When Feelings Become Weapons

Last year a friend shared a struggle they were having managing a team. He found the emotional labor time consuming and distracting from getting the work done.

Some staff needed support processing their raw emotions about work things on a routine basis. Others reported not having any feelings about issues that arose — yet the way they communicated about it painted a different, equally time-consuming picture.

Different presentations. Same root: feelings become the currency for getting a need met — whether through requiring others to continually do emotional labor for us, or through projecting them while insisting there’s nothing to feel at all.

His struggle is one I see often. As leaders, we find ourselves walking a fine line, especially when fostering psychological safety. We want to acknowledge that emotions are part of and present in the workplace without becoming therapists. Navigating this terrain can lead to a common pattern that undermines the trust and integrity of a team.

When Feelings Become Weapons

I've been working with a client where I keep seeing this pattern. Something is said or done that hurts someone's feelings. Then their raw, unprocessed emotions surface in a room that isn't built to hold it.

So instead of having conversations that focus on the work at hand, everyone is walking on eggshells. At best, they're trying to keep the peace, assuaging hurt feelings with platitudes. At bare minimum, they're skirting issues, hoping to avoid another outburst. Not surprisingly, this roundabout dynamic leads to more hurt feelings, along with other costly issues.

The rawness of their emotions isn't malicious. People are expressing themselves the only way they know how. Yet it often gets read as manipulative. Sometimes it feels manipulative to the person receiving it.

But I don't think that's really what's happening. I think it's a nervous system doing the only thing it was ever taught to do.

Emotional Contagion, Triangulation, and the Missing Ingredient

Somewhere along the way we learned to use our feelings to communicate our needs. Sometimes this is an overt need to have others bear witness to our emotions — “I hurt, and I need others to acknowledge my pain by feeling it.” Other times it's when our emotions come exploding out of us as big, loud, uncontained reactions that startle others into submission (or avoidance).

Either way, the underlying tactic is to communicate using emotional contagion — one person's activation sweeping into everyone nearby, because feelings, like yawns, are catching.

And when there's no steady presence to interrupt the reactivity, it often curdles into triangulation, where there's a victim, a villain, and a saviour. Everyone involved is cast into a role, usually without realizing it.

Most of us don't reach for villain — that one is reactively assigned. We tend to either identify as the victim, the one wronged by others. Or we step into saviour mode, trying to fix, rescue, and make the discomfort stop. What happens next is the saviour speaks out for the victim and reinforces the narrative that they were wronged by an evildoer, the villain.

Meanwhile, the villain often sees themselves as a victim too. They're simply protecting themselves from perceived harm they're receiving.

I say perceived harm because sometimes the thing sensed as a threat is feedback, or accountability, or a different perspective that challenges someone's authority or status. These might feel like a real infringement on someone's sense of safety and belonging. They're also normal parts of working with and navigating relationships with fellow humans. So the triangulation continues.

None of this erases accountability. Understanding why someone reacts the way they do isn’t the same as excusing what they did. Compassion for the pattern and responsibility for the impact can both be true at once.

As you can imagine, it's hard to overcome such rupture when there's a fixed mindset insisting the people involved fulfill the roles of triangulation. It makes the problem familiar, and therefore "easier to handle." What's more, we usually become so entrenched in our stories that we struggle to acknowledge we're playing a part in the triangulation.

What's often missing in these rooms is what I call vagal authority — a steadiness that doesn't flinch from the feeling and doesn't rush to fix it either. Just enough regulation, in at least one person, to let the room settle instead of spiral.

What Steady Actually Sounds Like

I don't say any of this from outside it. I'm the president of my HOA board, and this past year has handed our community more than its share of hard, tense conversations. The drama was high octane, and some people got very aggressive and argumentative in how they communicated.

The situations brought up big, negative feelings in me. I not only felt hurt, I felt disrespected, taken for granted, and villainized. My feelings took real, deliberate effort to move through.

Part of that practice is being discerning about who I process with. Some people feed the triangulation and get me more fired up. With the ones who fuel it, I notice heat rising. My heart rate climbing. My jaw clenching. The desire to fight coming online.

Others help me process from a regulated place. I have a neighbor I go to when the big feelings show up. And I can feel the difference in my own body between her and the people who, with good intentions, just pour gasoline on it.

With her, something else happens. She listens empathetically, so I feel validated and heard. Then she has a line she comes back to often: "it's really hard to be so-and-so" — naming the other person, holding space for how hard this must be for them too. Not toxic positivity. Not discounting what I feel. Just an insistence that more than one hard truth can be true at once.

She helps me separate the feeling from the story I've built on top of it — the fact from the fiction — and get back to the actual choice in front of me. Not because my feelings weren't real. They were. But real feelings and an accurate story aren't always the same thing.

Speaking with her calms me down. I feel more settled and at ease because I'm no longer holding onto the narrative that feeds triangulation. I can see that there's a lot about the situation I have no control over, which enables me to focus on what I can change while accepting what I can't.

It's not as gratifying as having someone fuel the story of being a victim. That feels powerful, righteous, emboldening. But it's a false sense of power. The saviour helps us hide from our own shame. The safe and regulated person helps us bring our whole truth, even the parts we'd rather deny or avoid.

At the end of the day, so much of these conflicts are fed by a shame we'd rather not feel. For me, in the HOA situation, it sounded like, “I should have been able to avoid this. I should have known better.” As if being on the receiving end of another’s vitriol was somehow my failure to prevent.

For a leader hearing hard feedback, it often sounds different but shares the same root, “I've given everything to this place, and now I'm being told I'm the problem.” We tend to believe that trying our best and being the source of real harm can't both be true. They can. That's not a contradiction to resolve — it's a tension to hold.

What's Becoming Possible

This is part of why I was brought into this particular client relationship — not just for the change-management expertise, but because someone needed to hold vagal authority in the room while these patterns got named and rewritten. 

What's emerging instead of avoidance or emotional contagion are real, constructive conversations. That doesn't mean it's not messy. If anything, surfacing what used to operate underground and explode feels more uncomfortable at first, not less — the old way was at least familiar. Saying something openly, risking that others won't agree with it, then genuinely listening to different perspectives rather than seeking agreement, feels vulnerable. But it's also the only path back to trust.

Psychological safety gets misread sometimes as "bring me all your feelings, all the time." It's not that. The workplace isn't where you can always dump unprocessed emotion, and not everyone there is equipped to hold it if you do. Psychological safety is something narrower and harder: the ability to be an imperfect human, without fear the room will collapse into contagion or triangulation where you’re suddenly the villain.

Challenge Accepted

This week, get curious — and compassionate — about an emotional situation that's currently taking up a lot of space in you.

Where does it feel safe to bring your raw feelings, and with whom? How can you tell, in your own body, the difference between someone who's fueling the fire and someone who's helping you see more clearly?

When have you found yourself cast as the victim, or slipped into the saviour role, trying to fix what wasn't actually yours to fix?

And the harder one: can you build enough vagal authority to sit in the messy middle of a hard feeling — yours or someone else's — without rushing to make it smaller?

If this feels like a big shift, you're not alone. The goal isn't to arrive at perfection, never getting worked up. It's to recognize the big emotions when they show up, regulate, and process so you aren't being controlled by them. It's a process. One I'm still practicing too.