Beyond Words 🤐 + “I feel missed” 🌫️

Identifying our emotions is a challenge, but conveying them to others is an art. Supporting efforts to speak from our hearts, however unskilled, leads to better relating than being language police. As any parent knows, a lot can be communicated without saying anything. Being too focused on language can miss the point entirely.

That said—and at the risk of meta-irony—language co-constructs realities, so catching the unspoken ontologies in our words can give us a lot of insight into how we’re shaping our reality-experience that otherwise remains hidden from our view. Places we have the option to claim more consciousness, if we can bring compassion.

Consider “I feel missed”. Unless I’m bringing it with a degree of “huh?”—looking for what’s upstream with open self-inquiry—I’m usually projecting my hurt or loneliness. I’m blaming them as the me-misser, or else manipulating the other person into trying to “see” me, while hiding behind a self-image of being more vulnerable and more conscious. In playing out scripts of separation, neither of us gets what we want. Like all projection I make my feelings of hurt and loneliness even less likely to be seen, and the other person will likely have gone slightly unconscious (into compliance or rebellion).

If I find myself “feeling missed”, my advice is to consider it a gateway, not a destination. I need to bring myself a lot of compassion to walk through to the other side. If I can get to those more upstream layers, I’ll be better off. And if I need to share something, that’ll more often get me what I’m looking for.

With love, Jordan