Did you fill in the blanks when you read the title of this blog? If so, maybe your mind went to: …so angry, …like dancing, or maybe even …like a natural woman. Today I’d like to focus on a common thing that I hear from people in sessions (and out in my own life), which is the idea that someone can make a person feel a certain way. Usually it sounds like, “(S)he makes me so mad!” We don’t usually question it when we hear this. We all understand the idea that we might react angrily after someone does something that we really don’t like, but perhaps this is actually a more accurate way of putting it. Maybe you think I’m just arguing semantics here, but actually I’m referring to something deeper. Our reaction belongs to us, and this can be completely independent of the actions of the other person.
I’m not suggesting that everyone has equal abilities to control their reactions, or even that an individual has the same level of control of their reactions across different situations. People who have ADHD (especially when it is untreated) have a much harder time reacting the way that they might want to. People who have increased stress and anxiety in a situation will also be more impulsive. Someone who just received terrible news may not be in firm control of their reactions either. We can work on ourselves, but there is a core truth that we must embrace in order to do so: My* reactions are my responsibility. Accepting this doesn’t magically make us less impulsive or mean that we always react exactly the way that we want to, but it does provide the maturity to realize that no one can actually make us feel anything.
In life we develop* a lens through which we see the world. We start to have a concept of right and wrong, how we should treat others, and how others should treat us. This is based on our deeply held personal values. We can feel as though we’ve been wronged when someone treats us differently than we expect to be treated. Because of this sense of being wronged, we can become angry and have angry reactions. There’s a few problems with this, though. Sometimes the other person doesn’t think that they’ve done anything wrong because they didn’t act in a way that conflicted with their values and world-view. Maybe they even see that you’re mad, but they may not actually care. In these cases, the only one affected by anger is you. In other situations, they might be insulted by your anger reaction. In these situations, the other person may give very little attention to what they’ve done wrong and focus only on their perception of how your reactions have wronged them. In reality, this is tough stuff to consider, especially in the moment, because it requires stepping outside of our point of view and our values to look at how this might feel from another’s point of view.
Viktor Frankl wrote a book that I’ve referenced before called, Man’s Search for Meaning. He is a psychiatrist who survived a Nazi concentration camp. In the book he describes multiple experiences that he went through over a long period of time in some of the worst situations that people have been subjected to in modern history. He also writes about coming to terms with the idea that regardless of what his captors were able to do to him, there was something they could never take from him: “Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except for one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.” This idea of being able to control how we feel is one that people argue about, but I tend to think that Dr. Frankl is correct. We might not be able to choose the emotion that pops up in a given moment, but if we’re being honest with ourselves, we know that sometimes we choose to continue to sit in an emotion afterward. Also, regardless of what emotion we’re feeling, we still have the ability to choose our response.
As I stated before, we’re not always going to give the exact reactions that we want to give. Through time, growth, and working on ourselves, we can get better at it, but only if we accept that we are in charge of our reactions. Others aren’t perfect either. Other people will also mess up and make mistakes. Good people sometimes do bad things…just like me and just like you. Yes, there are probably times in which people are specifically doing things because they know it will bother you. I would venture a guess, though, that this is probably less common than people doing things that bother you without realizing that it would be upsetting. In both situations, a controlled reaction is something that you’ll feel better about later.