The meeting was heated. I made a statement in order to bring us back to the main issue. All of a sudden, a colleague made a comment about my statement. The comment did not sound collegial or helpful. I felt he was questioning my expertise. I felt uncomfortable. By any HR definition, I had enough to submit a complaint against him, and I had the strongest possible evidence: my feelings. Was I right? Did I need anything more?
Years ago, a professional heavyweight boxer came to see me. Without any doubt, he was better equipped to defend himself than almost anyone who had ever sat in my office.
He came because of spiders.
His fear was so severe that the word alone could set it off. If he heard that someone had seen a spider in the building next door, his heart would race, he would start to sweat, and everything in him wanted to get out. Needless to mention, we met in a country where spiders pose almost no danger to anyone.
I have thought about him often over the years, because his case raises a question much bigger than spiders.
Did his fear make spiders dangerous? Of course not. His terror was completely genuine as an experience, but wildly out of proportion as an estimate of risk. It told me a great deal about him: what he had learned, what had happened to him, the associations his nervous system had quietly built over a lifetime. It told me almost nothing about spiders.
That is true of emotions in general. Our feelings don't read the world the way a thermometer reads temperature. They come from appraisals, the quick and mostly automatic judgments we make about what a situation means for us. Those judgments are shaped by temperament, history, culture, mood, and expectation, so every emotion carries news about two things at once: the situation and the person feeling it. When the appraisal is right, emotion is a wonderful guide. Fear spots danger. Anger registers injustice. Discomfort warns that a line has been crossed. When the appraisal is off, we feel fear where there is no danger, jealousy where there was no betrayal, and even a strange calm when we should be alarmed.
Clinicians have a name for one version of this mistake: emotional reasoning. It is the quiet logic of "I feel anxious, so something must be wrong." We also borrow whatever mood we happen to be in and let it color judgments that have nothing to do with it.
In workplaces, families, and institutions, discomfort is sometimes offered not just as a description of an experience but as proof that someone did something wrong. "What you said made me uncomfortable," we claim, with the unspoken understanding that this settles the matter. But there's a step being skipped. A feeling inside one person can feel like evidence of misconduct by another. But that boxer reminds us that this leap doesn't happen on its own. Discomfort can come from genuine mistreatment. It can also come from a misunderstanding, from an old wound the other person knows nothing about, from different norms colliding, from hearing a truth we didn't want to hear, or simply from difference: an unfamiliar accent, an unpopular opinion, a reasonable disagreement.
This analogy has limits, and people are far more ambiguous than spiders. And unlike a phobia, discomfort in a relationship can be an early sign of harm that hasn't yet shown its shape—harm that builds slowly or depends on who holds power over whom. The feeling, and the explanation we attach to it, are two different things.
I felt uncomfortable. This one short sentence often carries several claims folded together: Something you did caused it. You should have seen it coming. You meant it. And it was wrong. The first is something only the speaker can know, and each claim after it asks for more interpretation and evidence.
I have watched this sentence used as a weapon. A colleague raises a legitimate criticism, or points to a gap in someone's skills, and suddenly the conversation is no longer about the criticism. It is about the discomfort it caused, and now the person who raised it is the one under review. Once that happens, the original concern is rarely heard again, and the reported feeling may be treated as a finding.
That is why treating the feeling as the verdict creates a problem. If discomfort counts as settled proof, the other person has no way to address what actually happened. Subjective experience is still evidence; in medicine we rely on people's reports of pain every day. But on its own, it rarely tells us what another person intended or exactly what took place.
Fear Essential Reads
There is a mistake waiting on the other side, and it is just as serious: deciding that feelings are noise, and so "you're just being emotional" counts as an answer. It doesn't. The boxer's fear provided no evidence about spiders, but it was excellent evidence that something in his life needed attention. It was where his treatment began.
Discomfort is often the first sign of mistreatment. People who are being harassed or bullied may feel uneasy long before they can name the pattern. Brush feelings aside and you throw away exactly the signal that protects people. And when someone's accurate perceptions are dismissed again and again, especially as part of a broader pattern of control, that dismissal can do lasting damage of its own.
Perhaps the wiser path is to reject both errors: Feelings are not verdicts, and they are not noise. They are testimony from a witness who may be entirely sincere and whose report may matter enormously, but whose interpretation can still be incomplete or mistaken.
My boxer, by the way, recovered—but not because anyone told him his fear was silly. It wasn't silly; it was agony. He got better because we took his suffering seriously while gently reshaping his sense of danger against reality. In our last meeting, I told him that the next time he saw a spider, he might consider how terrified that little spider must be to see a giant like him. He laughed.
I think that is what all our emotions deserve: respect as experiences, attention as signals, and a careful look before we treat what they suggest as fact.
A final note: My colleague was right. My statement did not carry enough substance to suggest I was talking as an expert.