PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY?

YOUR FAULT I FEEL LIKE THIS, or is it?

Who makes us feel things, normally we hold other people responsible for our feelings, but is this accurate? Do others really make us feel things? If they are nice to us does it make us happy. If they are nasty and we get upset, is it their fault?

We live in a blame society, it’s always someone else’s fault, rarely ours. It is so easy to blame others for being mean to us, making us unhappy.

I want to offer a different view of this, one which when embraced is life changing. One that says we are alone responsible for our feelings and not others. And depending on how we feel at any moment, is then how we react to others, not the other way round.

So lets for a moment pretend that you are not reading this but your in my therapy room and I ask you to cry, right now. Now you’ve come into see me because you are troubled about whatever. You’ve come to get help cause you can’t see the wood for the trees. You’ve come into the therapy room feeling a little sad, but not weepy and suddenly this therapist is demanding that you cry to order. So are you going to do it?
The answer is no, in fact if I say this to you, you are more likely to smile at such a ridiculous idea that you can cry to order.

Now supposing you were still in this therapy session and you were upset and had started crying and I as your therapist suddenly demanded that you stop crying. Would you stop, answer no! You would feel terrible that the therapist that you were expecting to have some empathy and kindness towards you was suddenly being mean and unpleasant when you are upset.

As a therapist I know an awful lot about feelings, I know when people are sad, angry, anxious, depressed and every other emotion going. I understand how when people come to therapy that sometimes they sit down and the flood gates open and they tell me things that they have never told anyone in their lives before. And other times they come and tell me a version of what is going on but they hide their feelings. I know this, I have the gift of being able to feel their feelings when they are present in the room and not being expressed. Sometimes I will just notice them and say nothing, and other times I will ask the person what they are hiding.

BUT I CANNOT make anyone feel what is not theirs. If I was that powerful I’d be leading some quirky religious group by now or something equally dangerous. You cry because you feel like crying. You stop crying when you are ready, not because I’m some omnipotent control freak, that has the power to make you.

You are in control of your feelings in the therapy room, and for that matter in every area of your lives. It’s just in coming to therapy you are using my area of expertise of 20 + years standing and I’m good at what I do. So it is inevitable that in making the decision to come to therapy that I will find out about you. Cause that’s why you are there, even if sometimes it may take a while to see that.

But I haven’t just used this example to blow my own trumpet!
What I really want to look at is how we are responsible for our own feelings.

So let me use another example, suppose we are sitting having a coffee and I suddenly tell you I don’t like your top and it looks awful on you.
I’ll come back to my behaviour in a minute.
Now if you are having a good day, you’ll look me in the eye and tell me it’s none of my business what you wear and your not particularly interested in my views , as you like the top, and don’t need my rudeness.
Or, if you’re having a bad day, you may hear my comment and it just adds to your feelings of low self esteem. And you might think…. “Oh no, I can’t even get my top right, I’m such a failure.”

To go back to my comment, what I have been is rude and unpleasant to you. It is up to you how you will interrupt my rudeness. I do not have the power to make your top awful. I may not like it, as if it’s any of my business, and I have no right to just be mean to you.

So here is the subtle, but life changing shift. Your feelings are already in you. Your experiences as they happen to you, influence your feelings but will not alter your feelings unless you let them.

You are responsible for your feelings and no-one else.

Of course on one level that makes perfect sense, but we are so used to blaming other people for the way we feel that I just need to labour my point for a bit.

Lets change the direction for a moment.

Consider what if anything you had for breakfast this morning, now ask the first person you meet next, what they had for theirs. Now chances are that you won’t have had the same thing at all. So one of you might have had toast and the other cereals. It really doesn’t matter what, but the question to ask, who is right?….. Answer no-one, or both of you. There is no right answer. You had what was right for you, we’re not looking here at the nutritional value of your breakfast, just your right to choose to eat whatever it was.

Everyone has free will over their choice of food, this lesson is quickly learnt when children reach a certain age and start only eating what they want and not what we necessarily want them to eat! But generally we manage to accommodate these choices, and now live in a world where the evening meal can be as different as there are members of the household.

But there isn’t a right choice and that is my point here.

What sort of music, movies, books are you entertained by? Do the people around you share your tastes? Is it ok if they don’t? Of course.

We have no problems with our choices in this way, we allow our fellow man their rights to eat what they like, vote for whom they think is correct, have whichever religious view makes sense to them, all without a feeling of threat inside us. That is unless they are ramming their particular views down our throats as the only right ones. That is bullying and that will be dealt with in another chapter.

Were it goes wrong is in relation to feelings. And this started the minute we wanted to be part of something when we were small. So before school most children at some stage tell their parents that they are going to marry them, live together always or whatever. Then when they start school, the child wants to belong to a new gang, that is one made up of their school mates. They need that sense of belonging. One of the ways this is achieved is by wearing the same clothes, watching the same television programmes, liking the same things. So that there is a loss of individuality and a gaining of gang mentality. There is a need to belong.

This need shows itself in conforming to the rest of the gang. It doesn’t matter if this gang are little girls or adolescent males. They will all have a need to be like one another. And to be able to spot people outside of their gang. So if the little girl doesn’t have the latest toy, or right clothes or the adolescent male wearing their badge of gang membership, then those people without will not be allowed in.

There is nothing worse than feeling outside, and if you watch any play ground you can watch children inside and outside the groups, and what they do to try and belong.

As adults we let go of some of these behaviours, but not all. We no longer have to have the correct trainers/ clothes/ watch TV, but we do get hooked into is our feelings being wrong. Especially if we are in relationships where are views are criticised or belittled. We feel that we don’t know what we feel, if someone is telling us in a more authortive way that they are right, and we are wrong.

So it is no wonder that we feel that our knowledge of our own feelings is suspect.
And that we don’t trust our own feelings.

But our feelings ARE right for us and for us alone. Go back to my breakfast example, it’s your choice what you eat, healthily or not. Why would something even deeper inside you like your feelings not be your choice as well?

No -one can make you feel anything.

If someone says something nasty to you, it’s how you feel inside that will make you respond to the comment not the comment having the power to make you feel.

This of course does not just apply to nasty comments, it also relates to good situations, of which the most dramatic is falling in love.

We meet that certain someone, and all at once we are giddy with feelings, we can’t stop thinking about that person, dream about them, spend hours talking to each other and all the other things that happen at a start of any relationship.

But is it there loving us that is causing our feelings or is it the feelings inside ourselves. I would argue that it is our feelings. It is our dreaming, our thinking, our needs to be with the other. Obviously if the feelings are reciprocated then there is a full blown love affair going on. But if the other does not feel as we do then there is a case of unrequited love, which at it’s most pathological can turn into stalking.

The stalker firmly believes that the person they are stalking loves them as much as they love the victim. They project a whole set of feelings on to the victim that the victim does not feel at all. Potentially making the victim’s life a complete misery.

This then illustrates how are feelings are own, because no-one ever wants to suffer at the hands of a stalker. But what is the difference between them and us when we fall in love? …. Nothing except the other person also feeling the same way as we do, if we are lucky!

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What we do with our feelings apart from not own them, is blame other people for them. So we not only have conflict within ourselves about what we feel ,we also are cross with others for making us feel like this.

This does not make any sense at all.

We tell people all the time you make me cross/sad/upset or whatever. They in turn do it back to us, and then before we know it we have a full blown row on our hands.

There is a way we can see this behaviour in action. Have you ever seen a Pantomime?
Assuming you have, then you will know that you are sitting back in your seat enjoying the performance and at some point the Dame comes out and yells “Oh no he didn’t” and we all yell back “oh yes he did” This yelling continues for a few moments with us all getting more and more excited and sitting closer to the edge of our seats joining in, until there’s a big theatrical bang and the genie appears or whatever.

This is just so exciting and we collapse back in our seats laughing at the enjoyment of it all.

What this echoes is how we behave in an argument with our nearest and dearest. We start off discussing something, but we disagree with each other, and so feelings start to raise and we start to lose the content of our original discussion as we start slagging each other off… “ you make me sick” “ you stupid cow” I could go on with various expressions, but we all know what we say and how mean we can get towards the person we are rowing with. So the insults are hurled until both of you are totally furious with each other and then instead of the theatrical bang you will have your own version. The end of your row could be someone gets hit, you don’t speak for a week, someone storms out of the house, someone throws their dinner at the wall. Whatever you do you will do it every single time! Just like the Pantomime.

You have successfully blamed someone for how you feel, as they have you, and now you can spend happy hours feeling resentful at their horrible behaviour towards you. And of course you’re completely justified, as they were so horrid to you…

Um , can you?…. I don’t think you can. If people start to take responsibility for their own feelings, then blaming someone else for how we feel isn’t going to work.
Try saying some normal throw away lines that you might use in an argument - you make me sick- you make me really cross- you make me feel like a banana.
OK the last one is to illustrate my point here.

I can say- I feel sad/ cross /like a banana but I cannot blame someone else for those feelings, as the one about the banana is abject nonsense, but then so are the others!
No-one has the power over your feelings unless you believe that they have. If you accept the power of your own emotions as being yours then no-one can deny them.
Cause how do you know I don’t feel like a banana?

To change these destructive ways of behaving is very difficult, but not impossible.
So lets go back to the argument you were having, think of it as climbing a ladder up to the top and your end result. And, what you do is you take a step of the ladder into the unknown and instead of using the words - “You make me….” Try saying -”I feel….”
It stops the row in its tracks. Cause the person you are arguing with cannot do their normal rejoinder of “don’t you tell me…. You make me….” There is nothing to say those words back to as you are owning how the situation is making you feel, and not verbally abusing whomever you are rowing with.

Doing this takes a great deal of practise, and you may not have that many rows! So the other way that this personal responsibility is incorporated into our lives is by learning to use the magic word as often as possible. The magic word is, of course, I.

By learning to say I, then you are taking responsibility for yourself, for your feelings/ emotions and choice of breakfast. And in so doing you liberate yourself from the tyranny of powerlessness that happens when you don’t feel in control of your own self.

To be able to do this then allows you to make your own decisions about everything you do. Which doesn’t mean that you go to the other extreme and become belligerent and demanding. You only have power over yourself, no-one else.

Therefore you can start to make more balanced choices rather than being passive/ victim or aggressive/bully, instead you can be assertive /self assured.
Knowing that you have rights and those rights are as important as anyone else’s rights. But they are no more important than anyone else’s.

Just remember no-one can make you cry/ love them/ hate them/ sad. It’s your call, not theirs as to how you respond and feel.