Mislabeling your emotions
There’s a sort of stance that goes something like “you can’t be wrong about your own feelings; no one can tell you what’s happening inside your own head.”
I think people can in some cases be mistaken, but for the most part, I’m on board with this! It does indeed seem crazy to me, when I look back on my own childhood, and I think of the times that I would go “Owch!” during roughhousing, only for my father to say “That didn’t hurt.” If someone tells me that they feel betrayed, I generally believe them about the feelings, even if I think they haven’t actually been betrayed/think that their emotional response is confused or miscalibrated.
But there is a pattern that I’ve noticed, where people are not wrong about what they’re feeling, but are wrong about what that feeling ought to be called.
The easy example here is calibration. If you say that something is 70% likely to succeed, are you in fact correct?
i.e. if you were to track a hundred different instances of you saying that something was 70% likely to work, would you in fact see about 70 of them working and about 30 of them not working? If the answer is 68 to 32, I’d say that you’re well-calibrated! If the actual record is 51 to 49, I’d say that you need to relabel the feeling that you have labeled “70% confident.” It should be labeled “50% confident,” instead.
(Here I’m assuming that you want the words you use to actually track reality; it’s possible you might prefer to have a lying label for some other reason, but eww.)
It’s common, in my social circles, for people to practice calibration. To put forth deliberate effort to learn how well their felt sense of certainty matches the actual outcome. A lot of people are surprised to find that their labels were mixed up—that the feeling they thought meant “50/50” is actually, in practice, 60/40, or that they’re overcautious with their “90%” predictions and only get them wrong one time in 30, or whatever.
But I’ve found that fewer people care enough-according-to-me about other, similar mismatches between their internal experiences and the labels they use to communicate them.
For instance: I once had a colleague who repeatedly and explicitly insisted that he had “nothing but respect” for me. “Deep respect!”
Yet every time we disagreed, over the course of about a year, the only hypotheses he was capable of coming up with were “Duncan must be ignorant of several very important facts,” or “Duncan must be currently suffering from depression that is so severe that it is warping his ability to understand how the world works,” or—
(in one memorable case where Logan also agreed with me, and disagreed with him)
“—Duncan must be brainwashing, gaslighting, and manipulating Logan; I literally can’t think of any other explanation.”
This is, uh.
Not respect.
That’s not what the word “respect” means. If you explicitly describe yourself as having respect for someone, and yet you are reliably incapable of brainstorming any explanation for their actions other than “they’re somehow bad or stupid,” then you don’t actually respect them.
“But,” my colleague might have objected, “I can feel the respect for you, in my own head and heart, where none are allowed to tell me that I’m wrong!”
No. I grant that he was probably feeling some kind of positively-valenced, warm-fuzzy emotion. That, I don’t deny.
And at some point in his development, he started labeling that feeling “respect,” and from the inside, the word probably felt like a good focusing handle.
But words have meaning beyond how we use them in our own heads, and (I claim) it’s good to use words in ways that strongly correlate with how others use them. When you say, out loud, that have respect for Person X, other people will have a more-or-less commonsense understanding of what you mean, and that common understanding doesn’t include “Yeah, so, every single time Person X does something that baffles me I jump to the conclusion that it’s because they are dumb or crazy or bad.”
In other words, one’s use of the label “respect” can be objectively wrong, according to observable fact and common usage, and furthermore it can be deeply misleading to other people when it comes to helping them understand your actual state, and to predict what actions you will take.
(There might, sometimes, be a genuine disagreement as to what an ambiguous term means—you can surface that disagreement, and have a productive conversation about it, and both of you will walk away better for having dug beneath the labels. But sometimes you’re just … wrong.)
It’s like when people in movies say “with all due respect, sir,” and then go on to say a bunch of rude or confrontational stuff. You can call your internal feeling “respect” as a social move, perhaps, to try to cancel out what an outsider looking in would otherwise immediately identify as an obvious lack of respect. But don’t fall for your own propaganda!
I think this dynamic crops up in a lot of places, where by “this dynamic” I mean that someone checks their internal experience, finds a name for that internal experience that feels right, and then fails to check whether that name matches their actual behavior, or would be generally misleading to others.
For instance: people who describe themselves as “kind,” yet frequently behave in ways that are extremely unkind. They’re almost certainly not wrong that they have some sort of internal experience that could be reasonably described as “feeling kind,” but there is more to kindness than just a feeling.
For instance: people who describe themselves as “curious” or “interested” in what you have to say, yet spend the entire interaction doing nothing but shooting holes, shutting you down, marshaling arguments-as-soldiers and maneuvering desperately so as to avoid actually engaging with any of your points.
For instance: people who say that they “love” someone, yet curiously never take actions to that person’s benefit.
The thing I’m gesturing at here is not “well, you said you were curious, so you’d better start acting the part.” I’m not pointing at the mismatch between label and behavior as indicating a problem with the behavior. I’m pointing at it as indicating a problem with the label!
It’s a sort of contrapositive claim. If a person who felt respect wouldn’t X, Y, and Z, and you are Xing and Ying and Zing, then the thing you feel should probably have a label that isn’t “respect.” Maybe respect is in there, somewhere, but flour is not the same thing as cake.
I think just noticing that we can be wrong, in this way—that we can use the wrong word, the same way that someone can be wrong to say they’re 70% confident—is a pretty useful thing. In my own life, it’s helped a lot, to be able to disentangle the feeling from the label—“ah, okay, they’re not trying to tell me what I’m feeling, inside my own head, they’re just saying that they think I might be calling it by the wrong name.”
That’s a lot less invasive, and a lot easier to sort of cooperatively wrestle with.
I get the distinction between "that feeling isn't respect" vs "you'd better start acting the part" but I think they're both possible; it comes down to whether the person sees their behavior as aligning with their feelings or not. If I say I feel respect for you, and you ask me, "is this how you think you should treat a person you respect?" then my response could be:
1) "No, it's not, I keep treating you that way because I'm angry / tired / distracted / have my priorities wrong." then I think it is possible that I feel respect for you but am not working hard enough to live consistently with my values. Even if I fail enough that you feel consistently disrespected, I still wouldn't see that as compelling me to say I don't feel respect for you. I'd just see it as indicating that other people are ultimately affected by our behavior rather than our internal feelings, and I shouldn't be surprised or indignant when your actions are based on my not showing you respect.
2) "No, it's not, I keep treating you that way because of [other aspect of our interactions or something] then that's a practical problem to solve and again, if I fail beyond an acceptable level then the explanation is about my behavior, not my feelings.
3) "Yes, this is an appropriate way to treat someone I respect." This is the case where I think "what you feel isn't what I would call respect" is appropriate, and perhaps even "your emotion doesn't fit any existing definition of 'respect'."
In the common cases of "respect" and "love" maybe these options collapse together partway because a reasonably shared definition of those terms _implies_ behaviors like "get over your shit and act in keeping with your feelings" or "adjust how you express this feeling in a way that takes the recipient's experience of it into account."
It would probably be for the best if we could disentangle emotional experiences from evaluations of people from behavior towards people -- it doesn't seem reasonable to say we should have completely different words for them but we can set a clearer expectation that the verb has more practical consequences than the noun (feeling X vs showing X), and go more in your proposed direction of defining the feeling based on the actions it encourages.
I think I want this to be about something more like 'cashing out terms into shared expectations.' You said "whether that name matches their actual behavior, **or would be generally misleading to others**," and I think the second one definitely works better than "mislabeling" for discussing calibration, but I'd argue it's also a lot of what's happening for "respect" or "being kind" in your examples as well; people use emotion words in ways that don't make others expect the behavior from them that they end up displaying.
(I admit that this doesn't work as well in terms of getting people to agree that their feelings are internally mislabeled, but I'm not as sure about why language describing feelings would matter other than communication.)