The words “you make me feel” reflect a most misleading idea when it comes to understanding feelings: that one person can cause another person to have a feeling. We come by this idea quite honestly. Who has not heard a parent telling them “You made your mother unhappy” (or any other feeling you’d like to put into that sentence)? Or “Your father will be angry with you when he hears what you’ve done.” As children we learn that we can cause our parents to have certain feelings. We’re told we can “make” them happy, sad, angry, upset, etc.
If this actually were the case we would have a great deal of power over our parents emotional state. It isn’t the case. Ask any child who tried to please an angry father and who learned no matter what he did, father wasn’t happy. Ask any child who had a depressed mother for whom no matter what he/she did mother’s depression didn’t lift.
It’s an easy way to think we cause feelings in other people and they cause feelings in us. However, if this were the case we would have little or no control over our own emotional life but total control over the emotional life of others. It would be as if there were strings attached between our feelings and those people in our lives who are important to us. Similarly, there would be strings between their feelings and us. That image creates an amusing picture of human life. “A” acts towards “B” based on “A”’s feelings, which were “caused” by “B” and “B” does the same towards “A”. One wonders who is running the show here!
It is true that people live in some version of this picture. This can cause of a lot of unhappiness, even if there are times when both feel very close and connected. The latter happens when both A and B are feeling something similar and give the credit to each other. “You make me so happy”. This state is called “being in love.” If you’ve ever been there, you know that it doesn’t last. As one of my clients said, “The cause of all my greatest happiness has now become the cause of all my misery.
There is another way of understanding feelings which gets us free of those strings and which puts us in charge of our own emotional life. We can take responsibility for our own feelings. On the surface it doesn’t seem possible that we could be responsible for our own feelings. We often notice feelings arising in ourselves in response to something someone has said or done. It really does seem that they “caused” our feeling. However, that feeling was already there. Whatever was said or done simply resonated with that feeling, drawing our attention to what was there all along.
One image for this process draws on the concept of thresholds. Imagine an ember which is covered in grey ash. It’s hot and glowing. If someone blows on it more energy is released and it crosses the threshold between “glowing” and “fire”, bursting into flame. If the ember is cold all the blowing in the world will not bring forth a flame. The flame or feeling depends on a prior state.
Taking responsibility for your feelings lets you start to see something about yourself when a feeling arises in you. Instead of focusing on your partner (who “made” you have this feeling) you pay attention to what the feeling is telling you about yourself. This does take a bit of digging into your own internal world and into your emotional history. Sometimes help in this department is useful. You may not like what you see but once you understand the feeling reflects something about you there is a chance you can do something about that.
Many of our feelings are like programmed, automatic reactions. We learn these in our family. Some psychologists have likened feelings to a guidance system which tells us how to understand events and how to govern behavior. This is what being raised in a family does for us. Families teach us how to find our way in the human world. This works pretty well much of the time. We all unconsciously follow more or less the same set of rules. This helps us to get along relatively well most of the time. It’s when this doesn’t work that things get interesting and challenging.
The place where this most readily happens is in an intimate relationship. This is where we quickly learn that the guidance system of our family isn’t the same as the guidance system of our partner’s family. What I do which gives me a feeling of being “normal” or “right” isn’t the same as what my partner does which makes him/her feeling “normal” or “right.” When we hit these situations the first response is to try to get our partner to conform to the guidance system we learned. But if they try to do that they end up feeling untrue to themselves and a battle beings with each trying to change the other. This never goes well!
The way out of this is to work at being conscious and aware of your own guidance system. Much of it will be good and useful but there will be elements which no longer make any sense when held up to the light of day. Uou can change those elements by making conscious decisions about what kind of a person you want to be. Doing this may cause a bit of internal trouble because you will be going against your family’s guidance system. That’s called “growing up”: making decisions for your self; not relying on your family upbringing to do your thinking for you.
An example may clarify how this works. In my family when I asked to go out to play the first question I got was “Are your chores done?” What I learned from this was that work comes before play, doing jobs comes before having fun. This isn’t a bad general principle but when it’s followed unconsciously it results in there never being time for play/fun. In the adult world (as opposed to the world of a child) there are always more jobs. Before I was conscious of this aspect of my inherited guidance system I just didn’t feel comfortable stopping work in order to play or do something fun. At some level I believed my father would be unhappy with me if I hadn’t finished my work before I played. In other words, I was still living my life like a little boy wanting father’s approval.
Once I became conscious of the source of my feelings I had more choices about what I did. This didn’t come easily and it didn’t come from sitting alone in the dark and trying to understand my self! It came through conflicts with my partner who wanted us to have more play/fun time…..and who didn’t grow up with the strong injunction placing work before play. When this first came up I successfully tried to get her to help with the work with the promise we would “play when the work was done.” It didn’t take her long to experience that we ran out of time before we ran out of work! She then took the position that she was going to play before the work was done. That left me either having to do a lot of the work by my self or having to figure out why I was so uncomfortable stopping the work in order to have fun, or even having fun before working.
You can use your feelings to understand your self and to change your self to become the kind of person you consciously want to be or you can try to use how you feel to change your partner. One works, the other doesn’t.
