On feelings, the stories we tell ourselves, and learning to tell the difference
I’ve noticed how quickly we can turn a feeling into a conclusion about our lives.
We have a difficult conversation with our partner and begin wondering whether something is fundamentally wrong with the relationship. We feel restless at work and start questioning the career we’ve spent years building. Or we go through a period when life feels a little flat, even though nothing particularly bad is happening, and find ourselves asking if we’re actually happy.
Sometimes those questions are worth asking. Sometimes they point toward something we’ve been reluctant to acknowledge.
But sometimes we’re tired. Or disappointed. Or lonely in a particular moment. We may be grieving something we haven’t fully recognized, or responding to an experience that has more to do with our past than our present.
I see this in my work as a psychotherapist, and I do it myself. Knowing something about psychology doesn’t necessarily make us better at recognizing when we’re constructing a story around a feeling. Sometimes it just gives us more ways to explain it.
And the stories can be convincing.
I don’t mean that we should question every feeling or assume we’re overreacting. In fact, I worry just as much about the opposite tendency. I’ve worked with people who have become so accustomed to explaining away their discomfort that they have difficulty recognizing when something in their lives isn’t good for them.
Someone can repeatedly dismiss your concerns, and you might spend hours examining whether your reaction comes from an old attachment wound. That may be part of it. But the person is still dismissing you.
Sometimes we know what’s wrong and don’t want to face it. Other times, we’re convinced we know what’s wrong when we really don’t.
I think there’s value in giving ourselves a little more room before reaching a conclusion, particularly when that conclusion involves something important.
This is where discernment can help.
What I mean by discernment
Discernment sounds like a formal word, but I think of it simply as learning to tell things apart.
Am I unhappy in this relationship, or am I unhappy about something that’s happening within it? Is my job no longer right for me, or am I exhausted by the way I’ve been working? Is this a familiar fear showing up again, or is there something about the present situation that I need to take seriously?
Sometimes the answer is both.
Over the years, I’ve developed my own way of working through these questions, both personally and in my clinical work. I call it the Discernment Map. It offers five directions to look when a feeling is difficult to understand or keeps returning.
There’s nothing diagnostic about it. It won’t tell you whether to stay in a relationship, change careers, or make some other important decision. And it isn’t meant to turn every uncomfortable experience into a psychological exercise.
Most feelings don’t need that much attention.
But when something stays with us, especially when we find ourselves making judgments about our lives based on how we feel in a particular moment, the map can help us look a little more closely.
The Discernment Map
1. Look inward: What am I noticing?
Before trying to explain what you’re feeling, see if you can describe what’s happening.
What are you noticing in your body? Is there tightness in your chest, tension in your jaw, heaviness, restlessness? What emotions are present? What thoughts keep appearing? Is there an urge to withdraw, argue, fix something, or make a decision?
Imagine you’re in a meeting and someone talks over you. You keep listening, but you notice your jaw tightening. You’re angry, but there’s also some embarrassment. You wanted to speak up and didn’t. Now you’re frustrated with the person and with yourself.
That’s quite a bit to notice before you ever get to the question of whether you should leave your job.
I often begin with the body because it gives us another way to pay attention before we have an explanation. Sometimes it’s easier to recognize tension in our shoulders or a knot in our stomach than to identify what we’re feeling emotionally.
Of course, not every physical sensation carries some hidden psychological meaning. We’re not trying to interpret every ache or change in our breathing.
Just notice what’s there.
And see if you can be specific about the emotion. Anger may be easier to recognize than the hurt underneath it. We can call something anxiety when we’re actually feeling anticipation, or describe ourselves as unhappy when we’re feeling lonely that evening.
You don’t have to get it exactly right. You may not have a name for what you’re experiencing at all.
The idea is to spend a little time with the experience itself before deciding what it says about the rest of your life.
2. Look outward: What actually happened?
Now consider the circumstances.
What happened before you started feeling this way? What was actually said or done? What do you know, and what have you concluded?
Go back to that meeting. Your colleague interrupted you twice. You didn’t get to finish making your point, and your manager moved on without returning to you.
Those are things that happened.
The thought that nobody respects you at work is something you’ve concluded from those events. Maybe it’s true. Perhaps this has happened repeatedly, and you’ve already tried to address it. Or maybe your colleague was unusually distracted that morning.
You don’t have to decide which explanation is correct immediately.
I think this distinction matters because looking at the facts is sometimes confused with finding a more generous interpretation.
That’s not the purpose.
If someone has repeatedly treated you poorly, I wouldn’t want you searching for explanations that make the behavior seem acceptable. And if your workplace has a longstanding pattern of disregarding your contributions, the circumstances themselves deserve attention.
We’re simply trying to distinguish what happened from the meaning we’ve assigned to it.
Sometimes the facts support our discomfort. We need to be willing to see that.
3. Look beneath: What else may be shaping my response?
This is where I tend to spend a good deal of time in therapy.
Our experiences don’t happen separately from the rest of our lives. We bring our histories with us, along with whatever we’re managing in the present.
Perhaps being interrupted brought up a familiar feeling of not being heard. Maybe you grew up in a family where speaking up led to criticism, and you’ve learned to stay quiet even when you’re upset.
Or perhaps you’ve been working too much, sleeping poorly, and feeling increasingly resentful about how much is expected of you. The interruption was one more thing on a day when you didn’t have much patience left.
It’s worth asking what else might be contributing to the intensity of your response.
In parts work, we might notice that one part of us wants to confront the colleague while another is worried about being disliked. Both responses can make sense when we understand what each is trying to protect.
But I want to be careful here.
Not every reaction needs to be explained through childhood experiences. And I think we can sometimes misuse psychological language to dismiss legitimate concerns.
If you recognize that being overlooked is an old wound, that’s useful information. It doesn’t mean you’re imagining the way someone is treating you now.
Your history may help explain why something affects you so strongly. It doesn’t automatically tell you whether your response to the present is justified.
And sometimes you don’t need to go beneath anything. You’re angry because someone behaved badly. That may be enough.
4. Look across time: What changes, and what keeps returning?
This is probably the question I would encourage people to spend the most time with, particularly when they’re considering a significant life decision.
How long have you been feeling this way?
Think about a relationship in which you’ve recently felt disconnected. Perhaps you’ve had a difficult few weeks. You’ve both been busy, you’re not spending much time together, and conversations have become mostly about schedules and responsibilities.
You may find yourself wondering whether you’ve grown apart.
But what happens when you have time together without all the usual demands? Does the connection return? Have you felt this way before? Is it something you’ve discussed with your partner, and if so, what happened afterward?
Now consider someone who has been feeling alone in a relationship for years. They’ve tried to talk about it, made changes themselves, and perhaps even sought help together. There have been good stretches, but the same loneliness keeps returning.
Those are different circumstances, even if the feeling of disconnection is similar.
I think many of us want to figure things out while we’re still in the middle of the feeling. We want an answer that evening, before bed, preferably one that makes the discomfort go away.
But some experiences make more sense once we’ve had a little distance from them.
I’ve also seen the opposite. People can spend years waiting for clarity about something they’ve understood for a long time. They keep hoping the situation will improve, or that they’ll eventually feel differently about it.
Time isn’t always what we need.
Still, noticing what changes and what keeps returning can tell us more than the intensity of a single moment.
You may discover that your dissatisfaction disappears when you’ve had a chance to rest. Or you may recognize that even after a vacation, a good week, or a meaningful conversation, the same concerns return.
That’s worth paying attention to.
5. Look ahead: What does this require from me now?
At some point, we have to consider what we’re going to do with what we’ve noticed.
Sometimes the answer is fairly straightforward. You need to have a conversation with someone, ask for help, set a boundary, or make time for something you’ve been neglecting.
Other times, what you’ve noticed raises a much larger question.
When I decided to leave education after nearly twenty years, it wasn’t because of one bad day or a sudden realization. I’d spent a long time building a career that made sense to me, and for a while, it did. But the feeling that I wanted something different kept returning.
I had to take that seriously, even though I didn’t initially know what I wanted to do about it.
Not every persistent feeling requires a major change. Sometimes what we need is a different way of approaching circumstances we aren’t going to change. Sometimes we need to acknowledge that we’re disappointed without trying to resolve it immediately.
And sometimes we don’t know yet.
I think this last possibility can be especially difficult for people who are accustomed to being capable and decisive. We want to understand the problem and move toward a solution. Sitting with uncertainty can feel like we’re not doing anything.
But I also don’t want to romanticize uncertainty. There are times when continuing to reflect becomes a way to postpone a decision we don’t want to make.
If you’ve had the same conversation with your partner for years, have been clear about what you need, and nothing changes, you may already have enough information.
The question then may not be what the feeling means. It may be what you’re willing or able to do about it.
How and when to use the map
I think the map is most useful when something feels unsettled but its meaning isn’t clear.
Perhaps you’ve been questioning a relationship, feeling dissatisfied with work, or experiencing a sense of restlessness during a period of life you expected to enjoy. Maybe you had a strong emotional reaction to something and can’t quite understand why it affected you so much.
You don’t need to set aside an hour or turn this into an elaborate journaling exercise.
If something has been bothering you, write down the five questions and spend a few minutes with them. I would start with the first two: what you’re experiencing and what actually happened.
You may find that those questions are enough.
If not, consider what else might be contributing to your reaction. Look at whether the feeling has been present for a while. And then ask what, if anything, needs your attention.
I would also suggest resisting the urge to make every answer sound thoughtful or insightful. Sometimes the most useful thing you can write is, “I’m really tired, and I think I’m taking everything personally today.”
Or, “This has been bothering me for six months, and I keep pretending it hasn’t.”
There’s no benefit in turning the map into another thing you have to do correctly.
You might return to what you’ve written a few days later. See whether your understanding has changed. If it hasn’t, that matters too.
One thing I wouldn’t recommend is repeatedly checking your feelings throughout the day to determine whether they’re still present. For someone prone to anxiety or rumination, that kind of monitoring can become part of the problem.
The map is meant to help you gain some perspective. If you find yourself answering the same questions over and over, looking for certainty you can’t quite reach, it’s probably time to put it away.
When the map isn’t what you need
There are situations where I wouldn’t suggest beginning with self-reflection.
If you’re experiencing abuse, coercion, threats, or other circumstances that put your safety at risk, you don’t need to examine every possible explanation for your discomfort before seeking support or protecting yourself.
And if you’re experiencing significant depression, thoughts of suicide, or difficulty functioning, I wouldn’t want you relying on an exercise like this instead of appropriate professional care.
Persistent anxiety and other mental health concerns also deserve assessment and treatment when they’re interfering with daily life. The map may be useful alongside therapy, but it isn’t treatment.
There’s another situation worth mentioning, and it’s less obvious.
Sometimes we already know.
We know that we’re unhappy with how someone treats us. We know that a boundary needs to be set. We know we’ve been working at a pace we can’t sustain.
But rather than act, we keep examining our reactions, hoping to arrive at an explanation that makes the decision easier.
I’ve seen how insight can become its own form of avoidance. We understand why we’re struggling, and then we keep trying to understand it a little more.
At some point, more reflection may not help.
What we do with what we notice
I think we can put a great deal of pressure on ourselves to understand every uncomfortable feeling.
We’re sad, so we want to know why. We’re restless, so we start wondering what needs to change. We feel disappointed by something that shouldn’t have bothered us so much, and suddenly we’re examining our expectations, our childhood, and our relationships.
Sometimes that’s useful. Sometimes we’ve just had a disappointing afternoon.
I’m not suggesting that we ignore our feelings. I wouldn’t spend my days doing the work I do if I believed that.
But I do think we can learn to give them attention without immediately asking them to explain everything.
That’s what I hope the Discernment Map helps us do. It gives us a few places to look before we decide what an experience means. Sometimes we’ll recognize something we’ve been avoiding. Other times, what felt so important the night before looks quite different the next morning.
And there will be times when we go through the entire map and still don’t know.
I don’t particularly like that answer myself. But sometimes it’s the most accurate one I have.
This is the photo…
