Whenever you go all the way with telling your truth, you will be confronted by the reactions and responses such truth telling elicits … Feeling Fallout.

Feeling Fallout can be mild to extreme and always occurs when uncomfortable truth is shared. And because no one likes feeling uncomfortable, sharing deeper emotional truth is often avoided because of the feeling fallout.

I once had a client say to me that she was only willing to tell her truth when she could be certain that no-one would get upset, thereby ensuring that she never went all the way with her truth when things got emotionally charged. Net result … nothing much got resolved and she was often left feeling anxious and incomplete.

You cannot resolve conflict if you are not willing to share the whole of your truth (which includes how you are feeling) AND be willing to hear and receive the others’ whole truth including their feelings. It’s not difficult to share your feelings … it may feel challenging but it’s not hard. It’s just unfamiliar because you have been conditioned to be “nice” and “polite” and avoid conflict at all costs.

So how can you prepare yourself for feeling fallout?

1. Remember that feelings are simply energy-in-motion – they let you know how you feel and what you are making things mean, and how the other feels and what they are making things mean.
2. Feelings are not facts, they exist to be acknowledged, validated, felt and released.
3. You cannot have an effective conversation in the middle of a feeling reaction so when feelings arise, breathe … allow and let them move through you … and they will if you let them. As Jill Bolte-Taylor observed: It takes 90 seconds for the feeling to move through you and be done.
4. Expect some feeling fallout when addressing conflict and remember to keep communicating until the energy shifts.

Simple and, once again, not always easy when you start. And the more you practice, the easier it will become.

I recently went on an overseas holiday for a special birthday celebration with a group of girlfriends. Early on the morning of the big day, I received the news that a friend had died and I realised I would not be back in time for the funeral. I felt the grief rise up and asked myself:  “What is the most loving choice I can make in this moment?” I was surprised to feel that rather than go into the grief and feel it, I needed to accept it was there to be felt later, tuck it away and make a conscious choice to withhold my news from my friends for a few days. So I did.

I didn’t want to impact the birthday celebrations with my grief … and I also wanted some time to process before sharing. I felt very sad yet managed to put it aside and fully participated in all the activities from breakfast through lunch and then onto a sumptuous and beautiful dinner … all of which were lovely. In bed later that night, I let myself feel and cry and then went to sleep. When I woke up, I felt physically blah and had a rough start to the day. The plan was a full day trip to another town, exploring and shopping and lunching together. I decided not to go and told the girls I was not feeling up to a full day out. Once again, the most loving choice I felt I could make was to consciously withhold all the reasons for my decision. I knew I wanted to spend the day by myself with no need to explain or share … I just wanted to feel my feelings and be with myself … which I did.

The next day I told the girls what had been going on with me. When one of them said: “Why didn’t you tell us before now?” I asked: “And if I had, would you have wanted to stay with me and forgo your day out?” “Yes, of course …” she replied. I then shared all the reasons I did not tell them earlier, I took responsibility for the whole communication … and they all got it.

The rest of our holiday was wonderful and nurturing and fun.

What I realised … once again … is that I am okay and feelings are okay. And sometimes the most loving choice is to consciously withhold until ready to share fully.

This is an automatic and very common question when enquiring after someone’s emotional state – particularly when you see someone in obvious distress – yet from the paradigm of fear it simply cements the belief that feeling anything distressing is somehow “wrong” or that there is something “wrong” with the person feeling whatever they are feeling.

Asking someone “what’s wrong?” doesn’t allow the responder any space to consider what is actually going on from the paradigm of cause. The very question usually catapults the communication into the paradigm of fear and elicits one of two responses: Either some blurt about how awful something or someone is or “nothing”, which is actually true … even if not realised in that moment.

In the paradigm of cause, nothing is wrong and nothing is right.

There is only what’s so and any judgement about it (right/wrong; good/bad; negative/positive etc) is something you are doing, it’s meaning you are making of whatever is happening. And the most pervasive, unconscious judgement filters you have will concern feelings and emotions … hence your unconscious and automatic judgement of intense feelings rears it’s head in the form of the question: “What’s wrong?”

Time to change those filters and become conscious and aware that feelings are not wrong or bad or good or right … they are simply feelings –  there to inform you how you feel so you can feel them and respond. So the next time you are tempted to ask “what’s wrong?” consider asking this instead: “What’s going on?”

When you let go of your automatic judgement filters, you can more clearly see what is really going on and you can fully respond from love.