I Feel Like You’re an Asshole
Ineffective Communication and How to Do Better
Most couples seeking therapy say they want to work on “communication.” I think these couples believe that there’s a suite of rote mechanical skills they can learn, like “I statements,” mastery of which will restore peace, harmony, and joy to their relationship.
By the time a couple is willing to spend thousands of dollars talking to me about their problems, they are past the point where “I statements” are going to do the trick. You, the reader of this article, may have simpler problems, and the following simple solutions may still suffice!
Separate Observation from Inference
As you go about your life, you take in information through your senses. You subconsciously throw most of the sensory data away (filtering) and you assign a narrative or a meaning to what you have observed. You fill in gaps in your observations with your assumptions about what you did not directly perceive, and you may draw conclusions or form beliefs from there. Finally, you may react in some outwardly observable way.
This whole process is called the “ladder of inference” and human brains are really good at doing it so quickly, we usually don’t even notice ourselves climbing the rungs of the ladder. It’s one smooth uninterrupted process.
For example, suppose you see a dirty sock on the floor. What might happen next?
Filter: you notice the dirty sock out of all the other things in the room you were also seeing, hearing, smelling, and touching at that moment.
Make meaning: you feel a pang of upset, frustration, or wrongness about the sock.
Assume: you assume your partner took off their dirty socks after their workout this morning and threw them on the floor without a care in the world.
Conclude: your partner either didn’t remember or didn’t care that you asked them to keep dirty laundry off the floor and in the basket.
Believe: your partner doesn’t think your wishes are very important, and by extension your partner doesn’t think you are very important.
React: you storm into your partner’s office brandishing the dirty sock and demanding an explanation.
This is rather dramatic, I know, and yet I hear stories like this multiple times a week over lesser infractions. “It’s not about the sock, it’s about what the sock represents,” after all!
But in this case, it turns out that your partner made extra sure to get all the laundry into the basket and even carried the basket to the laundry room and started a load of laundry. The sock must have fallen out of the over-full basket along the way. Your partner does think your wishes are important and does think you are important.
You can short circuit a lot of suffering by climbing the ladder of inference more slowly and carefully, checking your assumptions with your partner as you climb. In the event your partner actually doesn’t care about you or your laundry preferences, you will still have an opportunity to feel hurt about that after verifying that it’s true, so you haven’t missed out on anything!
Separate Feelings from Thoughts
Feelings include: angry, scared, sad, lonely, curious, excited, joyful, embarrassed, and so on. You can usually express a feeling with a single word. Many situations might evoke a given feeling.
Thoughts are, for our purposes, stories that explain why a feeling arose. “You stood me up for our date” is a thought.
You can also combine them: “I felt sad when you stood me up for our date” contains the feeling and the thought.
The person with the feeling is the sole authority about that feeling. You are definitely, inalienably correct that you felt sad and nobody would know better than you about that. Expressing that you felt sad is fair and valid, and giving the other person the opportunity to know about your feelings maybe help you with them will probably be helpful in the long run.
Meanwhile, expressing thoughts is a much riskier business. Thoughts happen pretty far up the ladder of inference and often have meaning-making, assumptions, conclusions, and beliefs mixed into them. It is possible to express thoughts without overstepping, but it takes a lot more skill. Feelings are safer: you’re on solid ground with those. Expressing your feelings is less likely to evoke defensiveness and reactivity in your partner.
Express Thoughts Carefully
If you do want to express thoughts, it helps to label them as thoughts and to acknowledge the assumptions and conclusions you built into those thoughts.
“This dirty sock I found on the floor proves that you don’t love me” oversteps because it treats assumptions like facts.
Better: “When I found this dirty sock on the floor, I assumed you had left it there because you didn’t care enough about my wishes to put it in the basket” may still be inflammatory but is much more accurate. It takes responsibility for the assumption.
Even better: “When I found this dirty sock on the floor, I felt sad and hurt. I felt that way because I worried that you remembered I didn’t like socks on the floor and then you did it anyway.”
The venerable but ultimately underpowered “I statement” is supposed to help you express thoughts carefully. By talking about yourself, you’re less likely to engage in blame, character assassination, or unacknowledged assumptions and conclusions. However, I statements have some pitfalls.
Thoughts Disguised as Feelings, Part 1: “I Feel Like”
That brings us to the classic titular example: “I feel like you’re an asshole.”
It’s so bad, it actually wraps around and becomes delightful! This one short sentence has everything: ad hominem attack, hostility, and criticism, all dressed up in supposedly therapist-approved language!
Here’s a hint. If your sentence starts “I feel like,” it is not a feeling, it’s a thought.
Feeling: “I feel sad.”
Thought: “I feel like I’ll never be able to get what I want.”
Feeling: “I feel pissed off.”
Thought: “I feel like they set this up to be impossible and it’s not fair.”
Feeling: “I feel alone.”
Thought: “I feel like nobody is there for me and nobody ever will be.”
The distinction matters because if you’re trying not to overstep, if you’re trying to be careful about how you express thoughts, it helps to realize when you’re in “thought” territory.
Thoughts Disguised as Feelings, Part 2: Verbed Feelings
Here are some examples of a class of feeling words I call “verbed feelings:”
I feel controlled
I feel manipulated
I feel used
I feel betrayed
I feel insulted
Just to balance things out, they’re not all bad!
I feel loved
I feel protected
I feel cherished
I feel valued
I feel wanted
What do all of these feelings have in common? They paint a systemic picture with more than one person in it.
Verbed feelings are valid feelings! They are descriptions of emotional states. But most of the time, there is a much larger thought-structure associated with those feelings. Before you can feel betrayed, you must also have some agreement or expectation about another person’s behavior and then you must believe they have violated that agreement or expectation. That single word, “betrayed,” tells a whole narrative about what you believe about the other person’s actions.
When you feel the impulse to talk about verbed feelings, you have a choice to make.
Option 1: You can find another way to express what you are feeling that is truly just about yourself and not about the other person. For example, instead of saying “I feel betrayed,” you can say, “I feel surprised in a bad way and I’m not sure how that happened. I’m confused and scared.”
Option 1 uses pure “I” statements and stays completely out of blame or even acknowledging the other person’s role. It’s pretty safe. It’s a good skill to be able to produce the sentences in option 1.
Option 2: You can talk about the betrayal directly and carefully, laying out each step and leaving room for where you might have misunderstood. “We have talked about my car before and you told me you would not borrow it anymore without asking first. When I got home yesterday, the car was gone and so were you. I think you took it without asking me. Assuming that’s true, I feel disappointed and betrayed.”
Option 2 uses verbed feelings and carefully expressed thoughts. It takes a lot more skill to produce, but it’s more powerful and explains a lot more of what’s going on inside you. It leaves room for you to change your mind if you made a mistake.
If you are going to use option 2 well, you will have to get very good at going rung by rung on the ladder of inference and noticing exactly what you know from observation and what you filled in by inference. Subtle verbed feelings like “I feel manipulated” are almost impossible to express cleanly and effectively because manipulation requires conscious intent on the part of the other person and unless you are a telepath you don’t know anything for sure about their intent. It’s much harder to demonstrate manipulation than betrayal, and it’s more common to be wrong about whether the other person was actually manipulating you.
For all of these reasons, I suggest starting with option 1 and getting that working very well first before wading into expressing verbed feelings.
I hope these ideas are helpful to you!
Contact & Resources
Ask a question that might be answered in a future article! Email gretta@grettaduleba.com or fill out this anonymous form
A five-minute video about the ladder of inference
Lots of choices of emotion wheels to help find true feeling words
This article is very useful! One thing I’ve noticed about myself is that there are a variety of factors that can go into whether I pause and check my assumptions, or maybe even arrive at the more positive assumption first. For instance, if I’m feeling generally connected to my partner, and that they usually are reliable, and they respond to most of my bids, then I am more likely to assume that the sock on the floor had escaped the laundry basket. If, on the other hand, I’m constantly having to fight to get my needs met, and I feel like my partner generally doesn’t prioritize me, then yeah, I’m going to think that they left the sock deliberately or thoughtlessly because they don’t care about me or my needs. They haven’t been demonstrating that they care about me as it is, why would the sock situation be any different? Other factors at play can be how I’m doing, if I’m well rested, not hungry, hydrated, and feeling good, then I’m also more likely to pause and check myself than in the situations where I’m tired and hungry and burned out. Oh and then I guess there’s the whole negativity bias thing…we are much more likely to see the one sock on the floor and not notice that the bed had been made, the room dusted, and the trash taken out…