Take charge of what you feel
Q: I don’t agree with or understand your article about taking charge of your feelings. I believe that someone else can make me feel good by telling me they love me or that I look nice or by giving me a hug or smile.
And, you can make me feel bad in the following ways:
- You can treat me like I’m your slave, not your partner.
- You can dance with everyone else and not me.
- You can have an affair.
- You can tell me I’m an idiot or swear at me.
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Do you mean to tell me that doing these things will not make your spouse unhappy or feel bad? What I hear you saying is that if I were in charge of my feelings, I wouldn’t feel bad.
A: Another person’s behavior can be loving and may help you to feel good. And their hurtful behavior may be hard on you. But you are the one who has to decide to feel good or feel bad.
Your feelings are created by your thoughts and beliefs about what is happening around you. Others can’t make you feel good. But you may enjoy what they are doing, something only you can choose to do.
This is a fundamental truth of living, but many people have a hard time accepting it. Women are so conditioned to believe they are responsible for taking care of their partner, and have had such success at doing this, that they find it hard to realize they can determine how they feel by what they think and believe about themselves or others.
No control over feelings
If your feelings and well-being are dependent on what someone else does, despite how much you may love them (or in some cases end up hating them), then you have no control over yourself and your feelings. That’s scary.
Rather than saying “you can make me feel good,” I would say, “I can choose how I respond to what you do.” If you are good, kind and considerate, I can choose to feel content, appreciative and happy.
If your behavior is the opposite, I don’t have to feel bad. I can evaluate what you did, come to my own conclusions about it, and then decide what feelings I experience and how best to handle them. When I am having those feelings, I am in charge of them and I can still feel good about myself.
When I teach this idea to people, it often takes them many months to believe the idea enough to practise it. I agree the idea that you can affect how you feel, by what you think or believe, doesn’t seem to make sense at first. But try it for a while, not just once, but regularly for weeks or months. Once you realize you can challenge and change your feelings about something, you feel the better for it.
