00:00 

Hi there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale, and this is episode number 126, "Abdicating Our Emotional Responsibility." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale, and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:24 

Hello there, my friends. Happy to have you. Welcome to the podcast today. Glad you could make it. If you are new, welcome to the podcast. I hope you find things here that are helpful for you and that help to move you in a direction of having more of the kind of experience that you want to have in this life. If you have been here for a while, welcome back. Thank you for coming, and thank you for sharing. You sharing it is how this podcast gets out there and how people find information that is helpful to them. So thank you for taking the time to share, and let's get started, shall we? 

01:00 

Today, we are talking about abdicating our emotional responsibility. And this is such an important topic. So here's the thing: first of all, that I know about you, if you are here listening to this podcast, especially week after week, you are not a person who shirks responsibility. You are a person who steps up to the plate, who accepts responsibility, and does your best to fulfill it. If you were not this kind of person, you would not be interested in becoming a better version of yourself. And you have voluntarily taken the responsibility to learn and grow and progress. But there is a piece of responsibility that we are often not taught as we are growing up. And because of this, we can tend to stay in an immature stage of responsibility in this area. So even if you are uber responsible in the other areas of your life, this may be one that we want to take a look at. That's why we're exploring it today. 

02:01 

So in my coaching business, we call this emotional childhood and emotional adulthood. And it's fascinating to look at and self-evaluate where we are. When we are in a place of emotional childhood, we will abdicate our emotional responsibility. We will blame other people for our emotions, right? So many adults are living in emotional childhood and they have no idea. So let's start kind of at the beginning of our emotional life. A very small child depends upon the adults in their life to help them learn how to manage their emotions. Have you ever noticed that a small infant will even take cues from whoever is caring for them? If the adult is upset about something, the baby will often feed off of that emotion and may also get fussy. And a toddler does the same kind of thing. If they fall and scrape their knee, the first thing they do is look to their caregiver for their response. If the adult starts crying or freaking out, or even just gets overly concerned, the child takes those cues that they should respond in a similar manner. If the caregiver says something like, "whoops, looks like you fell, let's get back up and try it again," then as long as the child isn't seriously hurt, they learn that this is not something they need to get overly upset about. So just as a small child is dependent upon others to take care of them physically, they're also dependent upon others to teach them how to take care of themselves emotionally as well. And as children grow, the hope is that they will learn to manage their own emotions, not expecting or needing other people to manage them for them. 

03:46 

That is the hope, but many of us don't learn this very well. And here's where things can sometimes get a little bit tricky in our American society, and probably a lot of other societies as well, although I don't live there, so I'm not as up on it. But though we know we need to care for ourselves emotionally, we also get taught a lot of messages that say we are not responsible for our emotions, that our emotions are caused by something outside of us. Growing up, I know that I heard a lot of things like, "did daddy hurt your feelings? When you tell mommy you hate her, that hurts her feelings. You make me so mad. My children are driving me crazy," right? We would hear things like this all the time. Now these statements, they seem innocent enough, and to be honest, they're probably very well-intentioned. However, the problem is that they all put the thought in our head that we are not responsible for our emotions, that someone else is. We are taught that friends hurt our feelings, that it's our spouse's responsibility to make us happy, that we hurt other people's feelings, and that other people make us angry. Other people's words and actions can hurt us, annoy us, frustrate us, or even bring us satisfaction or pride or happiness, or make us feel love, right? But in reality, none of that is true. But many of us don't fully understand that yet, even though we're adults, and if this is completely new information. When we're an adult, and don't yet understand that we are responsible for our own emotions and other people are not, then this is what we call emotional childhood. This is the space of abdicating the responsibility of our emotions to other people, rather than stepping into 100% responsibility for all of our emotions. 

05:44 

So, as I work with clients, this can be a really tough concept to accept and to start to implement, and it makes sense. If we believe for 50 years that other people disappoint us, it can be incredibly difficult to wrap our head around the idea that they don't, that we create the feeling of disappointment all on our own. Okay, so how does that feel to you? Does it feel a little bit uncomfortable? It's very possible that it does, especially if this is a new concept for you. 

06:16 

So let's break it down into the pieces of the thought model to show you more clearly how your emotions or your feelings are 100% your responsibility. So remember the first line of the thought model is the circumstance line, or we sometimes refer to it as the C line. And also remember that a circumstance is always a fact, everyone in the world would agree on it, and we could prove it somehow. And the circumstance is always neutral as well. The fact part people can work with a little bit easier than the neutral part. But let's take it apart a little bit more and look at it. Actual things that people say or do are great circumstances because it can be very easy to see how they are facts. If I had a voice recorder on and someone said something, I could very easily prove what they said just by playing back the recording, it would be a fact, right? If I was recording a video, I could very easily play back the video to show what someone did. So circumstances are facts and they are also neutral, okay? 

07:28 

So let's skip the thought line in the model for now and jump down to the feeling line. So the thought model goes circumstance, thought, feeling. We're gonna skip that thought line because this is what most of us have done our whole lives. So disappointment, we've talked about that feeling already. So it is a feeling that would go into the feeling line. 

07:47 

And here's where it gets tricky for most of us. We think that someone does or doesn't do something, which would be a circumstance, and we feel disappointed. It's so easy to think that the circumstance creates the feeling. "They did this, I felt disappointed." "They didn't do this, I felt disappointed." Hence we believe that other people can control our feelings, that they're in charge of our feelings. But what most of us have never been taught or even learned on our own is that there is a thought line between the circumstance and the feeling. The circumstance is not directly connected to the feeling. And it's the thought in between there about the circumstance that creates the feelings. So the circumstance is neutral but our thought often wants to judge that behavior or create a why for their behavior or decide what we think that behavior means. And this thought is what creates the feeling. 

08:50 

So here's an example: let's say your adult child comes to you and and wants to talk, right? And it ends up being a pretty heavy discussion about something tough they're going through, and at the end they say, "I don't really want advice on this one. I just really needed to talk. Thanks for listening." And they get up and they leave, right? Okay, so what your child said is a circumstance. Okay, everything they said is a circumstance and quotes are always great circumstance because it's easy to see how they're a fact. But the more difficult part is realizing that what your child said is neutral. Because while one parent would be thinking, "really? You don't trust me? What makes you think I can't help you with this? Do you think I haven't been there before?" Another parent could be thinking, "oh, thank goodness. I really didn't want to get pulled into that drama." A right, the first parent's thoughts will create feelings of annoyance, frustration, or hurt, while the second parent's thoughts creates feelings of gratitude, liberation, maybe pride in their child's independence. Two very different thoughts about the same circumstance. Thoughts that create very different feelings. 

10:04 

You see, it's always our thoughts that create feelings. Our thoughts. And our thoughts are completely independent of what anyone else says or does. This is very often a new concept for so many of us. Working with a client recently, she had two major aha's that have changed everything for her. One: she realized that she was taking responsibility for what other people thought and felt, especially in regards to her. And two: she realized that she was not taking responsibility for her own thoughts and feelings and rather blaming them on other people. So these are the first and biggest things we need to understand about our emotional responsibility, or our emotional adulthood. We are responsible for creating our own emotions, and other people are responsible for creating their own emotions. If this is a new concept for you, stick with it  here. This is going to be a game changer for you. 

11:09 

It is so important that we learn to step out of thinking that it's our job to manage the emotions of everyone else in our life, and also to stop thinking that it is everyone else's job to manage our emotions. It is so amazing and so empowering for us to step into the responsibility of managing our own emotions, and not trying to manage someone else's. Other people get to think and feel however they want, and we get to think and feel however we want. It is so important that we understand this concept, because understanding it takes us out of blaming others for how we feel and into accepting responsibility for how we feel. 

11:55 

And then there's another piece of this emotional responsibility that is very important. We abdicate our emotional responsibility when we expect somebody else to do something for us emotionally that we really need to be doing for ourselves. So here's what I mean by that: it is nobody's job but my own to make me happy. And yet we often have expectations of other people that they should make us happy. Our husbands should make us happy. Our siblings should make us happy. Our children should make us happy. But it is nobody else's job but my own to help me feel happy. It's, and get this, this one's gonna rub you a little bit awkward probably, but it is nobody else's job but my own to help me feel love. And yet again, we often expect that other people should make us feel loved. Am I loving myself enough? Or am I wanting other people to do it for me? Am I wanting them to do my job for me? This is where so much of our suffering in life comes from. From wanting other people to do our job for us. 

13:15 

Now, is it nice when we think that other people love us when they treat us in loving ways? Absolutely. We are humans after all. But ultimately, it's not anyone else's job to create feelings of love in our life, because here's the thing. No one else can create loving feelings in our life. We create all of the love we feel inside of us all by ourselves. What other people do is what goes in our circumstance line. What we think about those actions of another person is what creates the feeling of love. The love they feel doesn't magically leave their body and enter into ours. We feel love when we think loving thoughts and when other people do things or say things that we construe as loving, we can feel love inside of ourselves because we think loving thoughts. 

14:14 

Okay so here's an example: when you're sick in bed and your spouse comes in and brings you something to eat and then spends a few minutes rubbing your back or your feet, those are just circumstances and they are neutral. The reason you feel love at that time is because of your thoughts. You are making it mean that he must love you and you're so grateful for the kindness and that creates feelings of love within you. But the feeling comes from your thoughts about his actions, not his actions. And the love that your spouse feels for you that brings about the action of wanting to bring you dinner and rub your back or your feet. That love? They feel. They're the recipient of that love. It stays in their body and they will act in certain ways because of it. That's why the action line comes after the feeling line, right? They will act in certain ways because of that feeling, and then their actions move into our circumstance line. But we don't feel their love; we experience their actions. They become our circumstance, and then really only feel the love that we create with our own thoughts about their actions. We have those loving thoughts, then we feel love. 

15:36 

I've known people who are incredibly loved by people around them, but who feel that no one loves them. Why can't a parent make their teenager feel their love? Because the teenager doesn't want to, right? Why can't a parent help an estranged child feel their love? Because it's impossible. We can't do that. We can't make somebody else feel our love, right? It's not because there's not love. It's because the other person's thoughts that create an emotion besides love, they create things like rejection or resentment or loneliness. If you've had a teenager in your home you will understand this at some level the love can be there in abundance, but they may not feel my love. And that is because they will construe my actions with their thoughts to mean that I don't love them, right? Instead they'll be thinking "oh, they don't trust me. Oh, they don't care about me. They don't care about my happiness, they just grounded me from seeing my friends!" Right? They construe those actions to mean that we don't love them. So we see this as well when people say that they don't feel God's love. Same concept. If we're not thinking loving thoughts about God, it's very hard for us to feel love toward God. And it's very hard for us in that place to recognize God's actions in our lives and to see those actions as being loving. 

17:09 

Let me give you another example. Let's say that I start dating someone and I really am kind of smitten with him and I really like him. And he starts texting me three to four times a day. My thoughts about several text messages a day are positive. I think that he must like me, that I love that he's contacting me, and I'm excited about it, right? These feelings, these thoughts, create that feeling of excitement. And I like him more, et cetera, right? And it moves from there. But if someone I don't like starts texting me three to four times a day, I don't feel love. I start to get creeped out. I start feeling annoyed and maybe even a little bit threatened if I've requested him not to text me. Same action, three to four texts a day, completely different feeling because of my thoughts. The second guy may have a lot of loving feelings toward me, but I'm not feeling his love. And I'm making his actions mean that he's not really my type. The first guy may not like me at all and just be kind of playing around, right? He may be a player. But I'm feeling loving feelings because of my thoughts about his behavior. Again, I'm not feeling his emotions at all. I'm only feeling the emotions that I'm creating with my thoughts. But the best news of all here is that if we want to feel love, we can choose to feel love by choosing to think loving thoughts. If we're not feeling love, it's because we're choosing not to have loving thoughts. 

18:47 

Emotional adulthood means that we understand and accept that we are responsible for all of our emotions. And we don't rely on other people to create them for us. So empowering, right? When we rely on other people to create our emotions for us, they will always fail. And we will always be disappointed because it is impossible for other people to create a feeling for us. Nobody can love us enough to make up for us not loving ourselves. And ultimately, my ability to love other people is closely tied to my ability to love myself. Brene Brown says that through her research, she's learned that we can only love another person to the amount that we love ourselves. 

19:40 

So in my podcast number 87, it's called "The Law of the Lid," we talk in depth about this concept. If my capacity for feeling love for myself is at a four, I am incapable of feeling love at bigger than a four, or more than a four. Someone may have the capacity to love me at an eight, but I can only comprehend love at a four. And I may be desperate to feel love at an eight, but my capacity for feeling love is limited by my capacity to feel love for myself. No one can love me enough to make up for me not loving myself, because my thoughts limit my ability to feel love. No one can make us feel as though we belong more than we believe that we belong. No one can create a feeling of belonging except for us. When we have expectations that someone else will step in and save us, that they will create for us what we have not been able to create for ourselves, then we will find ourselves always empty and always sorely disappointed. If we want to feel it, we have to create it and we create it with our thoughts. 

20:58 

So when we really start to understand that all emotions, all feelings start with our thoughts, then we can step into emotional adulthood and take full responsibility for our emotions rather than expecting someone else to manage them for us. Now again, I'm not saying that it isn't amazing to have people in our lives who do love us. And I'm not saying that we don't want that, we definitely do. We're humans, we're people who have an innate, deep desire to connect with other people around us. But our ability to connect with others is closely tied to our ability to connect with ourselves. The more we like ourselves, the more we accept ourselves, the more we love and appreciate and embrace ourselves, then the more we can accept this from other people because we have learned to think those thoughts that create this. And then the more we can give this to other people as well through our actions. 

21:56 

Here's the trick to remember here. You can love someone so much and that feeling of love may have you doing what you think are loving things for them, loving actions. But your actions move into their circumstance line and then they get to think whatever they want to about your actions. I can do something for one of my children that I feel is very loving, but they get to choose what they want to think about my actions. And I don't have a say in what they think about it. This is where we often get bent out of shape. We can do something for someone and they get to have their own thoughts because guess what? They're adults and emotional responsibility means that not only am I responsible for my own feelings, but the other person is also responsible for their own feelings. If they want to think that my intentions were selfish or manipulative, they get to think what they want. I get the opportunity, then, in that circumstance to really look at my intentions and make sure that they were clean and that I didn't have an agenda. 

23:05 

When we stop abdicating our emotional responsibility, we step into accepting and embracing that we are creating our own emotional experience here on earth. No one else makes me feel anything. No one else makes me do anything. Emotional responsibility means that I take it all on. It means I do it for myself and it also means I allow other people the space to do it for themselves. I'm responsible for how I feel. They are responsible for how they feel. The only thing I have to do with anyone else's thought model is I get to create circumstances for them. And I create the circumstances by the things I do and the things I say. My actions move into their circumstance line. Once I create an action, the rest is up to them. They get to create whatever thoughts and feelings they want to create. And sometimes this is the hardest part: letting go of the perceived control we have over how other people will interpret our actions or our words. Letting go of the idea that they should know what we really meant. But this is a piece of emotional responsibility as well. And accepting our emotional responsibility is an amazing part of growing up. And growing up is awesome. Wouldn't you agree? I love the empowerment that comes from these concepts and from growing up. And I hope that's helpful for you as well. 

24:41 

Alright, my friends, if you love this podcast, if you feel like it's helping you, please share it. There's a couple of reasons that that's important. The more people that listen to it, the more people will see it, the more it will show up on their feed. And if you would leave me a review, that would be great. The more reviews I get, the more four and five star reviews I get, the more it also shows up on other people's feeds. So people that you don't know can also find this great content. So hope this is helpful for you today. Thank you for joining me. I appreciate that and I will be back next week with a brand new podcast just for you. Have an awesome week and I'll talk to you later, bye. 

25:23 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free weekend win Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.