In many situations, clients talk about how someone else ‘made them feel’. I think of that as a person’s interpretation of someone else’s behavior. But to take that point a step further, I reread a book by Dave Ellis called the Human Being Book, and am now focusing on the reaction to a feeling. He says it best. I don’t even want to paraphrase. Please read and reread until you get the message.
(From Dave Ellis, Human Being Book, pp. 199-200)
People often resist their feelings because those
feelings are linked with undesirable behaviors.
Consider the man who breaks a dish every time
he’s angry. After a while, he makes himself wrong
for feeling angry. When he does feel angry, he
resists that feeling. After all, it costs too much to
keep replacing all those dishes.
His way of thinking misses one point: When
he gets angry, he doesn’t have to break dishes. In
fact, there are a lot of things he could do instead:
He could yell. He could take a brisk walk. Punch
a pillow. Play a tuba. Anything but break a dish.
Once we understand that a feeling does not
necessarily lead to any particular behavior, we
can give ourselves permission to open up to
the full range of our feelings. We can have any
feeling at all and then choose how we want to
respond.
Choose what to do next.
Feelings are for feeling. That’s all. There’s no
reason to judge them, explain them, justify them,
fear them, or stuff them. Feelings are natural
events, just like the weather. (As I have said, they are your interpretation of the behavior) To condemn a
feeling is like saying that rain is immoral. We can
feel any feeling without acting in ways that
damage ourselves, others, or our environment.
It is liberating to discover that actions and
feelings can function independently. We do not
have to feel strong, powerful, or motivated before
we take constructive action. We can do what needs
doing in our lives without fixing our feelings first.
That’s fortunate. Our feelings constantly shift
with the flow of outside events. When the baby is
screaming at 2 a.m., the boss is in a bloodthirsty
mood, or the weather is overcast and rainy for
days on end, we can feel low, even depressed. We
can find ourselves just reacting to other people’s
reactions: someone insults us, we fire back a
nasty remark; rain falls, we sink into sadness;
the car has a flat tire, we seethe with rage. If we
thoughtlessly react to those feelings, we’ll find
ourselves constantly at the mercy of the circumstances
that triggered our feelings.
Instead, we can notice our feelings, accept
them, and choose (I added the bold) what to do next. Instead of
lamenting the rainy weather, we can call a
friend or curl up with a favorite book. Instead of
complaining about what a jerk the boss is, we can
look for the underlying problem that sparked her
anger and find a way to solve it. We can even
attend to the screaming infant, knowing that we
can feel sleepy and still attend to business
tomorrow morning.
It’s to our advantage to have a clear sense
of what we can control—and what we can’t.
The weather and other people’s reactions are two
examples of items that belong in the latter category.
Instead, we can let go of such things and
focus instead on what we can control—our focus
of attention and our actions. Remembering this
offers a stable and lasting source of happiness.
Remember that like begets like
Yes, it is a challenge to be loving when
others aren’t. It’s easy to react in kind when
someone is rude, caustic, or resentful—easy and
ineffective. Sinking to a lower level merely adds
to the environment of tension, upset, and misery.
Being happier involves letting others have
their feelings and not taking it personally.
Feelings, whether they happen to us or someone
else, are not right or wrong—they just happen.
When another person is angry or rude,
they aren’t broken and we don’t have to fix
them. If we want to be happier, we can accept
the other person, notice our feelings about them,
and then choose what to do next. Unhappiness
is contagious. Awareness, attention, and action
offer the antidote that protects our system from
further unhappiness.
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