Acknowledge Your Feelings But Don't Let Them Control You

Feelings run deep, and sometimes they have to. Grief is one of those. If you bottle it up instead of letting it out eventually, it does real harm, and relationships tend to take the worst of it. My own smaller version of this is hunger. Get me hungry enough and I turn mean enough to spit nails. I've learned to warn the people around me when it hits, because until I've eaten something I simply cannot do what anyone asks of me. I'd bet you have your own trigger you could name.

Certain feelings get so big they seem to seize the controls. People will say they acted "involuntarily," that they did something they might regret and might not, but either way it wasn't really up to them. The feeling took over, so the fault lies elsewhere. You hear the shorthand all the time: "He made me so mad," as if that line alone excuses whatever comes after it.

So are we on the hook for what we feel? The honest answer is both yes and no. A lot of our reactions were wired in when we were small. We get handed negative responses to particular situations, and sometimes reasons to go with them, explanations that sound sensible enough that we take them on. Those reasons then push us toward certain actions, and they hand us a convenient way to dodge responsibility for whatever we do next.

Undoing any of that is hard. The old wiring can quietly fence in your whole life if you never question it. Think about how many times you've heard someone say "I can't help it" about behavior they clearly learned somewhere along the way. Is that phrase a kind of Get Out of Jail Free card, the one from Monopoly?

Worth asking yourself: what have you trained yourself to feel, and to do, in certain moments? And when you look closely, is that really coming from you, or did you pick it up from someone else?

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