Developing Emotional Responsibility

By Roger Meyer, M.S.Ed., N.C.C.

How many times have you heard yourself or someone else say, "That really makes me happy' or "you really make me mad" or similar expressions?

Those statements are common examples of what can be called "emotional irresponsibility": attributing our feelings to someone or something else as though that person, event, or situation directly CAUSED our emotion.

Emotional responsibility means that we "own" our behaviors and feelings, that they are ours and we are responsible for them. A typical example of this is how we react differently to the same situation at different times. If our emotions were determined by things outside of ourselves, then we would be doomed to feel the same way every time similar things happen.

In reality, we "choose" our emotions by how we interpret an event/situation. Sometimes this interpretation has become automatic so that when something happens our emotional reaction to it is instantaneous with no apparent interpretation going on.

That happens usually because of social conditioning: something similar happened in the past that we DID interpret a certain way and now we react similarly to the way we did the first time it happened.

Whichever the case, the emotions themselves are fine. You've likely heard that "feelings aren't good or bad, they're just feelings." Oftentimes, we seem to get into difficulty not because of the feelings, but because we judge them good or bad, or because of how we express them.

Anger is a very common - and healthy - emotion. It's how it gets expressed that is critical. Grief is another example of a difficult emotion. If someone close to us dies, we're going to be very upset. The degree of our grief is determined by how we felt about that person. It's not the death that causes the emotions; it's our interpretation of losing him/her. If it was the death itself, then we would have the same feelings every time we read an obituary.

So no matter how we feel is OK as long as we own the responsibility for it and avoid trying to blame others. "You make me angry" really is "I'm angry because...."

There are three ways to work toward emotional responsibility:

1. Remind ourselves that regardless of how we respond emotionally, it is our choice and our right, and it doesn't have to be "reasonable" or make sense to anyone else. Then we need to decide how to appropriately express those feelings.
2. Avoid making assumptions: so often we interpret something according to an assumption we have made that may or may not be accurate -- and we seem to usually choose the worst case scenario. One way to counteract this tendency is to ask ourselves, "What else might this mean?" Or to directly ask the person for clarification. If we insist on making assumptions, it requires us to give ourselves permission to be wrong.
3. Choose carefully the words we use to express ourselves, avoiding emotionally loaded words in favor of more neutral and usually more accurate ones.

As you become more emotionally responsible, you may find that you feel much more in control of your life and less at the whim of other people and events pushing your emotional buttons.