Other people are not responsible for our feelings. Each of us is solely responsible for ourselves.

 

Most of us have grown up learning the inverse of this idea.

 

Do you get angry or sad about a situation and spend time and effort thinking about how the other person should treat you or what they should have done differently to avoid making you feel this way?

 

Let’s look at what it means to take responsibility for your own feelings.

 

 

When you blame the way you feel on another person, you do two things:

1. You believe you control and are responsible for other people’s emotions, and they control and are responsible for yours.
2. You interpret the emotions that are coming up as messages about someone else.

 

Let’s dive into why these are false and what you can do about them.

 

You believe you control and are responsible for other people’s emotions and they control and are responsible for yours.

 

There are two critical elements underlying the first concept: control and intention.

 

Control

 

Looking at the first element – control – you spend copious amounts of time, energy, and money trying to control how other people receive and perceive everything from your thoughts to behaviors.

 

The key here is that you unconsciously believe that you can control what other people think and feel.

 

This belief is born from your learning in childhood – what was modeled for you – and from your common human desire to avoid uncertainty by controlling the world around you. Yet this belief is utterly false.

 

No matter how much you might want it, you will never be able to control how other people receive and interpret the messages you convey.

 

You can spend hours writing and re-writing emails and obsessing over creating just the right text message to achieve your desired outcome, but no matter how much you practice trying to control the variables in your environment, the only true thing you have control over is yourself.

 

“What do you mean?! Of course, my child is responsible for making me feel annoyed/angry/frustrated with his tantrums. He knows better! My partner is absolutely at fault for hurting my feelings by not replying to my messages. He is so selfish!”

 

When I first learned this concept, it was revolutionary for me, and it took me some time to truly understand what it meant, much less unlearn and re-learn new patterns of thinking and behavior!

 

So, let’s break this down for a moment.

 

In the first example, you are in a good mood and enjoying the day, then your child throws a familiar tantrum over being reprimanded for something he knows he should not have been doing.

 

Now you are frustrated, the day is ruined. If your child would just learn, you wouldn’t be in a bad mood or have a bad day.

 

Yet, the child isn’t throwing the tantrum at you. He is doing exactly what you are. He is reacting to a circumstance in his environment that he doesn’t like and over which he most likely wants to exert control, just like you are reacting to his tantrum and trying to control his behavior.

 

What’s going on…

Example 1

When something doesn’t go her way, your child experiences an emotional reaction: her body releases a hormone – cortisol/adrenaline/dopamine – depending on the circumstances – and her heart rate increases, after which she adds an interpretation onto that physical reaction, which gives her a feeling.

 

That feeling is a direct result of the particular lens you apply when you experience that emotional – physical/chemical – reaction. And that lens is created from a combination of your previous experiences, culture, and personality.

 

Essentially, you are both reacting to the same process, which at the core is simply a desire for control over an external circumstance. Neither of you are doing it to the other, and neither of you have the intention to harm the other.

 

Which makes you responsible only for what you can control, your intentions and your reaction.

 

You can’t fully control your child. She will sneeze even if you forbid it. Emotions and feelings occur whether you suppress, repress, or deny them.

 

What you can control is the intention behind your actions and your action, or response, itself.

 

We’ll get to intention and how to choose your reaction shortly, but first let’s look at a more sophisticated example between two adults.

 

Example 2

In the second example from above, when your partner doesn’t reply to your messages, it hurts. You feel unwanted, unimportant, unloved. That reaction makes sense.

 

You sent a message with expectations of a timely response that honored your needs and showed in a small way that you were valued, and those expectations weren’t fulfilled.

 

As time passes, and still no response, your emotional reaction kicks in – your heart rate picks up, stress hormones flood your body in preparation for a protective response. In this survival mode – our current evolutionary version of the fight or flight response – you layer that physical and chemical response with meaning.

 

You interpret his or her response. This interpretation comes from a combination of your previous experiences, your culture, and your individual personality. For example, someone who has been ignored or cheated on, equates attention with value, or is a pessimist, will automatically create an interpretation around the worst-case scenario. Thus, the feeling they get will not be pleasant.

 

How accurate are our interpretations?

Studies have shown that you are not very accurate in predicting other people’s emotional states or behaviors.

 

Your partner could very well not have responded because she or he was in an accident, had run out of battery, or any number of other reasons.

 

As with the first example, you do not control external circumstances. You cannot predict or control your partner’s emotions or behaviors with perfect accuracy every time.

 

So, choose to tell yourself a story that serves you, rather than one that holds you back.

The Inverse

 

Before we dive into the second part of the belief – intention – let’s look at what this belief means if you inverse it: other people control what you think and feel.

 

You immediately laugh at that statement because it’s so outlandish – this isn’t George Orwell’s 1984! But this is precisely the belief, however unconscious, you are following when you believe your child is responsible for making you have a bad day.

 

“So, let me get this straight, if I am in a good mood and then my child has a tantrum or my partner is a jerk, how I feel about that is my responsibility?”

 

Yes.

 

You can’t control the initial emotional reaction to the situation; that is chemical and physical, so you will still feel every emotion – rage and joy – but you can control the interpretation you place on it.

 

You can influence your feelings by deciding to generously interpret your partner’s actions, to give your partner the benefit of the doubt.

 

You can choose to receive the chemical messages your emotions are sending and decide to pause, to look at all possible stories that might apply, rather than reacting unconsciously in the moment.

 

You can decide how you want to show up and respond with a values-aligned action that serves you.

 

While the idea that you cannot blame other people for your negative feelings is full of responsibility, it is also full of empowerment.

 

It means that not only can you choose how you feel in the long term – you are not helpless and at the mercy of someone else’s whims – it also means that you are not responsible for other people’s feelings as long as your intention is good.

 

Intention

 

The second element involved in assigning power over your emotional state to other people means you believe, however unconsciously, that the burden of making other people feel happy and satisfied and complete is on your shoulders.

 

That is a heavy responsibility.

 

Do you spend copious amount of time, energy, and money trying to control others because at heart, you think you are responsible for how other people feel?

 

You weigh every word and action, often agonizingly deliberating before or even after an interaction over what would be or would have been best. You think you can control the outcome for yourself and others by carefully choosing how you show up.

 

But interestingly, that leaves the one part over which you have true control out of the equation – that you show up authentically.

 

The heart of the matter…

And so, you don’t show up authentically. You show up in the way you (often unconsciously) estimate you can control the situation for the better of everyone involved.

 

The key here is that you believe your intentions are pure, and your intentions for others are better or more accurate than their own intentions for themselves.

 

Are you trying to control other people because you feel responsible for ensuring their protection or their good?

 

You know that your child should go to university. You know that your partner should lose weight. You know that your friend should not date that person. You know that your parent should stop driving after age 65. You know that if they followed your wisdom, your family, friends, and even acquaintances, would be safer, healthier, and better off.

 

When you consider your own motivations, you don’t see them through the lens that reveals that what you are intending for someone else is built upon your own biases – your worldview and experiences – as well as your judgments.

 

What is true or good for you, is not necessarily true or good for someone else.

 

And anyway, how true is it that even with your most genuine desires and your best efforts, you are always able to make people feel good? Have you ever unintentionally hurt someone’s feelings? Has your message ever been misinterpreted despite your best intentions?

 

In sum, you only have control over and responsibility for yourself. You can’t control people or external circumstances, and you are only responsible for what you can control.

 

While this may seem liberating, “I am not responsible for my partner’s bad mood,” many people often feel confused as well.

 

“If I am only responsible for my feelings, which are the only things over which I have true control, what do I do with my bad mood and the hurt?”

 

The second is that you think the emotions that arise in the situation are messages about someone else.

 

Emotions are chemical and neurological messages about YOU. They tell you something about the way you experience the situation, which is a direct result of your personality, culture, and worldview.

 

But they don’t tell you anything about the way the other person experiences the situation.

 

Emotions are data points that you can use to flourish. They serve as valuable tools that help you holistically understand and purposefully respond to your environment.

 

But a holistic understanding requires a willingness to feel and to be curious, non-judgmental. You often ignore emotions and feelings because they are unpleasant.

 

But imagine what would happen if you didn’t have emotions.

 

Without loneliness, your social self would not know it was in pain or danger and would not connect.

 

Without fear, you wouldn’t know that there was danger in your environment, so you wouldn’t escape.

 

Emotions are integral to your physical and mental health because they are messages that something is not right, or in the event that you are feeling elation or joy, that something is very right.

 

Do you ever stop and recognize the moments where your emotions are telling you that you are heading down the right path? Usually, instead of reinforcing your decision, you just ride the giddy feeling, rather than taking advantage of the information given by positive emotions.

 

So, the next time you feel the physical response of an emotion, instead of using the emotion to look outward – the anger telling you what your child or partner should change – use the emotion to look inward.

 

Get curious. What is the feeling telling you about you?

 

Altering how you show up, which is ultimately the only thing over which you have control, will change the outcome. Even if the other variables in the equation don’t change, your shift will empower you to paint a different picture.

 

If you want to unlearn these concepts and rewire your emotional processing, schedule a free call with me.

 

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With gratitude to Victoria Topping for her work “Cosmic Vibrations” that so beautifully illustrates what our internal emotional world feels like. Find this and more here: https://www.riseart.com/art/100025/cosmic-vibrations-by-victoria-topping