A Bad Habit - Taking Responsibility for the Emotions of Others

In my life taking responsibility for the feelings or emotions of others is the hardest thing I have had to get my head around.

Taking responsibility for how someone feels means that you believe you can impact how they feel. It can also mean that you end up using other peoples emotions as a gauge of whether you are a good person or not.

When you do this two uncool things can happen.

1. It can make you manipulative, dishonest and resentful. 

2. It can set you up to be manipulated, controlled and also resentful.

Both introduce stress and problems into your life.

You need to realise you do this and stop it.

What does taking responsibility for emotions in others look like?

It looks like trying to keep someone happy.  Telling them what they want to hear.  Lying, hiding and avoiding doing or saying things so you don't rock the boat, upset or worry them.  People pleasing.  

It is letting someone push your guilt and shame buttons.  Constantly feeling judged and defensive as you try to justify and defend yourself. Avoiding conflict and creating problems. Feeling controlled and resentful. Feeling constantly not good enough or like a failure.

You have to let go  

If you engage with others with empathy and integrity you have to let people experience the emotions and feelings you may trigger within them.

This sits at the heart of having healthy personal boundaries.

When you worry how someone may react to your thoughts, beliefs, wants, desires or actions.  Your integrity and ability to make good decisions becomes flawed.  This is because your motives get all screwed up.  Your motive becomes not upsetting the other person or trying to make them happy.

You end up doing and saying things you don’t want to do or say.  Withholding, lying, deceiving. Being compromised. Creating trouble. Growing resentment.  Feeling hopeless or failure, terrible person etc.

You have to let people experience their own emotions and feelings. Let others own their emotional response while you own yours.

This does not mean that you be insensitive to people’s feelings 

Absolutely not. 

It means that if you act with integrity or make someone accountable for their actions and if they get upset - let go and allow them to process it.  Allow yourself to feel the discomfort without trying to fix it or change it.  Sometimes that might mean ending a call, walking away.  But it will also surprise you and what you expected would be uncomfortable was not uncomfortable at all!

What you will discover is that if you respect them and they respect you they will process it and reach acceptance.  If they can’t then this is a red flag that this person is not a healthy person to engage with in your life.

In your life you are responsible and accountable for your own actions and emotions.  You are not responsible for the actions or emotions of others. 

The moral of this story is - focus on managing your own actions and emotional responses….not others. 

The same problem can exist between you and your horse

What does taking responsibility for a horse’s feelings or emotions look like?

• When you avoid doing things that might worry your horse or have worried the horse in the past.

• Trying to shut a horse down when it becomes worried.

• Becoming obsessed with analysing a horse and how stressed or worried it might be.

• Micromanaging a horse and focusing on correcting any sign of negative emotion or feeling.

• Being overly concerned if the horse likes or loves them.

When you do these things and try to control and manipulate a horse’s emotions or feelings - you cannot create a healthy relationship or partnership with a horse.  You are going to be prone to problems.

Why - Because it makes you inconsistent, you hamper their ability to learn and process emotions and ultimately a sense of security with you.

For instance, many horse’s need time to develop their balance in canter.  Feeling unbalanced in canter can create worry in horse.  Practicing canter and clocking up time cantering is the way the horse can develop balance and gets confident in the gait.  If you avoid cantering to avoid worrying your horse it can never get confident with canter!

Or if you worry about your horse getting worried in different environments and you never take them out anywhere.  Then they never learn how to process changing environments.  You then set them up to become worried about smaller and smaller changes in their environments until they stress out leaving their paddocks.

If you shut a horse down and remove pressure ever time it gets a little bit worried about something, the horse can learn that becoming emotional removes pressure!  Therefore, instead of learning how to navigate the world, they learn to react emotionally to it.

We need to be sensitive of the feelings and emotions of the horse 

We need to set them up to learn and not to be overwhelmed.  But we need to understand and accept that the horses emotional response and stress levels change as they learn and grow in confidence.  A certain level of discomfort is normal in learning.  Learning does not take place in comfort zones, it occurs when the comfort zone is carefully stretched.  And you must accept and allow this.  Avoiding and protecting a horse against any kind of upset creates a paradox - you just end up creating what you fear - a horse that can’t handle anything and is even more stressed and insecure by your attempts to control and protect.