Why You Feel Responsible for Everyone's Feelings (and How to Break Free)
Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 207
This week we're looking at that common question, " why do I feel responsible for everyone else's feelings?" And there's a very, very simple answer to this. It's because at some point we learned that other people's emotional states were connected to our own safety. Probably somebody was unhappy with something.
If you were able to fix it, things went better for you. It's not a flaw, it's adaption, and it has made sense in the past. And for many of us, it was a survival mechanism, even if not in this lifetime, for generations we have used this to be able to be accepted by the people around us, by community, and to be able to thrive.
It's something which has served us very well in the past, and it isn't always so useful now.
It could be argued that we can influence how people feel, but I would say that all of people's feelings come from their own thoughts. We can't control them, and we're certainly not responsible for their feelings.
Influencing people, controlling people, and responsibility are three very different things, and often people conflate them.
" I shouldn't make someone else feel bad". "I cause their feelings", "I don't want to hurt them". All of these things are putting your thoughts onto someone else's emotions. Their emotions come from their thoughts.
Taking responsibility for other people's feelings quite often can feel and sound to us like kindness, but in reality, underneath all of that, It is a form of control. We don't want them to have their emotional experience, and we think, "If I manage that person's feelings, then they won't be upset, they won't feel bad."
Because if they felt upset or they felt bad, I will feel upset, and I will feel bad or disappointed or hurt or a whole load of other emotions.
And at its core, if you scrub around underneath it, "I don't want to cause disturbance there, then I can be more safe." It masquerades as care, and sometimes it is care, or there is caring intent underneath it, but it's worth looking at what's driving that.
Because every time we comfort ourselves to try and manage someone else's emotional state, we rob them of the chance for their own autonomy, for them to be able to experience and manage their own emotions. We're not protecting them from anything. We're actually taking something away from them, which is a vital part of the human experience. We're preventing them from developing the one skill that actually serves us in every area of our lives.
The moment that we choose to stop taking responsibility for everybody else's feelings, it can feel really intimidating because everyone else does have feelings, and then we have feelings about their feelings.
And then we need to be open to trust that we're gonna have capacity to hold our own disappointments, fears, frustrations, hurts, and sadness. And you're gonna have to tolerate an awful lot of things without fixing them. And tolerance, that is the work.
It doesn't come from understanding how to control other people. It doesn't come from trying to make other people's responses your responsibility. It comes from practicing sitting with your own discomfort rather than trying to manipulate someone else's so that you don't have to feel your feelings.
You're not going to be able to manage someone else's emotional condition.
And the greatest way of practicing this is also one of the most painful, because it comes from the practice of sitting with the discomfort of someone else's unmanaged emotions until it stops feeling like an emergency.
This is something that you can practice time and time again, because it rarely feels easy, and that doesn't mean that anything has gone wrong.
Learning and stretching ourselves can feel very exposing and vulnerable sometimes, but this is the most surefire way I have found to stay in your story and not feel like you're trying to micromanage someone else's adulthood and all of the emotions that they are allowed to have in their lived experience.
The reason that we feel responsible for other people's feelings is because we're often not willing to sit in our own.
If you would like to learn how, that's what we teach at www.SelfCareSchool.co.uk
There's loads of links in the show notes. I hope that this has been pause for thought this week, and I will speak to you next week
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