Have you ever had an entirely made-up conversation in your head? Or have you ever envisioned how a confrontation would go down while already deciding how the other person would react? I would be willing to bet that you found yourself with an overwhelming wave of unwarranted feelings about said person or situation. When we allow ourselves to travel so far down the path of this made-up scenario, our emotions hurry to align with our imagination leaving us with our version of truth that looks nothing like the truth at all.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of emotions that are justified—we may be responding to someone else’s behavior or to unexpected news that we didn’t see coming. But there are also emotions that are just…emotions. Our feelings are a gift from God to experience life more fully; even the painful emotions help us experience and appreciate joy. Author Lysa Terkeurst points out often in her writing that feelings are indicators, not dictators. That means that they are there to guide and help us navigate our relationships, dreams, growth and journey—that also means we’re not to be led by our feelings and make decisions solely based on the way we feel. And for the record, feelings do not equal truth. Just because we feel something, doesn’t mean it’s true. Once you get a hold of that, believe me when I tell you that your relationships with the people you love (and with yourself) will be much better for it.
Speaking of relationships, before I tell you how you could save your relationship, I should tell you that I’m not a relationship expert. I don’t even know if I could tell you that I’m good at relationships—although I am fiercely protective over the ones that I have. Every time I have discovered something profound about how to make them work, I stumble upon five things that absolutely mystify me about how to make them work. So a relationship expert, I am not. But it doesn’t take an expert to recognize that miscommunication precedes misunderstanding. When misunderstanding become commonplace in relationships, disagreements become commonplace. Disagreements usually lead to fights and fights can leave us with feelings of rejection, loneliness and emotional abandonment. All of those feelings cause us to frantically seek refuge behind the walls we built long ago as an act of self-preservation and protection.
So the words that are to come are to help you make sense of whatever arena you find yourself in—a fight, a difficult conversation, a loss, or ground-shaking news—and to help you understand what the ensuing emotions are trying to tell you. The words that are to come are to inspire you to find courage to explore your emotions before you look to escape. Because battles cannot be won from behind the wall.
Let’s go through this slowly and thoroughly—this is not a one-and-done kind of lesson. When we come face to face with a situation that causes emotions, we have a tendency to turn those emotions into actions. But before those emotions make the giant leap from feeling to action, there are thoughts. We feel, we think, we do. Our brain likes patterns so as soon as we begin to feel something, it rushes to connect emotion with information. That information doesn’t have to be true, it just has to be believable. If there isn’t any data or factual information to be found, we begin to make up a story that aligns with what we’re feeling. The story doesn’t have to be true, it just has to signal to the brain that there is a connection between what we feel and what we’re telling ourselves.
What does this look like in real life? It looks like that last fight you had with your husband when he wanted to go golfing with his friends and skip date night. The story you made up? He’s bored with your marriage and your relationship is losing its spark. Those thoughts led to thoughts that he doesn’t find you attractive anymore or want to be around you. That story you’re creating in your head is problematic, and honestly, it’s dangerous—to both you and your husband. Because as soon as you move these thoughts into action, it comes to life with accusations, exaggerations and fabrications. And when you say it out loud and your husband is staring back at you with a bewildered look on his face wondering how a conversation about golf escalated to a conversation about how you gained three pounds, you’ve lost control of the conversation.
Brene Brown introduced this theory and writes about it often. She calls it “the story I’m making up.” Five words. Five, simple words and they could change how you love who you love. According to Brown, “storytelling helps us all impose order on chaos–including emotional chaos. When we’re in pain, we create a narrative to help us make sense of it. This story doesn’t have to be based on any real information.”
Brown encourages people to preface these difficult conversations by acknowledging that you’re making up a story in your mind. When you approach a potentially difficult conversation with the words “the story I’m making up is…” and finish it with a truthful account of what’s going on in your head, Brown says you’re telling the other person your interpretation of situation but also admitting that it’s likely not accurate. “When you say ‘the story I’m making up,’ it conveys that ‘I want you to see me and understand and hear me, but knowing what you really mean is more important to me than being right or self-protecting,'” says Brown.
When you say those five words, either to yourself or out loud, you check the narrative in your head while also disarming the other person. As a result, the other person is much more likely to want to explain themselves rather than defend themselves. When the conversation leans toward explanation and not defensiveness, communication is introduced. When communication becomes an always-present element in your relationships, intimacy in any form becomes an always-present element.
So the next time you’re making up a story in your head, take a deep breath and ask yourself: What’s true about this situation? What do I know to be true about this person? Take a moment to separate the feelings from the truths. This is how we come out from behind the wall. This is how our relationships, our workplaces and our homes move from a battlefield to a safe place. A few words of vulnerability can build a bridge and destroy a wall.