The importance of Owning our Emotions

Have you ever thought that it was somebody else’s fault if you were feeling sad, angry or frustrated? I would be surprised if you hadn’t – almost everybody has fallen into this trap sooner or later. But what would it be like, if we took full responsibility for our negative emotions or reactions, and stopped blaming others for them?  If this sounds like an interesting or outright crazy idea to you, then read on …

To me, the idea of owning my emotions makes so much sense that I strive to adopt it fully in my emotional and social life. Nevertheless, at first glance it might seem that taking responsibility for your own emotions is a recipe for crushing your self esteem, and amplifying your negative feelings even more. Our wounded ego won’t like it a single bit, if we stop blaming others and make ourselves the only authors of our own destiny.

Having a network of relationships is beautiful, and probably it’s one of the basic needs of every human being. However, it is inevitable that every now and then we will feel some kind of negative emotion while we interact with others. Let’s make an example: you meet somebody and start having an intimate relationship with him or her. Everything is wonderful, your life seems much happier than before, and you enjoy some weeks or months of elation and deep connection with your partner. But alas, after a relatively short time, something unexpected happens. The person you were feeling such a beautiful resonance with, suddenly starts to be distant, cold, without any apparent reason. After a few days, he or she abruptly decides to put an end to your relationship – without any logical explanation. You fall down from heaven to the hard, cold ground in a matter of days. You feel empty, neglected … and most likely, angry. How could this person treat you like that? Isn’t it clearly his or her fault if you’re feeling the way you do now? Isn’t his behavior the obvious cause of your miserable situation? My answer is “no”, but maybe that requires some explanation.

If you look at this example carefully, I think you will discover that in any interaction between conscious, adult human beings, each one is responsible for their own emotions. This does not mean that it is your “fault” if you feel sad or angry: there is an enormous difference between fault and responsibility. “Fault” means that you are wrong, twisted, or otherwise flawed inside, and that you should fix yourself to conform to some external standard of goodness or strength. “Responsibility”, on the opposite, means that you are a fully conscious, powerful and self-determined human being, who takes merit for his own successes and happiness, and responsibility for his own failures and shortcomings. It’s interesting to note, that blaming others for your negative feelings actually makes you powerless to avoid them: the only way you can get better, is by changing the other person’s behavior by force, plea, or manipulation. Conversely, when you accept that every emotion arises inside you because you allow it, you open the door to the possibility of feeling better thanks to yourself. In this light, modifying your patterns of behavior is not a matter of fixing a broken thing, but rather of consciously choosing to evolve – to change for the better, to attain more harmony and connection for you and everyone around you.

Coming back to our example, we can start to see the situation in a different light. Did anyone force you to become involved with the person that just dumped you, causing so much pain? Probably not – so your responsibility starts here, in choosing wisely what kind of connection you need to build with each person that crosses your path. The art of selecting suitable partners that intimately resonate with us, instead of blindly following our instincts, can be developed and refined as any other human skill. It is an unfortunate myth that “love is blind” – sure enough, emotional connection is much more than a cold, rational choice done exclusively by the mind. But the more in touch we are with ourselves, the deeper we know our internal workings and the hidden reasons behind our emotional and sexual attractions, the more likely we are to be attracted by partners that won’t end up hurting us or simply walking away from us. If this is true, then it is our responsibility if we keep trying to build “impossible relationships” or keep finding out that the people we like actually have a completely different personality than we thought.

This brings me to another common reason of deep distress, also reflected in the example story I proposed. It seems as if, sometimes, people we are emotionally connected to all of a sudden “change faces” and present us with a side of their personality that leaves us shocked and incredulous. How can that wonderful woman, which was the sweetest girl on Earth up until a week ago, suddenly turn into a cold-minded, pragmatical person and decide to follow her own life goal in another country? How can someone that we are in love with, stop loving us at some time and leave us, brutally showing that we aren’t so compatible as we thought we were? Well, it is my opinion that more often than not, when something like this happens, it simply shows that we have been blinded by our own desires and expectations. Very seldom do people change radically in a nighttime, or in a week’s time. Even though human beings are by definition unpredictable and free in their choices, they don’t simply switch personalities like they change clothes – unless they suffer from a serious pathological condition. So when somebody suddenly shows us a face that we didn’t even imagine could exist, our first question might rather be – “How could I be so blind and not see this person for what she really is”? Maybe we should even apologize for having projected our own stuff on another human, and having refused to see her in its reality, and complexity. But even though the mind can lose itself in a labyrinth of  mirrors, life refuses to lie, and sooner or later it presents us with the crude reality. If we have allowed our imagination to wander too far, then coming back to reality can be very shocking.

A logical consequence of owning our own emotions, is that we don’t need to feel responsible for the feelings of others. This does absolutely not mean that we should not be supportive and caring with someone when they are hurt, especially if our behavior is what triggered their reaction. But we can let go of the idea that we need to “fix” somebody else’s sadness – only he can change his own emotional reactions, even though we can help him by finding reasonable compromises between his freedom and ours. Perhaps the most obvious example of this situation is jealousy. This feeling is so universal, and it’s the source of so much pain, that it probably deserves a more in-depth analysis all on its own. But if we accept that we need to own our emotions, then this is also true for jealousy – nobody ever “makes us feel” jealous. We are solely responsible for allowing this feeling to arise inside our heart, and while it is true that other people’s behaviors can be the trigger for it (in fact, almost anything can trigger jealousy given the right conditions!), they can never be the real cause. It is rarely so obvious as in jealousy, that we create and nurture our own negative feelings for which we usually then blame others.

The idea of owning one’s emotions is by no means a novelty –  you can find a mention of it in many inspiring books, including The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy or Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg, just to name a few. Still, I don’t think it has found the widespread acceptance it deserves yet – partly, because it is often misinterpreted as a harsh policy that maintains that each one of us should “deal with their own shit” completely alone. This is actually incorrect; in fact, I believe that only by being responsible of our own emotions can we be truly supportive of someone who is in pain. Feeling guilty about somebody else’s distress does not make us better friends, or lovers; on the contrary, it poses us in the difficult situation of trying to help our loved one, while we actually want to either punish ourselves or make up for what we “did wrong”. On the other hand, by accepting that we are the creators of our own negative emotions, and so are the others, we can allow ourselves to ask for help or offer support without blame or resentment. We do acknowledge that we are responsible for our anger or sadness, but we ask others not to trigger these feelings gratuitously. We can then happily and lovingly provide the same care to the persons we love, and to strangers as well.

Summing up, I frankly believe that a world in which each one took as much responsibility as possible for her own emotional well-being, would be more open to love and less prone to resentment. So much of our energy goes wasted into blaming others for our own unhappiness – with scarce results, since most people don’t react well to blame. I find it both easier and more effective to recognize that we are the authors of our own lives, although we often need the help of others to advance in our path of evolution. Very few people will refuse to offer their contribution to our development, if they don’t feel forced, manipulated or emotionally blackmailed in order to do so. And if our chosen friends cannot provide the support we need, we can simply thank them for what they’ve done so far and look for someone more in harmony with our current needs – without any hard feelings.

photo credit: Mixed emotions via photopin (license)