks them. Language can elicit pain, but when it comes down to it, the words are vibrations moving through the air or pixels on a screen; they cannot physically harm or threaten you. By clearly delineating the speech domain from other forms of action, it means emotions and stories can be a safe zone, provided all parties agree to the delineation.
Effectively this means there are two phases that are completely safe, and two that have risks and consequences. Discussing emotions and stories are safe, reaching consensus and executing decisions involve real risks and consequences. In reaching consensus, this represents a kind of group agreement, and as such it can trigger reactions that have downstream costs and consequences. Execution involves interacting with the world in verbal and non-verbal ways that can cause injury. In a worst-case scenario, consensus and execution can trigger violence.
There are subtle conflations that can occur between emotions, stories, consensus, and execution, and these conflations lead to confusion, mutual triggering, and (at worst) relational collapse.
When emotions and stories are conflated a series of issues can arise:
- Without fully feeling through the emotions, I am not grounded and regulated, and from that point of disregulation it is easy to be receptive to stories with the same emotional valence. If I feel fear, it is easier to latch onto stories that confirm this fear, even if it objectively false.
- Stories themselves produce emotional reactions, and these reactions can drive chain reactions. That could look like a positive feedback loop where the an emotion drives a narrative, which in turn reinforces the original emotion (e.g. fear begets fear).
- From a mental, numb, dissociated perspective, a sensible story can mask unfelt feelings, and just because the feelings are not directly recognized and felt does not mean they are not exerting influence.
When stories are conflated with consensus or execution a whole new series of issues can arise:
- If a story comes with an implied action it can come with implied risks, costs, and at worst, violence. This can make even naming stories appear dangerous, making it hard to discuss or even think about certain possibilities.
- This has a compounded effect when emotions and stories are also conflated, because it can mean it’s coming from an unregulated, ungrounded experience. Pain can easily be conflated with injury. While they often correlate, there are many forms of pain which may trigger fear of historical phantom injury which has little to no risk of actually materializing. This is the nature of “trauma” and conditioning — immune systems can only protect against what they’ve experienced, but immune systems can jump to premature conclusions.
When cleanly decoupled, feelings, stories, and actions each have nice properties.
Feelings are always true. I am the authority of my own sensational and emotional experience and can directly access and validate my emotional state. In some sense this is the only thing which I know. Everything on a story level is dubious, by degree. As emotions are true, they can be accepted on their own terms; the only emotions I cannot accept in others are those I cannot accept within myself. Beyond that, presence and being with the feeling are readily accessible and relatively inexpensive. I use “feeling” specifically because it is the sensations “beneath” emotion, which is the story for a set of sensations and feelings.
Stories are low stakes, playful, fun, inexpensive relative to actions. As such, they can be applied broadly to cover a lot of ground without needing to do anything. If stories and sensemaking are held in this playful light, many, many parallel stories can be arrived at, and can be systematically checked with reality, as actions play out.
Once the story space has been explored, consensus is a kind pruning process, it’s the forcing function for a group to arrive at a set of operative stories that are least wrong and most useful within the situation. Where stories are low-stakes and open, consensus has inherent stakes and is a narrowing kind of focus.
Consensus and execution are expensive. Where many stories can be held in parallel, there’s a kind of mutual exclusivity to consensus and execution, only one action can be taken. The benefit of this constraint is that it can act as a forcing function.
The attitudes ones takes in each stage are quite distinct.
Feelings — presence, receptivity, empathy, softness. As emotions are always valid, in a context where this is understood, they can be met with total acceptance and safety.
Stories — curiosity, play, ideation, spaciousness, openness. As stories are always wrong but useful, in a context where this is understood, they can be freely and playfully engaged with, and many “truthy” stories can be held in parallel to account for different angles and dimensions to a single situation.
Consensus and execution — serious, executive, narrowing, focused. As stories have consequences, in a context where this is understood, this where there’s a more serious intensity and focus; this is high-stakes and has a certain gravity to it. Consensus remains in the story-level, but even committing to a group decision is an action in and of itself, and can trigger consequences from both internal and external parties.
Confusing attitudes causes lots of accidental grief and confusion. A boyfriend may try to offer solutions (stories + actions) when their partner just wants presence (emotions). A sensemaking discussion may be blocked by fear if stories and consensus or exection are implicitly conflated.
The reason I have a child-belief that emotions and stories are dangerous is because of these very conflations.
If I told my father that I was sad, and he took that personally and lashed out at me, the surprise and pain and resulting fear of that situation taught me that emotions are connected to punishment. This was only the case because the emotions phase could not be safely and non-reactively held by my father, and his own emotional experience rushed into reactive punishment. This in turn was probably learned from his own parents.
I am now in the position of needing to break this cycle of reactivity and triggering, and my way is to refine clean tools and abstractions to de-risk the process.
This framework can help minimize spiraling.
One failure mode I have often faced is that come to a friend or family to work through my emotions, but my emotions wind up triggering them, and then I have suddenly re-orient around their experience rather than completing my own. In some sense, I feel dropped and there’s a non-consensual role-reversal, where if I decline the reversal it could spiral into relational rupture.
In this kind of situation, the simplest solution is to have a third person in the conversation who can ground the conversation. At this point, it would likely be best to pause the two-person conversation with the awareness that both parties are unregulated by their emotional experience and unable to ground the conversation. At this point it easiest to find a third person who is regulated and can ground the conversation.
Given that person A’s experience triggered person B, it may indicate that A and B may have higher likelihood of mutually triggering experiences. In that case, it may be easiest and best for C to regulate A and B separately, and then bring them together for closure.
Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Attempting a three-way conversation could trigger both A and B and overwhelm C.
Part of the intention of this framework is to cut up difficult situations into smaller and safer little steps, and gradually and incrementally come to alignment.
One of the reasons these situations feel so daunting and fraught is that everything is thrown together, and can be quite treacherous.
In feeling treacherous, often there is a natural avoidance which only leads to the issue growing, becoming more complex and opaque, all while resentment builds and personal capacity falls. When the situation comes to head, it is often because one person has exceeded capacity, which only makes it harder to engage with, much less resolve.
By breaking these situations into lots of small, easy steps, they can be dealt with directly in real time, preventing build up. In some sense, I see this framework as a relational hygienic practice, to keep the relationship open and clean.
This framework can be applied to contemporary patterns.
There’s a liberal conflation between language and action (e.g. “your speech triggers my trauma, and in doing so you’re inflicting a form of psychic violence on me”). I think this is highly problematic because (1) language is intrinsically non-violent (my air vibrations cannot hurt you. Sure it can feel bad, but that’s different than actual violence. The whole point of trauma is that I may be overfitting on past circumstances and vulnerability that may not exist any more. Discussed in Nonviolent Communications Implies Communication Can Be Violent), (2) it shuts down conversation which I’d argue is the single cheapest way to bridge, change, align and (3) in humoring this premise the triggered party can weaponize their trauma in a way that feeds into the false overfitting of their trauma while also projecting blame onto someone who may be an innocent bystander.
Applying my three rules to this example, my response to the triggered party would be: your emotions are 100% valid, but if the conversation was in the “story” phase, there is no harm that can arise. Happy to be there for your emotional experience, but you cannot claim threat of violence, which would require extra-verbal action.