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“It is not your responsibility to figure out what someone else is feeling and why. Let go of the illusion that ‘fixing’ their bad mood will make you feel better.” ~Sarah Crosby
A few years ago, I was talking to my husband on the phone. He seemed angry about something related to his work, but I saw an intense emotional reaction in myself. Immediately, my heart contracted and my stomach lurched. I could feel an uncontrolled rush of emotions activating within me.
My whole body was filled with nausea and I felt like Very uncomfortable.
It was a familiar and old pattern to me. My husband had some feelings and expressed them, and I felt completely overwhelmed by them. This then created a cycle of reactivity, where he would say something in irritation, I would respond with fear that he would be angry, and it would create a big web of emotions all over the place.
But what felt worse than that moment, when I experienced her emotions as if they were the end of the world, was what happened next. I would sink into a familiar place of despair about my husband and how he was feeling. I would try to think of ways to fix the situation, or feel distressed by his reaction.
This reaction is something I have experienced to a greater or lesser extent, not only with my husband, but with most people in my life. My real or imagined feelings toward someone, and how horrible it felt for me, in my body.
It was completely instinctive, that someone would seem upset and I would jump in and try to fix, reassure, help, or calm them down. And in that process, I would completely let my needs and emotions take over because of how much I didn’t like being around people and their emotions.
Sometimes it felt like people close to me were deliberately trying to upset me with their emotions. When a family member became angry it would completely overwhelm me and I would remain angry with them for days or weeks. It felt as if he was punishing me with his anger.
When my children felt frustrated or sad, I found it unbearable to see them feel so bad, and I would try to help them by changing their plans, bringing them a cookie, or trying to talk to them about how they were feeling.
The problem here is that, of course, when we are humans and around other humans, we encounter people who have feelings – about us, or about themselves, or about anything else about which we humans have feelings.
When we find other people’s emotions challenging, we are unable to give them the space they need to have those feelings. is an element of Your feelings are making me uncomfortable! Can you please turn them off because I don’t like them.
This makes sense when we don’t know how to deal with our emotions. If we don’t feel okay with our own emotions, we definitely struggle with other people’s emotions.
So how do we learn not to get attached to other people and their emotions? How do we stop such strong reactions to people’s emotions, no matter what the topic?
How can we stop other people’s emotional reactions from completely distracting us, and distracting us from our day – which takes up huge amounts of time and activates our own extremely uncomfortable emotions?
For me, the first step was learning how to recognize what was happening. I felt like other people’s feelings were happening to me, but in reality, they had feelings and I had feelings too.
My feelings are different from your feelings.
One reason we feel this way is because we get so caught up in each other and things get so messed up in relationships that we don’t recognize that we all have different feelings. In a lot of relationships we don’t give each other space for emotions, because of our patterns of how we react to emotions.
We often think it’s like this:
Stop being afraid! This is scaring me!
Stop being irritable! This is worrying me!
but there really is no one making us Have feelings. Our emotions arise automatically, just like anyone else’s. But we can learn how to stop reacting to our emotions over theirs.
if we could see Oh, here are my own feelings! We can then use this awareness to create some space and begin to focus on ourselves and our feelings instead.
Recognize that no one is having feelings intentionally.
Once I had been coaching for a few years and had made a paradigm shift in the way I worked with my emotions and responded to other people around me, I asked my husband what he liked most about my work. He said that he no longer feels tortured by my feelings. And I thought, Very good! It is very attractive.
I had become so used to being overwhelmed by his emotions that it never occurred to me that he was feeling the same way.
Because my emotional reactions are so different from his, I didn’t realize that he was also uncomfortable with my feelings. And it is the differences in our reactions that can cause so much confusion in relationships.
My strategy when overwhelmed by my husband’s emotions was to chase him down and immediately discuss and try to fix everything. His strategy was to try to get away from me and run away.
Essentially, we both felt challenged by each other’s emotions, and by working to create some space to support ourselves in our emotions, we made such a huge difference in the way we responded to each other.
When people are emotionally activated they cannot be truly empathetic.
What I know now about emotions is that we can’t really access empathy when we’re emotionally active, so if I’m with someone who has emotions, I don’t expect them to empathize and understand.
To gain full access to our empathy, we need to move through emotions, so part of working with other people is letting them move through anger/fear/sadness or whatever they’re feeling.
I don’t engage them in things I’m not happy about or talk about their behavior or what they’ve said – until they’ve moved on from that feeling.
When we feel an emotion, we see the whole world through the lens of that emotion. Anger sees disturbing things everywhere. Fear sees scary things everywhere. So getting involved in what someone might say when they are in a period of emotional activation does us no good.
Knowing this helps us work on not reacting to what they are saying, doing, or feeling.
Feelings activate emotions.
If we are feeling extremely calm and someone comes up to us and is expressing a lot of anger, it can easily activate our own emotions. This is natural. Maybe we feel afraid of anger, or maybe we feel angry at their anger. It’s natural for our emotions to be activated around others.
With all emotions, we want to work on supporting ourselves through emotional activation. When we can do that, when we can sit with ourselves and offer support, we can move through the emotions with greater ease and confidence, and not get stuck in that cycle of emotion.
By paying attention to your experience and naming it, you are providing yourself some support.
We can say to ourselves, The best thing I can do right now is to support myself in feeling my feelings, and not get involved in theirs.
We can acknowledge how challenging this is for us. We can give ourselves the gift of understanding, and it can help us deal with the discomfort of activated emotions.
Offer yourself some empathy, understanding, and validation.
Empathy is a very powerful resource when we are surrounded by emotions. Giving ourselves some gentle, kind, loving support when we feel triggered is a real gift to ourselves.
Maybe we say to ourselves:
This is difficult for me because…
I understand why this is so challenging.
It’s understandable that this is hard for me because…
It’s hard to see someone so disappointed or angry. It is difficult to control these feelings.
If it feels good, provide yourself with some physical support.
Place a hand on your heart, or caress your arms, embrace yourself as you stay with yourself in this experience of sitting with your feelings.
Of course, this is not always easy! When we’ve spent our entire lives reacting to people’s emotions in a certain way, it takes some effort and focus to start responding differently.
Other people’s emotional activations are some of the hardest things we deal with, but with awareness and intention, we can learn to view these experiences differently, and then learn to respond differently.
Now when I hear disappointment or irritation from my husband, or sadness or disappointment from my children, or anger or embarrassment from my family, I can recognize it. these are their Emotions! I don’t need to jump into the pool of their emotions and dive into their experiences.
Instead I can stand back and support myself, which in turn supports them because I am not adding to the emotional load they are experiencing.
I can help by being responsible for our emotions so we don’t create a big chaotic mix of messy emotions.
In this way one can create some space and peace in the emotional experiences around them.
About Diana Bird
Diana Bird is a neuro-emotional coach and author who helps people move from stress, anxiety and fear to peace and confidence. Sign up for her free emotional-processing mini-workshop And get powerful tools, free training, and ongoing support to transform your emotional well-being. Take the first step toward lasting emotional change. Diana lives in southern Spain with her two children and her photographer husband.
