Disentangling yourself from other people’s emotions

Hello beautiful people,

A few weeks ago, after arriving in London, my husband’s glasses were stolen at the gym. With his spare glasses in a box somewhere in a cupboard in our apartment in Spain, our only option was new glasses. A few mishaps with prescriptions followed, and so it took over 2 weeks to get a new pair. 

In the meantime he struggled. The physical struggle created a ripe opportunity for emotions to activate, as is natural in situations like these. Not being able to see, or work well or do what he’d planned, created a base for some frustration, anxiety and despair, among other feelings.

In the past, having one of my close humans have so many emotions in close proximity to me, would have been immensely hard for me. It would have weaved into my day and activated lots of my own emotions. 

There would have been – how can I fix this! I need to help him so his feelings that I find so uncomfortable will stop!

And – why is he having so many feelings! I am angry at him now! I would have dealt with this so much better!

And – what if he is feeling like this forever! This is making me so scared! 

To match his bundle of emotions, there would have been a lot of my own emotions – resentment, despair, fear …

What I wasn’t aware of, though, in the past is that I didn’t realise that my emotions were separate from his. And I would have felt I was being punished by his emotions. Him walking around in frustration would have felt really challenging to me, and I would have been unintentionally activated into anger or fear. 

Most of us don’t realise that we do have separate emotions from other people. 

That other people’s feelings don’t need to activate our feelings.

That we can have a space between us and them. 

We don’t realise this because when our feelings activate we quickly scan around and look to see what caused it. And if someone close to us is having feelings we often think they caused the activation.

You made me so angry!
You scared me!
You’re driving me crazy!

The thing, though, is that no one can make us feel anything. The emotions we feel are actually there before that person came along, usually long long long before.

It doesn’t feel like this, I know. It often feels like we are feeling their emotions. 

But it’s this understanding about us all having our own separate emotions that is key – so that we can change how we are responding. 

Learning how to separate my feelings from those of people around me – especially, if I am honest, with my family – has created life-changing shifts in my relationships. 

And by learning these skills and demonstrating them, I managed to teach my husband how to have the same understanding as me.

I didn’t show my husband how to do it with instruction. 

Nor did I tell him.

I just started to use the tools I had learnt on how to create this space, and he naturally observed and started to understand because of how differently I was showing up in our conversations.

How differently I responded to his emotions.

And my own emotions.

We change our relationships by demonstrating different responses. By showing up differently.

And to that other person we feel different.

And it’s not just our partners or nearest and dearest. It’s in all of the relationships we have.

For me it’s changed how I bent over backwards to attempt to please members of my family, how I dealt with frustrated strangers I would encounter out in the world, how I viewed people being angry around me, how I was able to support my kids in disappointment, fear or rage.

Having these specific tools to not get involved in other people’s emotions has been radical and beautiful for my life. 

I don’t want to jump into the emotional soup of those around me.

I don’t want to get distracted from my day, my path, my needs, wants & desires because someone else is having feelings. 

So instead of jumping into my husband’s emotional soup, I gave him emotional support that was effective and empowering.

I let him have his feelings, without getting tangled up in them.

I shared genuine empathy and compassion with him.

I gave him space to have the naturally occurring emotions that happen in experiences like this.

And the outcome was – this experience didn’t dominate either of our lives. It became something that wasn’t difficult to navigate, it didn’t stop us or create unnecessary conflict.

And because I have been demonstrating these skills of creating space between each of our emotional experiences and how to deal with emotions, my husband had already got the knowledge of how to ride this particular emotional wave in a way that it wasn’t constantly overwhelming him, as it might have in the past.

When we know how to navigate our own emotional activations, we teach those closest to us, how to navigate theirs. 

Not by instruction but by them seeing how we do it. By literal osmosis – it’s trippy & amazing! (My husband says it sometimes feels like magic.)

Love to you

Diana