3. What Are Feelings in Nonviolent Communication (NVC)?
The Short Answer
In Nonviolent Communication (NVC), feelings are the language through which our body communicates our Needs to us.
Pleasant feelings tell us that certain Needs are being met. Unpleasant feelings tell us that something precious is asking for our attention.
Rather than seeing feelings as problems to get rid of, NVC invites us to become curious about them. What are they trying to tell us? What Need, what quality of life, are they pointing towards?
For me, discovering this changed my relationship with myself. Feelings stopped being interruptions to life. They became guidance for how to care for life.
More Personal Answer
My Relationship With my Feelings
Before I encountered Nonviolent Communication, I had a rather complicated relationship with my feelings.
When I felt joyful or excited, I welcomed them.
When I felt sadness, fear, shame, guilt, loneliness or disappointment, my attention immediately went to thinking I am having a problem, and searched for a way to quickly get rid of them and fix myself. I saw feelings as a problem. And deeper, I thought what is wrong with me for feeling those emotions?
Slowly, I began to discover something very different.
What if my feelings were not problems? What if they were messages? What if, instead of trying to silence them, I learned to listen to them?
This simple shift changed my relationship with myself.
Feelings Are the Language of the Body
Imagine you are driving your car. Suddenly, a red warning light appears on the dashboard.
The red light gives me important information that something is going on in the engine that needs care.
But imagine that instead I would think: What’s wrong with this light bulb? I should change the light bulb or simply take it off.
You can imagine I will be soon in deeper trouble.
This is what I believe many of us learned to do with our emotions. Our feelings are very similar. They are the dashboard of our inner life. They are not trying to make our lives difficult. They are trying to help us.
If I feel hungry, my body is telling me: “I need nourishment.”
If I feel thirsty: “I need water.”
If I am choking: “I need air.”
This seems obvious. None of us would argue with hunger. None of us would judge thirst.
We simply understand that the body is communicating something important.
And I increasingly experience other feelings in exactly the same way:
If a close friend suddenly cuts contact with me, I may feel sadness. The sadness is not the problem. It is my body’s way of telling me: “Something precious is missing right now.”
Perhaps friendship. Perhaps closeness. Perhaps shared understanding.
The sadness gently draws my attention towards what matters, so that I can care for it.
Perhaps I will try to repair the friendship. Perhaps I will grieve. Perhaps I will invest more deeply in other relationships.
The feeling itself does not tell me exactly what to do. It simply points me towards the area of life that is asking for my attention.
The Relationship Between Feelings and Needs:
In this sense, feelings have a very specific role. They are the body’s way of communicating to me the Need that is asking for care.
Imagine seeing smoke in the distance. The smoke is telling me, “Hey, there’s a fire over there,” even if I cannot yet see the fire itself. If I want to take care of the fire, I need to move towards it.
The relationship between feelings and Needs is exactly the same. The feeling is like the smoke. The Need is like the fire. The smoke isn’t asking me to fix the smoke. It is inviting me to discover the fire. The feeling guides me towards the Need that is asking for care.
What Causes My Feelings?
We often say:
“You make me angry.”
“You hurt me.”
“It makes me sad when you don’t call.”
These expressions suggest that another person causes my feelings.
I increasingly experience something different.
The other person’s actions certainly matter. They stimulate my feelings. They are the trigger.
But what actually creates my feelings is the meaning I give to what happened—which is an expression of my Needs being met or not.
For example, imagine a man looks at my partner.
How do you imagine I feel?
Well, it depends on the thoughts that cross my mind in the blink of an eye:
- I might think, “He looks attractive. She might prefer him.” Then I feel jealous or afraid.
- Or I might think, “How dare he look at her like that? I hate men who look at women as if they were shirts in a shop window.” Then I feel angry.
- Or I might think, “She chose me. She is so beautiful.” Then I feel proud.
The observation is exactly the same.
The only thing that changes is the story I tell myself about what happened. My thoughts are the immediate trigger for my feelings.
And because my thoughts are themselves an expression of my Needs, the deeper cause of my feelings lies in my Needs.
- If I feel jealous, it is my body’s way of telling me: “I have a Need for love, reassurance, or security in the relationship.”
- If I feel angry, it is my body’s way of telling me: “I long for women to be treated with respect.”
- If I feel proud, it is my body’s way of telling me that my Need for self-confidence has just been met.
This does not mean that I am not responsible for my actions. Quite the opposite.
I love the word response-able.
I want to become increasingly able to consciously choose how I respond to life and to take full responsibility for the impact my actions have on other people.
At the same time, I no longer believe that another person can literally create my feelings.
This understanding has been deeply liberating for me.
It reminds me where my power lies. While I cannot choose how other people behave, I can choose how I respond. And that is where my freedom begins.
Feelings Are Not Thoughts
One of the first distinctions I learned in Nonviolent Communication (NVC) seemed surprisingly simple: Feelings are not thoughts.
I believe there is a lot of confusion around this distinction.
Consider sentences such as: “I feel ignored.” “I feel manipulated.” “I feel rejected.” “I feel abandoned.”
These sound like feelings. But are they?
A feeling is a description of my inner experience.
When I slow down, however, I notice something interesting: these words are not actually describing my inner experience. They are interpretations of another person’s behaviour.
“I feel ignored” or “I feel rejected” are actually describing what I believe the other person is doing to me.
On a subtle, yet significant level, the other person is therefore likely to hear these words as a judgment about them—an analysis of what they are doing wrong.
“I feel ignored” is often heard as: “You are ignoring me.”
“I feel manipulated” is often heard as: “You are manipulating me.”
In fact, these statements are thoughts rather than feelings.
“I feel manipulated” actually means: “I think you are manipulating me.”
“I feel judged” actually means: “I think you are judging me.”
To reconnect with my actual feelings, I ask myself:
“What is actually happening inside me when I think you are judging me?”
Perhaps I feel insecure. Perhaps I feel hurt. Perhaps I feel angry. Perhaps I feel sad.
These words describe my inner experience much more directly.
And not surprisingly, the more I express my actual inner experience, the easier it becomes for the other person to stay with me and connect with what I am saying, rather than needing to defend themselves.
When I say, “I feel judged by you,” the other person is likely to respond, “I’m not judging you. Stop being paranoid.”
And when I say, “I feel sad,” I am no longer analysing them or their behaviour. I am simply sharing my own experience. And because there is no judgment about them in my words, they are more likely to stay open and hear me.
Feelings Are Guidance for Caring for Life
It is quite easy to see how unpleasant feelings serve life.
Take fear, for example. If I were unable to feel fear, I probably would not survive for very long. I might stand at the edge of a cliff and think, “How beautiful. Let’s try to fly.” Or I might see a lion and think, “How sweet—I want to pet it.”
Fear invites me to take actions that protect life.
Or take shame. Shame is there to alert me when I perceive that my belonging may be at risk, because belonging is deeply important to me.
Or take physical pain. If I feel pain in my foot, it is my body’s way of telling me, “Something is not okay with your foot. It needs attention in order to heal.”. If I were unable to feel pain, I would have no idea that my foot needed care, and I would likely damage it even further.
Unpleasant feelings are warning me that an important Need is not being met. They invite me to pay attention and tune in to what is needed so that I can care for it.
Unpleasant feelings are not there to make life difficult. They are there to help me care for life.
I used to think unpleasant feelings were signs that something had gone wrong. Today I increasingly experience them differently. Not as enemies. Not as failures.
But as guidance.
If I feel lonely… If I feel afraid… If I feel disappointed…
My feelings are not trying to punish me. They are inviting me to notice that something precious needs care.
The difficulty is that many of us have learned to fight our feelings instead of listening to them.
For example, I may feel depressed, and my immediate thought is: “What is wrong with me?” That thought immediately creates a second, often even deeper pain: seeing myself as a failure.
Or I may feel shame, and the voice in my head says: “Come on, get over it. Be a man.”
Instead of trusting my feelings, I learned to judge them.
Today, I increasingly experience my feelings very differently. Rather than seeing them as problems to get rid of, I see them as deeply precious friends that are here to support me.
If I judge my feelings or constantly distract myself from them, I gradually lose contact with them. And when I lose contact with my feelings, I also lose contact with the guidance Nature has planted within me to help me care for life.
Why We Learned to Distrust Feelings
Most of us did not grow up in a culture that taught us how to welcome our feelings.
Instead, many of us heard messages like:
“Don’t cry. Boys your age don’t cry.”
“Don’t be so sensitive.”
“You shouldn’t be angry.”
“Don’t be scared.”
“Be strong.”
“Don’t worry, it’ll be fine.”
“Come on, cheer up. You’re bringing everyone down.”
Slowly, we learned that some feelings were acceptable and others were not.
Instead of becoming curious about our inner experience, we often learned to suppress it, judge it, or fix it as quickly as possible.
I don’t say this to blame our parents or our culture. Most of them simply passed on what they themselves had learned.
And yet I experience this as a great loss. Because the more disconnected I become from my feelings, the more disconnected I become from the Needs they are pointing to.
It is a bit like driving a car while ignoring the dashboard. For a while, everything may seem fine. But sooner or later, the engine breaks down. Life has a way of eventually getting my attention—sometimes through much more painful experiences than if I had listened earlier.
Feelings Naturally Move
When I observe feelings carefully, I notice something fascinating: on a subtle level, they cannot remain exactly the same for more than about 15 seconds. A feeling is a vibration. It is movement within me.
I actually love the word emotion, because it literally contains the word motion. Feelings naturally move.
Joy comes. Joy goes. Fear comes. Fear goes. Sadness comes. Sadness goes.
The more I welcome a feeling, the more freely it tends to move through me.
Ironically, the more I resist it, or the more afraid I am of feeling it, the longer it often seems to stay.
This is because my unconscious thoughts tend to recreate the feeling again and again:
For example, I might feel down and immediately think, “What should I do to feel better?” Of course, I don’t know, because I don’t yet understand why I feel this way. Soon, I feel disappointed with myself for still feeling down and lost about what to do. I feel down.
Then another thought appears: “What’s wrong with me that I’m still feeling this way?” which is a disappointment about myself. So I feel down.
Then another thought follows: “After all the personal development I’ve done, I’m still not happy.”
And once again, I feel down.
When a feeling is fully felt and welcomed, it naturally moves.
When it is resisted, however, it tends to be created and recreated through my thoughts.
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