We’ve all felt frustrated, withdrawn, and powerless at some point when our expectations aren’t met. And this can really affect our relationships and bring us down into depression or ramp us up into anxiety. However, the truth is that our feelings are a result of how we interpret the world around us. We delve into how our expectations of our partners, children, bosses, and friends can often create a sense of powerlessness and frustration, and how we can reclaim our power by taking responsibility for our feelings and expectations.
We have an inherent freedom and of course, it comes with responsibility, and I think the responsibility is to look at our own expectations and be aware of them and be accountable to them. Where do we have those expectations? Literally everywhere. And once again, expectations aren’t bad. We all have them. We’re going to have them, no matter what.
It’s what we think and believe about what’s happening that makes us feel how we do, and this is where we have control, and I know it doesn’t feel that way, but I’m hoping to invite you to consider that this is how our feelings come to be. They come from what we think at any given time, and the good news is that we can work with what we are thinking.
So if you want to lower the amount of hurt in your life and get your emotional power back, join us for today’s episode!
What you will learn on this episode:
– The influence of our expectations on our feelings, especially in relationships, are at play when we have hurt feelings
– Our feelings are a result of how we interpret the world around us.
– Our expectations of our partners, children, bosses, and friends can often create a sense of powerlessness and frustration.
– We can reclaim our power by taking responsibility for our feelings and expectations.
– How to manage expectations, deal with hurt feelings, recognize when you’re in physical danger, and set boundaries when safety is at risk.
– Insights on the power of choice and control in extreme hardship from psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s observations from a concentration camp during World War II.
– How to create a healthier narrative in our minds to combat feelings of anxiety and overwhelm.
Let’s Connect!
I absolutely love to hear your thoughts and get your questions.
You can email me at: Leighagermann@gmail.com
I can’t wait to hear from you!
DISCLAIMER
This podcast is not intended to provide mental health treatment. Leigh Germann is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and not a doctor, psychiatrist or psychologist. She does not provide diagnosis nor offer therapy through the LeighGermann.com website or in the information offered on the website. It is important that you do not disregard professional medical or mental health advice or delay seeking professional medical or mental health treatment because of any information on the LeighGermann.com website including but not limited to blogs, newsletter, videos, podcasts, e-books, programs, webinars, courses and other services. Leigh Germann and offerings on LeighGermann.com are not providing legal or financial advice, business advice, psychotherapy, supervision, religious advice, or medical advice. The information contained on this Website has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.
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TRANSCRIPT
Do people really have the power to hurt our feelings? In today’s episode, we talk about understanding our expectations and how they can help us feel better in our relationships. This is Leadership Parenting. Episode number 30, your Emotional Power. Did you know that resilience is the key to confidence and joy? As moms, it’s what we want for our kids, but it’s also what we need for ourselves. My name is Leigh Germann, I’m a therapist and I’m a mom. Join me as we explore the skills you need to know to be confident and joyful. Then get ready to teach these skills to your kids. This is Leadership Parenting, where you learn how to lead your family by showing them the way.
Hi, friends, and welcome back to Leadership Parenting. I am excited today to talk with you about something that I’ve been noticing these past few weeks. It’s really become kind of a theme that has been front of mind for me and I guess it’s always there, but so much on my mind recently as I’ve been working with women lately, and the theme that I’m talking about is how easy it is for us to feel powerless when it comes to how we feel, and one way that’s showing up in the work I’m doing is in people’s relationships Having a relationship with someone that’s important to them it could be a spouse, a mother, a sister, a mother-in-law or a friend they really care about and then having a lot of sad and disappointed feelings, times when they don’t feel really good, when they feel hurt and even really mad at a person they care about that are doing things that they feel are hurting their feelings. And this is something that I think we can all relate to, right? We all know how it feels to have our feelings hurt when someone just doesn’t show up the way we want them to. They don’t do or say the things we hoped, or they do or say things that we don’t think they should do, and all of these can really hit us hard. It has an effect on us so much so that sometimes we’ll pull back, withdraw into our own pain and kind of sit there and stew about it.
It’s an awful feeling, feeling hurt like that, and it can really feel powerless, because it takes that person doing something different for us to feel better and this is where I think we hit the hardest part of it. When we feel that way, we need that person who hurt our feelings to take it back or do it differently or make it up to us somehow so that we can be happy again, and that happens sometimes, but most of the time, I think, it leaves us feeling frustrated and powerless. So today I want to talk about your emotional power, and this isn’t a concept that is often talked about in this way, because most people, I don’t think, really understand the way thoughts and feelings work, that internal world formula that we laid out in episode five, that our thoughts create our feelings, and most of the time we live in an illusion that it’s things outside of us that cause us to feel how we feel. And how we feel is the center of our universe. I mean, it’s really the thing that grabs our attention and drives us to do the things we do. We kind of gauge the quality of our life based upon the feelings that we have, and we prefer positive feelings to negative ones, even though I don’t like calling them positive or negative. We do this in our lives. We judge the feelings we have and try to feel more of the positive and less of the negative. And then we do this other thing. We do this thing where we think that our feelings come from things outside of us, in other words, that people or things cause us to feel the way we do, like you did something that made me feel this, and this is not technically how it works, of course. It really feels that way because we react to what people do or things that happen, and so it seems that things outside of us are the reason for our feelings. But there is a step that most of us miss. It’s included because it happens so fast. We miss the step where we interpret what the person said or did, and that is why we feel how we do. So what I’m saying here is that we are responsible for our own feelings because it comes from how we interpret what is going on around us. And I know we kind of addressed this a couple of episodes ago and not being offended, but I want to expand upon it more because I think it’s a big part of what we struggle with Almost universally as human beings, and so often we believe the illusion that others have the power to make us happy, make us feel loved or content or cherished, and that they also have the power to hurt us, make us angry, feel unloved or unappreciated, and I believe this.
I believe this growing up. I believe this all the way up into my young adulthood, until I had a teacher challenge me on this, not just me, the whole class. It was a class on marriage, on relationships, on making each other happy. That was the topic that we were discussing, and I remember that conversation. The teacher saying no one could hurt my feelings. And I’m like what Are you kidding me? What about that guy that was rude to me yesterday? Or the person that hurt my friend’s feelings did something really rude to them? I actually had a lot of scenarios and they kept listening and nodding Yep, none of them have the power to hurt you.
Okay, but I’m hurt, I’m feeling it, it’s in my chest, it makes me cry. I’m not saying that you don’t feel hurt. It’s just that others can’t make you feel that way, and they can’t make you happy either. Then where in the heck does this feeling come from? It comes from your thoughts about it. It comes from the story you tell in your mind about what’s happening. So, technically, we hurt our own feelings. The concept the teacher was trying to teach us is the very concept that I’m sharing with you today, and if this is a little shocking for you, you’re not alone. This isn’t what we learn as we grow up. This is not what people tell us and it’s not even what we say to our kids. We say this to our kids they hurt your feelings, you hurt my feelings, you hurt your sister’s feelings. So we throw these phrases around as if they’re truth and then we all believe that’s how it works, and I do it too.
I think I still fall into that trap even today. I worry about hurting other people’s feelings, and it’s tricky, right, because we try to meet people’s expectations. I do. I think about what might help my husband feel loved. I try to do it. I try to please and love all my kids and my friends. I try to do the things my clients expect me to do. I try really hard to be a good friend, therapist, mom, wife. But I don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not. We can’t do it right all the time and I want you to think about this in your life. Have you, have you been able to really make everyone happy around you? You know illusions are all around us. If my husband remembers my birthday and gives me something to mark that occasion and I’m delighted by it did he really make me happy or did I interpret his actions to be just what I wanted and therefore I’m happy. What am I thinking? He loves me so much because he took the afternoon off for me. He brought me flowers. That makes me happy. But have you ever had an expectation that doesn’t quite get met? Maybe your favorite flowers are roses and he brought you daisies.
I have a friend who told me this happened to her when they first got married. She said my husband brought me daisies our first anniversary Daisies. Can you believe it? Who brings their wife daisies? Those are ordinary flowers, not special flowers. And she laughed about it. When she told me, because it had happened years before and she’d kind of worked through her feelings about it she told me I actually was hurt. I decided he wasn’t doing it right, showing me in the right way, loving me in the right way, because he brought me a common flower instead of a rose. So our anniversary was not what she or her husband expected. She said it ended in a fight because she was hurt by her husband’s choice and he was defensive and kind of refused to agree that he’d done something wrong.
And I think this happens a lot in our relationships. We have these expectations, like these scripts that they use when filming a movie, and we expect our partners and our kids and our bosses and our friends to read their lines, to do it the way we have it scripted in our minds, and when they don’t, it feels wrong and we have a decision to make right there. When that happens, the decision is to determine if the problem is the other person or that the problem was that I had an expectation that wasn’t met. This is the place where we get to make some decisions about our expectations, about our thoughts, about our feelings and about what we want to do. So let’s talk about these four things Our expectations, our thoughts, our feelings and what we want to do. Number one our expectations. Everyone has expectations. Your brain will not let you go through a day without them. It’s how you make sense of the world and plan for things. It’s part of how your brain tries to keep you safe. So it’s not going to be getting rid of expectations that helps us. It’s becoming aware of them, taking responsibility for them.
My friend saw roses as the only option for her husband to convey his love for her, and she didn’t even realize that that singular option really narrowed and limited the window she was giving herself to be happy. Notice, I said the window she was giving herself, not giving her husband, because the window was hers. Her spouse had to do things just so for her to feel his love, and this is a setup. Of course she could have communicated that to her husband. She could have said it’s our anniversary coming up and I want you to buy me roses, and that would have helped. She said she would have never done that because those roses had to be his idea. If she asked for them, it would ruin the meaning.
Okay, how many of us get stuck in this trap? I want more affection from my spouse, but if I have to ask him for a hug or a kiss or to do that thing or to call me in the middle of the day, if I have to ask him, then it just doesn’t count. He needs to think about it on his own. That’s what it means for me to feel loved. If I just go after it myself, go after that hug or a kiss or call him because I want to talk to him in the middle of the day, or just snuggle up next to him and give him a squeeze, then it’ll be ruined. He has to do it. He never reaches for me, but if I tell him, then it just isn’t the same.
So many times we are right next to somebody wanting something and not asking for it, not allowing it, because if we ask for it it won’t be meaningful. So we have rules around our scripts, needing people to know them so they can act them out without us telling them. And I think the way to feel how much of a setup this is is to think about a time when you are on the other end of this, when someone was expecting something from you, a thing for you to do or say or respond to that you just weren’t even aware of, and how it ended up hurting that person’s feelings. That’s an air quotes and that was not your intention. And all of a sudden you’re standing there, responsible for hurting someone without even knowing it was hurting them, and it feels awful.
We try to apologize and be better be better at communicating the expectation, but also better at trying to do it right so they don’t get hurt again. And what I’m saying is that I don’t think we can do that perfectly all the time. So we end up offending people and getting offended, and it doesn’t serve us because it’s an illusion. In other words, our happiness, wellness, safety, appreciation, approval all revolves around someone else’s reaction to us. If it matches our expectation, we’ll feel good, and if it doesn’t, then we’ll hurt. This is the trap.
It’s at the core of most of the marital work that I do. Once in a while I have a couple who fundamentally do not see eye to eye on their basic core values. They do not have the same goal in mind. They maybe are not particularly very compassionate or helpful to each other and they really should not be together because they just don’t match up, they’re not going in the same direction. Once in a while that happens Most of the time I have two hurting people sitting in front of me, both longing for the other’s love and acceptance and both feeling absolutely unappreciated, unloved, with a lot of hurt feelings. Sometimes I see this. It’s just so shockingly clear, but they can’t see it. And I want to be respectful. Be respectful of people’s feelings, because how you feel is how you feel.
The moment we start to say you’re not allowed to feel a certain way because, for whatever reason, you’re wrong or you’re thinking about it differently or something it’s so invalidating, so not helpful. So we have to validate the feeling and this is what I want you to think about when you’re in your relationships and you’re dealing with that with yourself, with people that you love, that you want to validate those feelings. We’re not saying that the feelings themselves are wrong. They’re what you feel and I can see it. I can see how people get hurt. It causes them to pull back from each other, to blame each other and to make demands that are very difficult to fulfill. I need you to make me happy, and my question is what does that really mean? Because what that teacher taught me years ago fundamentally is that other people aren’t responsible for our feelings. We are, and we actually get to choose how we feel in every single situation. We have more involvement in it than we realize, and this is why I’m talking about this in this episode today, because this is where we start to get our emotional power back into our own hands, and it can help us in our relationships. It can help us in our sense of happiness in life, if we can understand how this works.
I’ve talked about Victor Franco before. He’s the psychiatrist who was a prisoner in a concentration camp during World War II and, because of his profession, while he was right in the middle of the trauma, he studied the effects of being in that horrible place, how it affected him and how it affected the people surrounding him. You know, this is a place of cruelty, of treating humans in unthinkable ways, taking their freedom, their clothing, their names, even treating them less than they would treat animals. And what Victor Franco saw was the effect this had on different people. He watched and studied reactions of prisoners and determined in the end that the only thing that the guards could not take away from the prisoners was the power to think for themselves and to choose how they were going to make sense of and think about what was going on around them. He wrote that even in the most awful of situations, you still get to decide how you’re going to feel and how you’re going to act because of those feelings. And those guards could not make those prisoners feel worthless. They could do things to them, but they couldn’t make them less human. And there were some prisoners who started to think about themselves like the guards were treating them and they often were the first to lose hope and even die. There were also people who received the same inhumane treatment, who continued to believe in their own humanness, still acted humanely. They shared their food, cared for each other, in spite of their treatment, and they determined their internal state.
Frankel wrote, quote we who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. There may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man, but one thing, the last of the human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food, various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis, it became clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, then, any man can, under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him mentally and spiritually. End quote An inner decision and not the result of camp influences.
That phrase really jumped out at me when I read this book Man’s Search for Meaning many, many years ago. It was one of the reasons I decided to be a therapist, because I’d gone through some hard things as a child, things that were out of my control, things that made me feel powerless, vulnerable and made me believe that I probably wasn’t going to be able to be happy, not like other people who had different things happening in their lives, and it was a very depressing belief. I could feel it taking over, sometimes leaving me really anxious and kind of hopeless. And then, maybe because of something someone else said or did, I would have this spark of hope, a shift in how I was thinking, and then I would feel better, happier, calmer, more full of optimism, a little more hope. And so it seemed like others could make me sad or make me happy, depending on what they did or said to me. Maybe that’s why the phrase from Frankel’s book, the one that talks about prisoners’ inner decisions determining the person they were, rather than the influences of the camp. Maybe that’s why it really beckoned to me, because I love the idea that we get more choice in how we feel. I just really believe it. I’m not saying it’s easy and definitely not saying I do it well all of the time. I just love the idea that no one is a prisoner to their circumstances.
We have an inherent freedom and of course, it comes with responsibility, and I think the responsibility is to look at our own expectations and be aware of them and be accountable to them. Where do we have those expectations? Literally everywhere. And once again, expectations aren’t bad. We all have them. We’re going to have them, no matter what.
But think about where our expectations sometimes cause problems for us. In my work with families, one that comes up a lot is mother-in-laws and daughter-in-laws, and after working with this for many, many years, I kind of think there should be a training class where mother-in-laws and daughter-in-laws can go to exchange each other’s scripts and read them through and through so they show up and know what to do and what to say. And of course I’m kidding here. But think about how differently we sometimes feel about things when it comes to our expectations, different from someone else’s expectations. A mother-in-law might think you should do it this way, she should have this certain role, get this kind of treatment, and the daughter-in-law thinks she should have this level of respect and get this kind of treatment and it all should look this way. And then the poor husband is in the middle trying to say the things his mother wants to hear and the things his wife wants to hear, so that he can make them both happy, and it’s kind of a setup for unhappiness and letdown. Of course there are expectations there. You may never fully understand your mother-in-law’s expectations, but you definitely need to understand your own, because your happiness is in your hands. When your mother-in-law or we could substitute anyone your mother or your sister or your friend, or even just with your spouse comes into your home, into your circumstance, you get to decide what you’re going to think about things, and you can’t do that if you have this automatic expectation that is showing up and you aren’t aware of it. So just knowing that you’re filtering everything through your own expectations is going to get you connected to your power. That’s the first step. Okay.
Next we want to look at your thoughts Once again from the Victor Frankel’s book Man’s Search for Meaning, quote. Fundamentally, then, any man can, under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him mentally and spiritually end quote. What Victor Frankel is speaking of here is the power. Each one of us has to be in control of our own feelings, even when we’re dealing with a tantruming child or a difficult customer or a frustrating spouse or an opinionated mother-in-law. Notice, all of those are thoughts describing the situation, and I know it’s not a concentration camp, but boy can it feel devastating to us when we have these very dark and painful thoughts about our circumstances. Here’s another way for us to say it Any woman can, under such circumstances, decide what shall become of herself mentally and spiritually, because it’s not what’s happening outside of us that makes us feel something. It’s what we think and believe about what’s happening that makes us feel how we do, and this is where we have control, and I know it doesn’t feel that way, but I’m hoping to invite you to consider that this is how our feelings come to be. They come from what we think at any given time, and the good news is that we can work with what we are thinking.
I use this every day, you guys. Yes, in my relationships, for sure, but you know where else I use it. I use it with the thoughts I have about my day, because oftentimes I get slammed with feelings of overwhelm, like it’s just too much, I have too much on my plate, or I have feelings of fear or sadness. I’ll have thoughts like people are just not kind. This is a harsh world and of course, these happen usually after I hear about something terrible on the news or in one of my clients lives and it hits me and my thinking, and then I feel it. It hits my feelings. So if I’m walking through my day with this thought of darkness, people are unkind or I have too much to do, I can’t do it all. It really does create a heavy and sad fearful feeling for me and I can’t do anything about the things happening in the world on the news. But I can work with my thoughts about it. I can clean them up, meaning I can sort through them and decide how I need to think about this.
My cleaned up version goes something like this there are very awful things happening in the world right now. I see that. But there are also very good things and I make it a point to think about the good things, notice the difference and the option that humans can be both ways and that people are still choosing to be kind. Some place in the world where there is unkindness, there is also kindness happening and I look at my life and see where there is kindness and I get to decide what I want to do to help with that kindness in the world and all of my sad thoughts get some context. I kind of put them in a bigger picture. I don’t try to hide them away or go Pollyanna on us, just get more balanced and this helps me. It helps me change how I feel, from hopeless to hopeful. How do I want to feel about people, about humankind? I want to feel love and hope and I get to work with my thinking and choose the direction. I let those thoughts go.
You know, sometimes I feel discouraged or fearful about growing older, or some aspect of my body, whether it’s sick or not looking like my expectations, or whether I’m making progress fast enough on my goals or any number of things. I know I’m not alone in this. I know this happens to all of us because I work with it every day with women. Our minds are one big factory of thoughts and it puts out all kinds of products, some that serve us and some that just don’t. This is a key in dealing with depression, with not feeling happy or hopeful, not feeling energy. Our thoughts are tied to this and often it’s a result of very hard things that happen to us in our lives, circumstances that affect how we think about our lives, about others, about our world, and those heavy, dark thoughts can define our reality. I also get the other variety, the fearful thoughts. I get both, and you might too. I can look at a goal or a task I have to accomplish and have a lot of thinking. That creates scary feelings for me, and I work on this a lot, particularly because anxiety seems to be where I fall on the map with that.
And how do I want to feel when I give this presentation? How do I want to feel when I go to that gathering and meet a lot of new people? How do I want to feel about my body? Well, I want to feel peaceful, I want to feel confident, I want to feel love. So, with thoughts, create feelings. What will I have to be thinking in order to feel that way? I might have to think I want to give this presentation. I have skills, I have knowledge that will help people. I’m safe. I have my own back. I will be okay, no matter what happens. Do you hear that essential self showing up there to keep me grounded? I might say I love this body. I’m going to appreciate it and take care of it. I might say I love my mother-in-law Wait, did I just say that I do love my mother-in-law?
She is awesome. We’ve never really had a power struggle ever and I know I’m very lucky. But also we’ve worked to be generous with each other, make assumptions and have thoughts that are loving of each other. But what if you do have a struggle with your mother-in-law? What if you do think she’s trying to keep control over her son and she doesn’t like you and she thinks you’re doing everything wrong? What are those thoughts then? I don’t want her here. She’s so mean, I can’t stand it for her to be here. Can you tell? I’ve heard these things a lot, frankly. I’ve heard just about the same dialogue from mother-in-laws about their daughter-in-laws Lots of hurt feelings, when what I think each party really wants is to just feel loved and accepted. And, of course, we’re going to be defensive and even aggressive ourselves if we feel threatened. Most of the time, I want to tell you, the threat happens in our own thoughts. Our mother-in-law making a comment does not have the power to hurt us unless it gets into our thinking and we start to take it seriously. We’ve talked about having thoughts and what they are, but let’s just review.
Your thoughts are a narrative in your mind. You hear it in your head and this narrative or story can be good for you or not good for you, and you’re separate from your thoughts. So I want you to think about your thoughts as being on a movie screen like subtitles or close caption, and you’re in the seats in a theater reading the subtitles of your life. If you were the director of the scene you’re watching, you could pause the filming and change a line, change something in the script, and the actor would have a different thing. They were saying Now, why would you do that? It would be because you’re going for a different feeling, a different action, because thoughts create feelings and feelings cause action. And as a director, you might see that you want that actor to have a different feeling on screen. So you’d change their lines in the script and their feeling would change and possibly they would do a different behavior. The lines in the script determine what the character is going to feel and then what they will do. This is how our thinking works and you are both the director and the actor. That’s what makes it a little confusing. These are your lines, your script, and the people in the movie with you have their own lines and their own scripts and you don’t always have the ability to read each other’s scripts. But you do have the ability to pause and decide if you want to keep your line or change it and the reason you would do that is because of how you want to feel.
Let’s talk about feelings now. The most helpful question I have when working with myself is this how do I want to feel? Think about that question for a minute. How do you want to feel when your husband brings you flowers, even if they aren’t roses, or your mother-in-law comes to visit and she says things about your silverware drawer or how you fold your clothes, or your child isn’t listening to you, maybe even calls you a name? How do you want to feel? This is the core of emotional power. How you feel is going to come from what you’re thinking, and though you can’t control your feelings, nor should you try to control them, you do get to work with your thoughts and how they create your feelings. So if you want to feel peaceful when your mother-in-law comes, what would you have to be thinking when she comes through the door? It’s good that she’s here. I want her to be here. I’m grateful that she gave birth to my husband. She’s going to be herself. She’s going to do things her way. She’s going to be bothered by my silverware drawer. That means nothing about me. I’m safe.
Now, if you really don’t feel safe, let’s say she comes in and takes your money, takes your children, then you really won’t be able to say that statement truthfully that you’re safe. And if you aren’t safe and this goes for any of our relationships if you aren’t safe physically, if you’re not safe as far as basic human rights, then you need to acknowledge that and take action on that. Your thoughts pointing out to you that you are not safe, those thoughts are serving you. You wouldn’t try to change those. So what would you have to be thinking in order to feel safe with someone? Well, I’m not in physical danger. I still have my basic human rights and freedom. Okay, so could you say that you’re safe, you’re not in physical danger and you have your basic human rights when your mother-in-law or your spouse is doing something that doesn’t match your expectations? Yes, probably so. If you can’t, then you are in physical danger and you will need to act, and that acting could involve not having that person in your life. It could involve setting specific boundaries. Sometimes we need to do that, but most of the time we aren’t in physical danger.
We are having our feelings hurt by our own thinking, I might add. We don’t feel happy or peaceful because maybe our spouse didn’t take out the trash or was looking at his phone instead of us at dinner, or a mother-in-law wants to tell us all the things we’re doing wrong in our home, and I get to decide if those actions or words hurt me, because we want to feel safe in spite of those things, because really we are safe. You can always make a request of another person. In fact, this is a great thing to do. Sometimes we can ask for things we would like, but I just want to make sure that our happiness isn’t tied to it, because that’s another painful trap we get into sometimes, where we just ask the other person to do things to make us happy and then, if they don’t, we’re right back at that powerless place again. So it makes you wonder why we’re even in relationships at all.
Right, and I’m going to say the reason we are in relationships is so that we can learn and grow and just so that we can love people. That’s the job of people in our lives, not to make us happy and not for us to make them happy. It’s to practice loving and being loved for who we are. Of course we need to work together, talk about our expectations, be flexible with them, but the big takeaway is that once we’re aware of our own expectations and the way we’re giving our power to others by whether they meet those expectations or not, once we’re aware of this, we can start to feel a whole lot better in our life.
When your husband brings home the wrong flowers, or no flowers, you can put that into context and decide how you want to feel about that. Of course, you may decide you want to be with someone who has different values, a different style, a different way of communicating. You may even decide that you have to set boundaries with people where you get to restore safety to situations that aren’t safe and we’ll talk about that in more detail, maybe even in the next episode on boundaries. But you don’t have to change your thoughts to be happy in every situation. You may have thoughts that create feelings of hurt, but at least you’ll know why you’re having them. They are coming from your assessment of the situation, from what you’re thinking about someone’s actions. You can say to someone I don’t want you to come over, I don’t want you in my life, but I want you to make sure that you know that it is you making that decision. They can’t make you feel anything. You feel what you feel because of what you are thinking about them, and if you need to set a boundary, that’s okay. It’s your decision.
I’m just always hoping that we learn to hold our hearts, the wellness of our hearts, the safety of our hearts, in our own hands, to recognize our own value, to use our wisdom to see that deep inside, we are safe, with or without someone’s approval or without their thoughtfulness. We’re not doing this to let people off the hook, but to decrease our own suffering. I want us to have more options than we think we have. Since I’ve learned this concept, I’ve probably cut my hurt feelings down by 50% at least. Other 40% of the time I get stuck in this exact thinking trap and I don’t see it in time, but I can work with it to restore my peace quickly, and maybe 10% of the time I’m actually in a situation where I’m in danger or at risk and my thoughts about another person are telling me that I have to get out of there or I have to set a boundary that restores my safety. Maybe even 10% is too high, I don’t know. It happens sometimes, though, so please do not think that if you’re in an abusive situation where your human rights are being violated that you just have to change your thinking about it. That is definitely not what I’m saying. You always have the right and responsibility to be in a safe place.
Much of the time, I believe, our hurt feelings are not about safety. They are hurting thoughts, missed expectations, maybe even old injuries. We have had that bubble up in our lives today that we’re sensitive about, and this is why we do so much work on understanding your essential self the fact that you are whole, valuable and wise, because your wellness and your safety needs to be in your own hands. Yes, people around you can validate that for you, but no one can give you that ultimate reassurance. We’ve got to believe it for ourselves. So when we have a bossy mother-in-law or a husband who doesn’t bring us the thing we think we need to be loved, we can ultimately fall back on our own knowledge that we’re valuable and lovable and that we don’t need that from someone else to be okay. This allows us to be generous with people.
When your friend doesn’t call you back or doesn’t invite you to the party, you can say hmm well, I think I really wanted to get that from them. But how do I want to feel right now I could get really hurt, really offended and angry because I’m thinking not fair, so rude. They’re doing this on purpose to me and they shouldn’t. If you really believe those things are true, then it is actually pretty empowering, right. I mean, if that friend is purposely trying to harm you, then you may want to rethink your desire to be invited by that friend. That’s one of those 10% that might require a boundary, but most of us, me included, get so caught up in the pain of the perceived insult that we don’t get to look at and evaluate the thoughts that decision point. Is this something that tells me being with this person is not safe, or something that tells me that I can remember my value and not take offense? Either way, it’s not about you and this can give us peace. It’s what we do when our toddler is melting down, when our teen is stomping up the stairs, when our spouse has a bad day and snaps a little. I’m not saying we should be victims and just accept bad treatment, but is it possible that their behavior really isn’t even about us? It’s them being caught up in their own expectations and emotions as well.
Okay, we’re going to wrap this up with number four, deciding what we want to do. We’ve looked at our internal world, that we have expectations. We’ve looked at how thoughts are telling us a story about things and create our feelings. We’ve looked at how we can even ask ourselves how we want to feel and start to create our own narratives to get that feeling. Now we look at what to do.
Once you’re feeling more peaceful or calm or confident whatever that feeling is you’re going to be able to act in ways that match what you care about. Have you ever said, uh, I hate that I act this way. It’s not like me, not what I’m about? This happens because we feel something that pushes us to act in that way. So if you want to choose behaviors that match your values, you’ll need to feel the things that help you act that way.
If I want to be kind, friendly, generous in my actions, I need to feel safe and peaceful and loving, and that’s hard to do when I’m thinking I don’t want to be here, I can’t do this, I hate this. So we can start with the question how do I want to act? What do I want to be doing based upon my values? And when I think about a friend who has not shown up the way I want them to, or my child hasn’t been cooperative, or I didn’t get a job that I wanted, or the news is so bad. How do I want to behave? What do my core values call me to do? Is it to reach out to the friend, stay calm with the child, go for another job interview or be kind in spite of the bad news everywhere? How would I have to feel in order to be able to do those things? What would it take to reach out?
A feeling of understanding, safety within myself, love, for all of these scenarios will need some kind of feeling that is not threatening, kind of peaceful, right. And what kinds of thoughts would we need to be thinking that would generate these feelings? This is not about me. My child is having a hard time. We’ve been practicing this right In our podcast. This wasn’t the right job for me. There will be another in my future. I still believe in the goodness of people.
This is a formula, and you may have recognized this cognitive behavioral, the CBT formula the thoughts create feelings and feelings create action. Only we have reversed engineered it. We started with how we want to act and then looked at what we’d need to feel and then what we’d need to think, using the thinking and feeling formula to help us have a little more control over our responses to the circumstances that we cannot always control. I’m not sure if this is exactly what Victor Frankel was going for when he wrote Man’s Search for Meaning. I know our circumstances are rarely as dire and life threatening as his were, but the concept has opened my eyes and given me back control over my life in ways I hope to share with whoever will listen. It’s not an outcome we’re looking for here, but a process I want you to have access to, so you get to decide when and what hurts your feelings or what makes you happy, and you get to work with it. With this process, I’ve seen marriages go from the brink of divorce to being so much happier. I’ve watched daughter-in-laws and mother-in-laws come to peaceable coexistence with each other, and I’ve seen lives generally just lifted and filled with hope when it seemed that was never going to be a possibility. Once again, just play with the idea. Ask yourself how do I want to feel in this situation, and then try on some thoughts and see what happens. I look forward to talking with you guys again next week. Thank you so much for your time today, take care. Or on my website at Do people really have the power to hurt our feelings? In today’s episode, we talk about understanding our expectations and how they can help us feel better in our relationships. This is Leadership Parenting. Episode number 30, your Emotional Power. Did you know that resilience is the key to confidence and joy? As moms, it’s what we want for our kids, but it’s also what we need for ourselves. My name is Lee Gurman, I’m a therapist and I’m a mom. Join me as we explore the skills you need to know to be confident and joyful. Then get ready to teach these skills to your kids. This is Leadership Parenting, where you learn how to lead your family by showing them the way.
Hi, friends, and welcome back to Leadership Parenting. I am excited today to talk with you about something that I’ve been noticing these past few weeks. It’s really become kind of a theme that has been front of mind for me and I guess it’s always there, but so much on my mind recently as I’ve been working with women lately, and the theme that I’m talking about is how easy it is for us to feel powerless when it comes to how we feel, and one way that’s showing up in the work I’m doing is in people’s relationships Having a relationship with someone that’s important to them it could be a spouse, a mother, a sister, a mother-in-law or a friend they really care about and then having a lot of sad and disappointed feelings, times when they don’t feel really good, when they feel hurt and even really mad at a person they care about that are doing things that they feel are hurting their feelings. And this is something that I think we can all relate to, right? We all know how it feels to have our feelings hurt when someone just doesn’t show up the way we want them to. They don’t do or say the things we hoped, or they do or say things that we don’t think they should do, and all of these can really hit us hard. It has an effect on us so much so that sometimes we’ll pull back, withdraw into our own pain and kind of sit there and stew about it.
It’s an awful feeling, feeling hurt like that, and it can really feel powerless, because it takes that person doing something different for us to feel better and this is where I think we hit the hardest part of it. When we feel that way, we need that person who hurt our feelings to take it back or do it differently or make it up to us somehow so that we can be happy again, and that happens sometimes, but most of the time, I think, it leaves us feeling frustrated and powerless. So today I want to talk about your emotional power, and this isn’t a concept that is often talked about in this way, because most people, I don’t think, really understand the way thoughts and feelings work, that internal world formula that we laid out in episode five, that our thoughts create our feelings, and most of the time we live in an illusion that it’s things outside of us that cause us to feel how we feel. And how we feel is the center of our universe. I mean, it’s really the thing that grabs our attention and drives us to do the things we do. We kind of gauge the quality of our life based upon the feelings that we have, and we prefer positive feelings to negative ones, even though I don’t like calling them positive or negative. We do this in our lives. We judge the feelings we have and try to feel more of the positive and less of the negative. And then we do this other thing. We do this thing where we think that our feelings come from things outside of us, in other words, that people or things cause us to feel the way we do, like you did something that made me feel this, and this is not technically how it works, of course. It really feels that way because we react to what people do or things that happen, and so it seems that things outside of us are the reason for our feelings. But there is a step that most of us miss. It’s included because it happens so fast. We miss the step where we interpret what the person said or did, and that is why we feel how we do. So what I’m saying here is that we are responsible for our own feelings because it comes from how we interpret what is going on around us. And I know we kind of addressed this a couple of episodes ago and not being offended, but I want to expand upon it more because I think it’s a big part of what we struggle with Almost universally as human beings, and so often we believe the illusion that others have the power to make us happy, make us feel loved or content or cherished, and that they also have the power to hurt us, make us angry, feel unloved or unappreciated, and I believe this.
I believe this growing up. I believe this all the way up into my young adulthood, until I had a teacher challenge me on this, not just me, the whole class. It was a class on marriage, on relationships, on making each other happy. That was the topic that we were discussing, and I remember that conversation. The teacher saying no one could hurt my feelings. And I’m like what Are you kidding me? What about that guy that was rude to me yesterday? Or the person that hurt my friend’s feelings did something really rude to them? I actually had a lot of scenarios and they kept listening and nodding Yep, none of them have the power to hurt you.
Okay, but I’m hurt, I’m feeling it, it’s in my chest, it makes me cry. I’m not saying that you don’t feel hurt. It’s just that others can’t make you feel that way, and they can’t make you happy either. Then where in the heck does this feeling come from? It comes from your thoughts about it. It comes from the story you tell in your mind about what’s happening. So, technically, we hurt our own feelings. The concept the teacher was trying to teach us is the very concept that I’m sharing with you today, and if this is a little shocking for you, you’re not alone. This isn’t what we learn as we grow up. This is not what people tell us and it’s not even what we say to our kids. We say this to our kids they hurt your feelings, you hurt my feelings, you hurt your sister’s feelings. So we throw these phrases around as if they’re truth and then we all believe that’s how it works, and I do it too.
I think I still fall into that trap even today. I worry about hurting other people’s feelings, and it’s tricky, right, because we try to meet people’s expectations. I do. I think about what might help my husband feel loved. I try to do it. I try to please and love all my kids and my friends. I try to do the things my clients expect me to do. I try really hard to be a good friend, therapist, mom, wife. But I don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not. We can’t do it right all the time and I want you to think about this in your life. Have you, have you been able to really make everyone happy around you? You know illusions are all around us. If my husband remembers my birthday and gives me something to mark that occasion and I’m delighted by it did he really make me happy or did I interpret his actions to be just what I wanted and therefore I’m happy. What am I thinking? He loves me so much because he took the afternoon off for me. He brought me flowers. That makes me happy. But have you ever had an expectation that doesn’t quite get met? Maybe your favorite flowers are roses and he brought you daisies.
I have a friend who told me this happened to her when they first got married. She said my husband brought me daisies our first anniversary Daisies. Can you believe it? Who brings their wife daisies? Those are ordinary flowers, not special flowers. And she laughed about it. When she told me, because it had happened years before and she’d kind of worked through her feelings about it she told me I actually was hurt. I decided he wasn’t doing it right, showing me in the right way, loving me in the right way, because he brought me a common flower instead of a rose. So our anniversary was not what she or her husband expected. She said it ended in a fight because she was hurt by her husband’s choice and he was defensive and kind of refused to agree that he’d done something wrong.
And I think this happens a lot in our relationships. We have these expectations, like these scripts that they use when filming a movie, and we expect our partners and our kids and our bosses and our friends to read their lines, to do it the way we have it scripted in our minds, and when they don’t, it feels wrong and we have a decision to make right there. When that happens, the decision is to determine if the problem is the other person or that the problem was that I had an expectation that wasn’t met. This is the place where we get to make some decisions about our expectations, about our thoughts, about our feelings and about what we want to do. So let’s talk about these four things Our expectations, our thoughts, our feelings and what we want to do. Number one our expectations. Everyone has expectations. Your brain will not let you go through a day without them. It’s how you make sense of the world and plan for things. It’s part of how your brain tries to keep you safe. So it’s not going to be getting rid of expectations that helps us. It’s becoming aware of them, taking responsibility for them.
My friend saw roses as the only option for her husband to convey his love for her, and she didn’t even realize that that singular option really narrowed and limited the window she was giving herself to be happy. Notice, I said the window she was giving herself, not giving her husband, because the window was hers. Her spouse had to do things just so for her to feel his love, and this is a setup. Of course she could have communicated that to her husband. She could have said it’s our anniversary coming up and I want you to buy me roses, and that would have helped. She said she would have never done that because those roses had to be his idea. If she asked for them, it would ruin the meaning.
Okay, how many of us get stuck in this trap? I want more affection from my spouse, but if I have to ask him for a hug or a kiss or to do that thing or to call me in the middle of the day, if I have to ask him, then it just doesn’t count. He needs to think about it on his own. That’s what it means for me to feel loved. If I just go after it myself, go after that hug or a kiss or call him because I want to talk to him in the middle of the day, or just snuggle up next to him and give him a squeeze, then it’ll be ruined. He has to do it. He never reaches for me, but if I tell him, then it just isn’t the same.
So many times we are right next to somebody wanting something and not asking for it, not allowing it, because if we ask for it it won’t be meaningful. So we have rules around our scripts, needing people to know them so they can act them out without us telling them. And I think the way to feel how much of a setup this is is to think about a time when you are on the other end of this, when someone was expecting something from you, a thing for you to do or say or respond to that you just weren’t even aware of, and how it ended up hurting that person’s feelings. That’s an air quotes and that was not your intention. And all of a sudden you’re standing there, responsible for hurting someone without even knowing it was hurting them, and it feels awful.
We try to apologize and be better be better at communicating the expectation, but also better at trying to do it right so they don’t get hurt again. And what I’m saying is that I don’t think we can do that perfectly all the time. So we end up offending people and getting offended, and it doesn’t serve us because it’s an illusion. In other words, our happiness, wellness, safety, appreciation, approval all revolves around someone else’s reaction to us. If it matches our expectation, we’ll feel good, and if it doesn’t, then we’ll hurt. This is the trap.
It’s at the core of most of the marital work that I do. Once in a while I have a couple who fundamentally do not see eye to eye on their basic core values. They do not have the same goal in mind. They maybe are not particularly very compassionate or helpful to each other and they really should not be together because they just don’t match up, they’re not going in the same direction. Once in a while that happens Most of the time I have two hurting people sitting in front of me, both longing for the other’s love and acceptance and both feeling absolutely unappreciated, unloved, with a lot of hurt feelings. Sometimes I see this. It’s just so shockingly clear, but they can’t see it. And I want to be respectful. Be respectful of people’s feelings, because how you feel is how you feel.
The moment we start to say you’re not allowed to feel a certain way because, for whatever reason, you’re wrong or you’re thinking about it differently or something it’s so invalidating, so not helpful. So we have to validate the feeling and this is what I want you to think about when you’re in your relationships and you’re dealing with that with yourself, with people that you love, that you want to validate those feelings. We’re not saying that the feelings themselves are wrong. They’re what you feel and I can see it. I can see how people get hurt. It causes them to pull back from each other, to blame each other and to make demands that are very difficult to fulfill. I need you to make me happy, and my question is what does that really mean? Because what that teacher taught me years ago fundamentally is that other people aren’t responsible for our feelings. We are, and we actually get to choose how we feel in every single situation. We have more involvement in it than we realize, and this is why I’m talking about this in this episode today, because this is where we start to get our emotional power back into our own hands, and it can help us in our relationships. It can help us in our sense of happiness in life, if we can understand how this works.
I’ve talked about Victor Franco before. He’s the psychiatrist who was a prisoner in a concentration camp during World War II and, because of his profession, while he was right in the middle of the trauma, he studied the effects of being in that horrible place, how it affected him and how it affected the people surrounding him. You know, this is a place of cruelty, of treating humans in unthinkable ways, taking their freedom, their clothing, their names, even treating them less than they would treat animals. And what Victor Franco saw was the effect this had on different people. He watched and studied reactions of prisoners and determined in the end that the only thing that the guards could not take away from the prisoners was the power to think for themselves and to choose how they were going to make sense of and think about what was going on around them. He wrote that even in the most awful of situations, you still get to decide how you’re going to feel and how you’re going to act because of those feelings. And those guards could not make those prisoners feel worthless. They could do things to them, but they couldn’t make them less human. And there were some prisoners who started to think about themselves like the guards were treating them and they often were the first to lose hope and even die. There were also people who received the same inhumane treatment, who continued to believe in their own humanness, still acted humanely. They shared their food, cared for each other, in spite of their treatment, and they determined their internal state.
Frankel wrote, quote we who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. There may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man, but one thing, the last of the human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food, various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis, it became clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, then, any man can, under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him mentally and spiritually. End quote An inner decision and not the result of camp influences.
That phrase really jumped out at me when I read this book Man’s Search for Meaning many, many years ago. It was one of the reasons I decided to be a therapist, because I’d gone through some hard things as a child, things that were out of my control, things that made me feel powerless, vulnerable and made me believe that I probably wasn’t going to be able to be happy, not like other people who had different things happening in their lives, and it was a very depressing belief. I could feel it taking over, sometimes leaving me really anxious and kind of hopeless. And then, maybe because of something someone else said or did, I would have this spark of hope, a shift in how I was thinking, and then I would feel better, happier, calmer, more full of optimism, a little more hope. And so it seemed like others could make me sad or make me happy, depending on what they did or said to me. Maybe that’s why the phrase from Frankel’s book, the one that talks about prisoners’ inner decisions determining the person they were, rather than the influences of the camp. Maybe that’s why it really beckoned to me, because I love the idea that we get more choice in how we feel. I just really believe it. I’m not saying it’s easy and definitely not saying I do it well all of the time. I just love the idea that no one is a prisoner to their circumstances.
We have an inherent freedom and of course, it comes with responsibility, and I think the responsibility is to look at our own expectations and be aware of them and be accountable to them. Where do we have those expectations? Literally everywhere. And once again, expectations aren’t bad. We all have them. We’re going to have them, no matter what.
But think about where our expectations sometimes cause problems for us. In my work with families, one that comes up a lot is mother-in-laws and daughter-in-laws, and after working with this for many, many years, I kind of think there should be a training class where mother-in-laws and daughter-in-laws can go to exchange each other’s scripts and read them through and through so they show up and know what to do and what to say. And of course I’m kidding here. But think about how differently we sometimes feel about things when it comes to our expectations, different from someone else’s expectations. A mother-in-law might think you should do it this way, she should have this certain role, get this kind of treatment, and the daughter-in-law thinks she should have this level of respect and get this kind of treatment and it all should look this way. And then the poor husband is in the middle trying to say the things his mother wants to hear and the things his wife wants to hear, so that he can make them both happy, and it’s kind of a setup for unhappiness and letdown. Of course there are expectations there. You may never fully understand your mother-in-law’s expectations, but you definitely need to understand your own, because your happiness is in your hands. When your mother-in-law or we could substitute anyone your mother or your sister or your friend, or even just with your spouse comes into your home, into your circumstance, you get to decide what you’re going to think about things, and you can’t do that if you have this automatic expectation that is showing up and you aren’t aware of it. So just knowing that you’re filtering everything through your own expectations is going to get you connected to your power. That’s the first step. Okay.
Next we want to look at your thoughts Once again from the Victor Frankel’s book Man’s Search for Meaning, quote. Fundamentally, then, any man can, under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him mentally and spiritually end quote. What Victor Frankel is speaking of here is the power. Each one of us has to be in control of our own feelings, even when we’re dealing with a tantruming child or a difficult customer or a frustrating spouse or an opinionated mother-in-law. Notice, all of those are thoughts describing the situation, and I know it’s not a concentration camp, but boy can it feel devastating to us when we have these very dark and painful thoughts about our circumstances. Here’s another way for us to say it Any woman can, under such circumstances, decide what shall become of herself mentally and spiritually, because it’s not what’s happening outside of us that makes us feel something. It’s what we think and believe about what’s happening that makes us feel how we do, and this is where we have control, and I know it doesn’t feel that way, but I’m hoping to invite you to consider that this is how our feelings come to be. They come from what we think at any given time, and the good news is that we can work with what we are thinking.
I use this every day, you guys. Yes, in my relationships, for sure, but you know where else I use it. I use it with the thoughts I have about my day, because oftentimes I get slammed with feelings of overwhelm, like it’s just too much, I have too much on my plate, or I have feelings of fear or sadness. I’ll have thoughts like people are just not kind. This is a harsh world and of course, these happen usually after I hear about something terrible on the news or in one of my clients lives and it hits me and my thinking, and then I feel it. It hits my feelings. So if I’m walking through my day with this thought of darkness, people are unkind or I have too much to do, I can’t do it all. It really does create a heavy and sad fearful feeling for me and I can’t do anything about the things happening in the world on the news. But I can work with my thoughts about it. I can clean them up, meaning I can sort through them and decide how I need to think about this.
My cleaned up version goes something like this there are very awful things happening in the world right now. I see that. But there are also very good things and I make it a point to think about the good things, notice the difference and the option that humans can be both ways and that people are still choosing to be kind. Some place in the world where there is unkindness, there is also kindness happening and I look at my life and see where there is kindness and I get to decide what I want to do to help with that kindness in the world and all of my sad thoughts get some context. I kind of put them in a bigger picture. I don’t try to hide them away or go Pollyanna on us, just get more balanced and this helps me. It helps me change how I feel, from hopeless to hopeful. How do I want to feel about people, about humankind? I want to feel love and hope and I get to work with my thinking and choose the direction. I let those thoughts go.
You know, sometimes I feel discouraged or fearful about growing older, or some aspect of my body, whether it’s sick or not looking like my expectations, or whether I’m making progress fast enough on my goals or any number of things. I know I’m not alone in this. I know this happens to all of us because I work with it every day with women. Our minds are one big factory of thoughts and it puts out all kinds of products, some that serve us and some that just don’t. This is a key in dealing with depression, with not feeling happy or hopeful, not feeling energy. Our thoughts are tied to this and often it’s a result of very hard things that happen to us in our lives, circumstances that affect how we think about our lives, about others, about our world, and those heavy, dark thoughts can define our reality. I also get the other variety, the fearful thoughts. I get both, and you might too. I can look at a goal or a task I have to accomplish and have a lot of thinking. That creates scary feelings for me, and I work on this a lot, particularly because anxiety seems to be where I fall on the map with that.
And how do I want to feel when I give this presentation? How do I want to feel when I go to that gathering and meet a lot of new people? How do I want to feel about my body? Well, I want to feel peaceful, I want to feel confident, I want to feel love. So, with thoughts, create feelings. What will I have to be thinking in order to feel that way? I might have to think I want to give this presentation. I have skills, I have knowledge that will help people. I’m safe. I have my own back. I will be okay, no matter what happens. Do you hear that essential self showing up there to keep me grounded? I might say I love this body. I’m going to appreciate it and take care of it. I might say I love my mother-in-law Wait, did I just say that I do love my mother-in-law?
She is awesome. We’ve never really had a power struggle ever and I know I’m very lucky. But also we’ve worked to be generous with each other, make assumptions and have thoughts that are loving of each other. But what if you do have a struggle with your mother-in-law? What if you do think she’s trying to keep control over her son and she doesn’t like you and she thinks you’re doing everything wrong? What are those thoughts then? I don’t want her here. She’s so mean, I can’t stand it for her to be here. Can you tell? I’ve heard these things a lot, frankly. I’ve heard just about the same dialogue from mother-in-laws about their daughter-in-laws Lots of hurt feelings, when what I think each party really wants is to just feel loved and accepted. And, of course, we’re going to be defensive and even aggressive ourselves if we feel threatened. Most of the time, I want to tell you, the threat happens in our own thoughts. Our mother-in-law making a comment does not have the power to hurt us unless it gets into our thinking and we start to take it seriously. We’ve talked about having thoughts and what they are, but let’s just review.
Your thoughts are a narrative in your mind. You hear it in your head and this narrative or story can be good for you or not good for you, and you’re separate from your thoughts. So I want you to think about your thoughts as being on a movie screen like subtitles or close caption, and you’re in the seats in a theater reading the subtitles of your life. If you were the director of the scene you’re watching, you could pause the filming and change a line, change something in the script, and the actor would have a different thing. They were saying Now, why would you do that? It would be because you’re going for a different feeling, a different action, because thoughts create feelings and feelings cause action. And as a director, you might see that you want that actor to have a different feeling on screen. So you’d change their lines in the script and their feeling would change and possibly they would do a different behavior. The lines in the script determine what the character is going to feel and then what they will do. This is how our thinking works and you are both the director and the actor. That’s what makes it a little confusing. These are your lines, your script, and the people in the movie with you have their own lines and their own scripts and you don’t always have the ability to read each other’s scripts. But you do have the ability to pause and decide if you want to keep your line or change it and the reason you would do that is because of how you want to feel.
Let’s talk about feelings now. The most helpful question I have when working with myself is this how do I want to feel? Think about that question for a minute. How do you want to feel when your husband brings you flowers, even if they aren’t roses, or your mother-in-law comes to visit and she says things about your silverware drawer or how you fold your clothes, or your child isn’t listening to you, maybe even calls you a name? How do you want to feel? This is the core of emotional power. How you feel is going to come from what you’re thinking, and though you can’t control your feelings, nor should you try to control them, you do get to work with your thoughts and how they create your feelings. So if you want to feel peaceful when your mother-in-law comes, what would you have to be thinking when she comes through the door? It’s good that she’s here. I want her to be here. I’m grateful that she gave birth to my husband. She’s going to be herself. She’s going to do things her way. She’s going to be bothered by my silverware drawer. That means nothing about me. I’m safe.
Now, if you really don’t feel safe, let’s say she comes in and takes your money, takes your children, then you really won’t be able to say that statement truthfully that you’re safe. And if you aren’t safe and this goes for any of our relationships if you aren’t safe physically, if you’re not safe as far as basic human rights, then you need to acknowledge that and take action on that. Your thoughts pointing out to you that you are not safe, those thoughts are serving you. You wouldn’t try to change those. So what would you have to be thinking in order to feel safe with someone? Well, I’m not in physical danger. I still have my basic human rights and freedom. Okay, so could you say that you’re safe, you’re not in physical danger and you have your basic human rights when your mother-in-law or your spouse is doing something that doesn’t match your expectations? Yes, probably so. If you can’t, then you are in physical danger and you will need to act, and that acting could involve not having that person in your life. It could involve setting specific boundaries. Sometimes we need to do that, but most of the time we aren’t in physical danger.
We are having our feelings hurt by our own thinking, I might add. We don’t feel happy or peaceful because maybe our spouse didn’t take out the trash or was looking at his phone instead of us at dinner, or a mother-in-law wants to tell us all the things we’re doing wrong in our home, and I get to decide if those actions or words hurt me, because we want to feel safe in spite of those things, because really we are safe. You can always make a request of another person. In fact, this is a great thing to do. Sometimes we can ask for things we would like, but I just want to make sure that our happiness isn’t tied to it, because that’s another painful trap we get into sometimes, where we just ask the other person to do things to make us happy and then, if they don’t, we’re right back at that powerless place again. So it makes you wonder why we’re even in relationships at all.
Right, and I’m going to say the reason we are in relationships is so that we can learn and grow and just so that we can love people. That’s the job of people in our lives, not to make us happy and not for us to make them happy. It’s to practice loving and being loved for who we are. Of course we need to work together, talk about our expectations, be flexible with them, but the big takeaway is that once we’re aware of our own expectations and the way we’re giving our power to others by whether they meet those expectations or not, once we’re aware of this, we can start to feel a whole lot better in our life.
When your husband brings home the wrong flowers, or no flowers, you can put that into context and decide how you want to feel about that. Of course, you may decide you want to be with someone who has different values, a different style, a different way of communicating. You may even decide that you have to set boundaries with people where you get to restore safety to situations that aren’t safe and we’ll talk about that in more detail, maybe even in the next episode on boundaries. But you don’t have to change your thoughts to be happy in every situation. You may have thoughts that create feelings of hurt, but at least you’ll know why you’re having them. They are coming from your assessment of the situation, from what you’re thinking about someone’s actions. You can say to someone I don’t want you to come over, I don’t want you in my life, but I want you to make sure that you know that it is you making that decision. They can’t make you feel anything. You feel what you feel because of what you are thinking about them, and if you need to set a boundary, that’s okay. It’s your decision.
I’m just always hoping that we learn to hold our hearts, the wellness of our hearts, the safety of our hearts, in our own hands, to recognize our own value, to use our wisdom to see that deep inside, we are safe, with or without someone’s approval or without their thoughtfulness. We’re not doing this to let people off the hook, but to decrease our own suffering. I want us to have more options than we think we have. Since I’ve learned this concept, I’ve probably cut my hurt feelings down by 50% at least. Other 40% of the time I get stuck in this exact thinking trap and I don’t see it in time, but I can work with it to restore my peace quickly, and maybe 10% of the time I’m actually in a situation where I’m in danger or at risk and my thoughts about another person are telling me that I have to get out of there or I have to set a boundary that restores my safety. Maybe even 10% is too high, I don’t know. It happens sometimes, though, so please do not think that if you’re in an abusive situation where your human rights are being violated that you just have to change your thinking about it. That is definitely not what I’m saying. You always have the right and responsibility to be in a safe place.
Much of the time, I believe, our hurt feelings are not about safety. They are hurting thoughts, missed expectations, maybe even old injuries. We have had that bubble up in our lives today that we’re sensitive about, and this is why we do so much work on understanding your essential self the fact that you are whole, valuable and wise, because your wellness and your safety needs to be in your own hands. Yes, people around you can validate that for you, but no one can give you that ultimate reassurance. We’ve got to believe it for ourselves. So when we have a bossy mother-in-law or a husband who doesn’t bring us the thing we think we need to be loved, we can ultimately fall back on our own knowledge that we’re valuable and lovable and that we don’t need that from someone else to be okay. This allows us to be generous with people.
When your friend doesn’t call you back or doesn’t invite you to the party, you can say hmm well, I think I really wanted to get that from them. But how do I want to feel right now I could get really hurt, really offended and angry because I’m thinking not fair, so rude. They’re doing this on purpose to me and they shouldn’t. If you really believe those things are true, then it is actually pretty empowering, right. I mean, if that friend is purposely trying to harm you, then you may want to rethink your desire to be invited by that friend. That’s one of those 10% that might require a boundary, but most of us, me included, get so caught up in the pain of the perceived insult that we don’t get to look at and evaluate the thoughts that decision point. Is this something that tells me being with this person is not safe, or something that tells me that I can remember my value and not take offense? Either way, it’s not about you and this can give us peace. It’s what we do when our toddler is melting down, when our teen is stomping up the stairs, when our spouse has a bad day and snaps a little. I’m not saying we should be victims and just accept bad treatment, but is it possible that their behavior really isn’t even about us? It’s them being caught up in their own expectations and emotions as well.
Okay, we’re going to wrap this up with number four, deciding what we want to do. We’ve looked at our internal world, that we have expectations. We’ve looked at how thoughts are telling us a story about things and create our feelings. We’ve looked at how we can even ask ourselves how we want to feel and start to create our own narratives to get that feeling. Now we look at what to do.
Once you’re feeling more peaceful or calm or confident whatever that feeling is you’re going to be able to act in ways that match what you care about. Have you ever said, uh, I hate that I act this way. It’s not like me, not what I’m about? This happens because we feel something that pushes us to act in that way. So if you want to choose behaviors that match your values, you’ll need to feel the things that help you act that way.
If I want to be kind, friendly, generous in my actions, I need to feel safe and peaceful and loving, and that’s hard to do when I’m thinking I don’t want to be here, I can’t do this, I hate this. So we can start with the question how do I want to act? What do I want to be doing based upon my values? And when I think about a friend who has not shown up the way I want them to, or my child hasn’t been cooperative, or I didn’t get a job that I wanted, or the news is so bad. How do I want to behave? What do my core values call me to do? Is it to reach out to the friend, stay calm with the child, go for another job interview or be kind in spite of the bad news everywhere? How would I have to feel in order to be able to do those things? What would it take to reach out?
A feeling of understanding, safety within myself, love, for all of these scenarios will need some kind of feeling that is not threatening, kind of peaceful, right. And what kinds of thoughts would we need to be thinking that would generate these feelings? This is not about me. My child is having a hard time. We’ve been practicing this right In our podcast. This wasn’t the right job for me. There will be another in my future. I still believe in the goodness of people.
This is a formula, and you may have recognized this cognitive behavioral, the CBT formula the thoughts create feelings and feelings create action. Only we have reversed engineered it. We started with how we want to act and then looked at what we’d need to feel and then what we’d need to think, using the thinking and feeling formula to help us have a little more control over our responses to the circumstances that we cannot always control. I’m not sure if this is exactly what Victor Frankel was going for when he wrote Man’s Search for Meaning. I know our circumstances are rarely as dire and life threatening as his were, but the concept has opened my eyes and given me back control over my life in ways I hope to share with whoever will listen. It’s not an outcome we’re looking for here, but a process I want you to have access to, so you get to decide when and what hurts your feelings or what makes you happy, and you get to work with it. With this process, I’ve seen marriages go from the brink of divorce to being so much happier. I’ve watched daughter-in-laws and mother-in-laws come to peaceable coexistence with each other, and I’ve seen lives generally just lifted and filled with hope when it seemed that was never going to be a possibility. Once again, just play with the idea. Ask yourself how do I want to feel in this situation, and then try on some thoughts and see what happens. I look forward to talking with you guys again next week. Thank you so much for your time today, take care. Or on my website at leagermancom. Thanks again and I’ll see you next time.
The Leadership Parenting Podcast is for general information purposes only. It is not therapy and should not take the place of meeting with a qualified mental health professional. The information on this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any condition, illness or disease. It’s also not intended to be legal medical or therapeutic advice. Please consult your doctor or mental health professional for your individual circumstances. Thanks again and take care.
Transcribed by https://podium.page. Thanks again and I’ll see you next time.
The Leadership Parenting Podcast is for general information purposes only. It is not therapy and should not take the place of meeting with a qualified mental health professional. The information on this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any condition, illness or disease. It’s also not intended to be legal medical or therapeutic advice. Please consult your doctor or mental health professional for your individual circumstances. Thanks again and take care.