I'm chewing my bottom lip [in thought] on this one as I type because you've really made me think.
Mick, When I was first introduced to the concept of not being in control others feelings, it took me a long time to understand what this meant. I am still thinking about it years later. I first heard and read about this in the context of group therapy for clinically depressed patients. People often say: "He really pissed me off" or "You made me feel horrible." We tend to hear it more when we are referring to how other people affect us. When we learn that someone else reacted in a negative way about something we said or have done, there is a tendency to say: "Well... that is their problem, not mine" which can loosely be translated as: "I'm not in control of how other people react."

There seems to be a contradiction there... other people are allowed to hurt us, but when others are hurt or upset by our actions, they alone are responsible for their reaction.

Taking it to an extreme level, we could say that being in the same room with a lion makes us fearful. But what if we were in the same room with a lion and had no knowledge that the lion was there, maybe it was asleep behind the curtain, so we did not hear it, see it, or know beforehand how close we were to the beast? It is not the lion's presence that causes us fear, rather it is the way we process the knowledge or awareness of the lion's presence.

More realistically, it is not the words or actions of someone else that cause us to feel a certain way, rather the thought process that ensues when we have become aware of what the other person has done. There is no invisible force that somehow shoots across the room and penetrates us to the bone when someone says or acts in a certain way, no invisible lightning bolts that jump across the space between us. All of the reaction occurs within our own mind. Most of the time, our reaction is conditioned by earlier experience, like when our parents raised their voices or we could see they were angry with us. As children, we learned that was not a good thing for us, and as humans, we apply our earlier experience to a broader range of experience, as when anyone begins to yell at us, or even if we hear someone yelling at someone else. Alarms get triggered in our head that this could be a difficult, perhaps dangerous situation.

There is nothing wrong with that; it is a safety mechanism as when we enter a room with a lion, we know immediately that we have entered into a dangerous situation. Such reaction to the knowledge and awareness of our proximity to the lion may preserve our very lives.

Nor do we enter a social setting and spout off exactly what we are always thinking; nor should we. Even though the act of speaking our mind or acting out our feelings does not project out some invisible ray or force field to other people and cause them to react, we understand (if we are socially adept) that others will react in certain ways to what we do or say. So we reserve such words or actions in order to get along with other people.

Then again, we might do or say something in a crowd--some will react negatively, some positively, and some will have no reaction. This demonstrates that people process external stimuli in different ways, which also implies that it is not our words or actions that affect people, it is how they interpret the stimuli, and even how they choose to react or respond.

For people with low self-esteem or depression, this is powerful knowledge. Depression often results from feeling a loss of control. Taking back our right and our ability to retrain our minds to process sensory input in a different way can liberate us from the feeling of helplessness, or from the imaginary shackles someone has engineered to control us. It requires effort and work on our part to do so. There are volumes of information that deal with how to accomplish this.

We may not stop and think "Let's see, how will I choose to react to your words that you hate my guts and wish that I would die?" I'm only suggesting that it is within our power to decide, to choose, to control how we will react, whether such words will dissolve us into a puddle of mush or whether we will simply recognize that we do not have to change our life in order to somehow make the other person feel differently.

I'm so sorry if I have beat this idea to death. image It is something I still work at... usually after someone says something "that really pisses me off." image

"There is no shame in not knowing; the shame lies in not finding out." ~ Russian Proverb
Last Edited By: YammerHammer Jun 14 09 10:37 AM. Edited 1 times.