How Do I Experience My Feelings without Harming my Loved Ones
Previously, we talked about handling our feelings without hurting ourselves.
Today, we’re talking about handling our feelings without hurting others.
I hesitate to write about my children, because I want their words to be their own.
And yet, I think I can pinpoint the moment I stopped falling apart in front of my children.
When I was 23 and my son was not-quite-3. I found myself failing all of my courses at college.
I found that my little fledging restaurant had gone under (when a co-owner absconded with our wee, but sustainable profits).
I found that my short marriage was over.
I had saved up my tears for months, whispering the mantra of It will get better. It will get better.
I remember sitting on the floor of our living room and wondering about all of the tiny decisions that had placed me here, with no money, and now, no husband.
I started to cry. I started to cry a lot. My not-quite-3-year-old noticed me. His eyes were concerned and full of love. He walked over and put his arms around me.
It’s okay, mama, He said.
I looked at my fuzzy duck. He had no idea. He had no way of knowing how bad things were. He only knew that he could comfort me. I saw in his eyes a sense of fear and responsibility that no toddler should have to handle.
It took me back to a time, as a child, where I was in the same situation with my mother.
This is a very common problem in the domestic sphere of life. We fall apart in front of our children. Children should never feel responsible for the emotions of their parents.
I scraped it together, waited until he took his nap, and then I cried. And I picked myself up and did what I needed to do to make our lives work.
This is what happens when you are really emotional in front of your children.
***
This is an obvious example. Everybody knows that it’s not good to sob uncontrollably in front of your 3-year-old.
What about spouses?
What about older children?
What about colleagues at work?
It’s a fallacy to think that we are all going to be shiny, happy people all of the time.
I want to be authentic, but authentic me is not always pretty or funny or kind. Sometimes authentic me is snarly.
Do I have a right to be snarly around others?
What about sad?
Is it good for us to experience the extent of each other’s suffering?
When does my suffering become your burden?
Here are my thoughts- and I’m looking forward to hearing yours-
A good tantrum is like a decadent dessert
It’s all right to have it once or twice a year, but if you are partaking weekly or even daily, your anger is taking its toll.
You are responsible for your feelings
They are yours.
Perhaps somebody was a jerk and contributed to them, but they are yours now.
This is (like everything else) a mixed bag. You get to feel your feelings. You get to learn from them. They are mostly useful to you. You get to decide what you do about them when you are done.
This also means that you can’t say, You made me feel this way. Because that’s not a true or helpful statement.
You can say, I feel bad because I asked you if these pants made my butt look fat and you said, ‘it’s not the pants.”
See the difference there? What you feel is what you feel when you feel it. It is yours.
Don’t Mistake a Feeling Threshold for someone caring or not caring about you
What is a feeling threshold?
It’s the extent that someone can observe someone else’s feelings without feeling the need to react and/or run away.
High Threshold: People can cry in front of me. People can lose their little minds in many different ways, and I can take it without taking on their pain.
Low Threshold: I know a car dealer who knocks a few thousand dollars off the price of a car if a woman cries in front of him. His feeling threshold is pretty low.
A person’s feeling threshold has little to do with how much they care about you.
We are given a physical barometer to react to anyone that is expressing their pain. It resonates with us. Just because there is resonance doesn’t mean that people care. Just because people don’t react doesn’t mean that they don’t care.
Sometimes we are so caught up in our own drama that we confuse the two.
A friend told me this story.
She was upset at her husband. He had missed an important event where she was to give a speech.
Later, at home, she told him how upset she was.
When she burst into tears, he left the room.
She yelled, You don’t care! You don’t care!
and he said, I’m getting you a kleenex.
The only way to know if someone cares about you is how they react in the longer run. You have to have a few arguments, discussions, tear-filled moments before you can integrate the threshold with their feelings.
Understanding the threshold is key
My sweetheart totally gets it when I say, I really need things to be like this. or Could we work on this?
He needs a quiet calm voice. He is like a deer in the woods. I need to approach him quietly and peacefully.
When I do that, our relationship works.
This man does not respond to hysteria. Or shouting. Or swearing. Or vegetables being chopped ferociously.
His feeling threshold is very sensitive. He can’t respond if he is feeling over-run by my emotions.
Think about the people in your life. Does your emotional style fit theirs?
Sometimes people need commentary and/or direction
If my kids come home and I am chopping a potato in a particularly aggressive way, I might say, I’m a little mad right now. It’s not your fault. I just need you to get your homework done and to keep your music down.
The it’s not your fault is key when working with children. Because kids believe that they are responsible for everything.
It’s also good to put a time on it. I expect to feel better by suppertime.
Sweethearts need commentary and direction too.
I am really pissed off about this situation that has nothing to do with you and I don’t require your advice at this time.
or
When I am able to have a civil conversation about the state of our finances, I’ll let you know. I don’t want to scream at you for bringing home a jet-ski when we live in the desert.
Also at work:
I’m frustrated with how that meeting went. I don’t think the client understands that we can’t bend the space/time continuum. I appreciated your comment about realistic expectations. Perhaps later when I’ve calmed down, we can talk about next steps.
See that? You identified the feeling. You placed it in context to space and time and then you put forward what you wanted to do next.
This is the beauty of your feelings being YOUR FEELINGS. You get to decide how and with whom you want to experience them.
When you give someone the right to experience your feelings, you can honor them and not burden them.
For example, I was recently helping out a friend who was very upset. She is going through a hard time. I just listened. She told me a story of remarkable sadness and beauty. It helped me understand her better, to see the place she came from.
Then she said, Thank you for listening. I didn’t need anything but for someone to listen to me and tell me that I wasn’t crazy for feeling bad about something from long ago.
I said, You’re welcome.
Notice she didn’t ask me to fix anything in her life.
Never give the responsibility of your feelings over to somebody else.
I always feel honored to talk with someone who is processing an emotion. This is tangibly different than someone who is dumping their emotions on me. It feels different.
I know a person who dumps on me every single time I see her. Her life is so awful. Her life is SO AWFUL! She puts it on others in the whiniest, most annoying way possible. This is irritating because I cannot fix her life. I cannot resolve the issues that she is having because I am not her.
Tomorrow- How can my emotions be helpful to my process of living and not just things that make me feel bad?
Wow! Did you read all this? If you got to here, could you leave me a comment? It’ll be like your flag on top of a summit.
Tell me: What are your feelings about feelings?
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Lots and lots of good advice here. Thank you for writing it all down! I’ve already sent the link to this post to others who I think need to read it.
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Yay! Thank you! My thought process required a bath, a nap, and two hours of writing. Phew! Glad this is helpful to you!
Oh, Bridget, I love, love this!
If only I had read this about five or ten years ago…you would saved me the frustration of learning the hard way.
Awesome post, as usual, Bridget!! Thank you for giving me some words…I’ve often been at a loss when the kids ask why I’m crying (usually when watching some tear-jerker movie) so it’s helpful to have a “_____is why I’m upset & it’s not your fault, I’ll be normal again soon” phrase to go to! Thank you for being the gift you be in this world!!!
xoxo
Thank you for this. It’s a difficult balance sometimes. Neither stuffing emotions nor letting them all out all the time is a good option. Can you blog more about how you are able to “wait” for the right time to let your emotions out? Thanks.
Michelle- Thank you for loving it and reading it in its entirety! I’m sorry that you learned the hard way. I learned the hard way too. I am really happy that I met my sweetheart at 32 and not 22!
Sarah- it does help. Especially the “not your fault” part. Your kind words make my day!
Sue- You are so welcome. The balance is difficult, sometimes. My stepson and I struggle with this all of the time.
I want to blog about how I wait to let my emotion out. I have to think a little about how I do. Waiting for the right time is hard sometimes.
Hi! It’s @realsarah from Twitter.
I did read it all! It’s different than what I was expecting…when I saw your tweet, I think I was expecting something about intuitively feeling other people’s emotions, or something like that…something more “mystical.” Haha.
But this is a brilliant post! I think it’s very true that we have to own our own stuff. I love your emphasis on helping to give people some subtle direction about what we need from them. I am working on this in my own marriage, to be more direct with my husband. Why do I think he can read my mind? He cannot!
Also with children; that is very important (love your caption at the picture of your son, so dear.)
Am I helpful with these comments? I don’t know…sorry if I’m not…but I really did love reading the article. If I process more after thinking about it, I will be back to submit more comments!
Sarah-
Your comments are quite helpful. I don’t think we even realize sometimes how much our kids pick up from us. I am certainly not perfect in this category.
I want to talk more about owning our stuff. I think people have a hard time differentiating between ownership and “keeping it to themselves”. We want to be authentic. Authentic sometimes means difficult emotions. But if we don’t expect others to fix it, then maybe we can be more free to express it? Also, energetically (woo-woo-ing-ly), there are ownership issues sometimes.
So much to explore.
Thank you, Bridget, for putting this down in text. Up until now, it has been difficult to find the words to say to my loved ones almost exactly the way you’ve said it here, and I am grateful to have the inspiration. I agree that life is short, emotions are natural and that for every minute we spend angry, we miss out on 60 seconds of possible happiness. Again, thank you.
Chimp Champion- Isn’t it amazing how hard it is to come up with what to say when you’re mad? It can be so difficult.
I would say that useful anger is good, and I’d go with 60 seconds of useful angry processing than the hours of lost happiness that come when we don’t work through what we are truly truly angry about. It’s figuring out the useful from the not useful, that’s the hard part!
Really happy that you were here today!
One of the things that helped me begin to channel overwhelming feelings of anger and fear, and things affecting low self esteem, was studying kung fu, especially the boxing and hitting punching bags! But also the energy moving forms and peaceful/non violent interaction with classmates. I did this back when I was 26 through 30 years old. I used to be in talk style therapy for many years, and as soon as I started addressing my emotions on an energetic level, I found helpful ways of directing them away from myself and people I cared about in a way that actually changed the quality of my life for the better.
I don’t think I could go back to a purely traditional talk therapy therapist, although I have a great respect for this type of work, and the code of ethics and methods that guide these trained counselors are really comforting.
My husband likes to yell at the dumb people on TV, all the corrupt politicians and people that are not nice to other people, like verbally policing the world from your sofa. Then I yell at him to stop yelling at the TV. Then the cat runs out of the room, because he doesn’t like it when people aren’t ‘chill’.
Also, if I don’t do aerobic exercise at least once per week, then I get backed up with gross amounts of negativity.
Lilly- this is really smart. I’ve done some Aikido and it does make a difference.
Addressing the emotions at an energetic level is so important, and much easier to do if one is made present by martial arts, and then experiences energy moving forms and other practices that bring these emotions into focus.
Thank you!
Indeed, as others have said Bridget, so much content you’ve offered! And it’s a fine line, isn’t it? This balance between not asking another to bear our emotions or a way in which we keep ourselves tightly-wound and tightly-stuffed inside. No easy answers. No pat formula. Life has a way of bringing it forth…eventually.
I have cried in front of my daughters and felt the pang of pain that’s created for them; while, at the very same time, being grateful that they can know me as a woman who hurts as well as holds it all together.
A tightrope – often with no safety net.
Thank you.
Ronna-
I agree. It is a balance. If you don’t show the difficult emotions in front of your kids, they might grow up with the idea that difficult emotions don’t happen to everyone, or worse, that their parents always had it together, so what’s wrong with them that they don’t?
They have to see us as real people.
A burden is not always a bad thing.
I think I’ll be visiting this over and over and over again.
Re: 7 & 8 I think that feeling your feelings and owning your own emotions is a fabulous place to start for woo-woo stuff. I for example am very clairsentient, and it is a real study for me to discern where things are coming from, to know and own what is mine, and to be aware of other people having feelings but not get swept up in them or take them on. I also think that when you have unresolved emotional pain, there is a tendency to resonate with that pain in others, so being conscious of and addressing your own stuff is also a way of protecting yourself. There is a difference between being witness, and getting dragged down in all the heavy stuff in the world — of which there is plenty1
Marion-
This is so very true. Often, unresolved emotional pain causes resonance. Resonance can be very painful and not useful.
A sensitive person surrounded by people who are emotionally unhappy, is an unhappy person, without any reason to be.
Oh, yes, this is enlightening. The threshold. So…just wow! Yes! OK. Must noodle on this for a while. I never had thought of it this way. My husband gets angry at me when he is upset and I just can listen and listen. Accuses me of being unfeeling. But I am not unfeeling. I can just take a lot from others without being affected…not that I’m not affected at all. Just, I don’t dissolve into a puddle of goo. And let’s face it, my friends have needed me to be that rock for them. So no wonder. Wow. High threshold for me. Makes sense. Ah, and the taking responsibility for the feeling. Hmmm. I wish the husband weren’t so averse to woo-woo. It makes him shut down. I wish I could print this out and say Jimmy Page wrote it or something…
Oh, and can I have the name of that mechanic? (Wink.)
i have found that nothing beats a well-timed hug and plain ole’ listening. bearing witness just can’t be beat. i was just talking to my son about this very thing. how two women i love are immersed in a dark place right now, and all i can do it bear witness and hold the space for them. good post, by the way.
jeanne- It can be very difficult to watch our friends in dark places. But holding that space for them is an act of courage and comfort and hope, and it is enough, I agree.
I love this story!
Thanks, Bridget
<3
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