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If you're tired of feeling never enough, of constantly being derailed by your own fears or the reactions of others, then you are in the right place. I'm Deb, a licensed psychologist, and this is Blooming Outside the Lines, a podcast dedicated to women who've spent their lives trying to stay within the lines of what's acceptable, who've never felt good enough and who are ready to break free and bloom. Let's talk about how you can build a solid foundation connected with your strength and your wisdom. Before we start, I need to make sure that you know that the information I share with you is just that. It's just information. It's not meant to be a prescription for what you should do or meant to replace the advice of any of your healthcare providers. It also doesn't mean that we have a professional client-therapist relationship.

Hi there and welcome. I've been struggling with a cold and waiting for it to pass on by to record this and it hasn't, so I'm hoping it's not gonna interfere too much. Okay, in my last episode, I introduced the entangled intimacy style and our tendency to swing back and forth between appeasing and disconnect in relationships. 

Today I want to talk about one of the ways that we can start to move ourselves out of this pattern by looking at the belief that we are responsible for the feelings of others. Why is this important? It's important because if I believe that I cause you to be sad or angry, etc. it's going to be harder to take care of myself and give myself what I need or to go after what I want in life, especially if my worth is entangled with how you see me. 

I'm wondering what comes up for you when you think about who's responsible for feelings and the idea of whether you can make someone feel a certain way, like happy or sad. So for instance, how about if you plan to do something with a friend and you wake up in a lot of pain and don't really feel up for it? Do you worry about making your friend sad if you cancel or maybe angry with you? 

For most of the women that I've worked with and myself included until I learned more about the brain, most have believed that they have the power to make other people feel what they feel. This belief seems to be tightly woven with the core belief that my worth depends upon your approval or your disapproval. It's a core tenet in what, as I shared in the last episode, I have come to call an entangled intimacy style, a style of relating to others and seeing oneself as tangled up in the needs and wants of others. 

My hunch is that this style of relating is a result of our genetic heritage as well as our socialization as women and as caregivers.

 If you're unfamiliar with what I'm referring to by our genetic heritage, check out episode 11, Women, Epigenetics, and the Need to Please to learn more about that. I labeled this style of relating with others as an entangled style of relating after working with so many women who uncovered the core belief of feeling or believing that they were okay or lovable if others approved of them and who had a great deal of fear around being disapproved of. There are a few common themes in this style of relating. One, a tendency or ability to intuit the needs of others. Two, to feel responsible for other people's feelings. And three, the expectation that others will know what I need without me needing to tell them because that's what I do for them.

I want to address this idea of feelings and who's responsible for them. I've talked before about our history of women and how it seems likely that the fear of not being chosen would be passed down through our genes. In addition to that basis for looking outward for approval, when we are young, we are totally dependent upon our caregivers. Young children would die without them. This is also the time when we are developing our beliefs about ourselves and the world and those around us. And we're doing so with an immature brain, a brain that is still in the process of developing. 

And the result, is that our beliefs turn out to be very concrete and egocentric. If I clean my room and mom is happy, I can start to develop the belief that If I'm good, mom will be happy. 

Because I can't survive without mom, keeping mom happy is going to be a survival need. And because the brain prefers to use what's already there, this wiring or connection between being good and mom being happy is likely to become generalized to other people.

And so because this wire is connected with survival in the brain, when it lights up, when someone is unhappy with me, I'm very likely to feel a great deal of fear. Fearing threats to our survival has allowed us to survive as a species.

The other factor that supports this belief of responsibility for other people's feelings is our language. We often say, I made her angry or I frustrated her or she made me mad. Our language supports the idea that we can determine how others feel and that they can do the same for us. 

The reality is, we just don't have that much power. It's true that our brains tend to match each other through our mirror neurons. So if I'm feeling sad, often others will feel sad as well. And if I'm tipped into a defensive state, it's likely that the other person's brain will react to my brain state and will match it. And so the other person will also tip into into defense. So it is true that how we are feeling may be matched by those around us. 

And in my experience, most of the time when we talk about making someone feel a certain way, we're talking about something we did or said that we believe caused the other person to feel the way they do. So back to my initial example If I need to cancel plans with a friend because I wake up in too much pain to go and my friend seems sad or irritated, many, maybe most of us, are likely to feel like we caused that sadness or irritation. Am I right? Is that how you would feel? Would you believe that you caused it, that you caused your friend to be sad or irritated? If so, you're not alone.

If I go back to that core belief, connecting worth with approval or disapproval, keeping people happy is going to be really important, right? In talking about that belief, that connection between worth and approval, I need to qualify that most women didn't come in saying, my sense of being okay is based on how others see me.

Most often they came in because of all of the striving they were doing to be good enough and that that striving was resulting in them feeling depressed or anxious or turning to food for relief. When we broke down the striving, when we looked underneath it, there was this pressure to be good enough. And when we went underneath that, good enough turned out to be a function of being or doing things in a way that others approve of. Not always, things are never so black and white, and this was true so many times that it seemed to be the norm rather than a reflection of an individual client's struggle.

The pull to appease seems to be tightly wound with feeling responsible for other people's feelings. If I'm going to keep the peace and keep you happy, I have to believe that I have the power to do that, right? I hope that makes sense. It's like one can't very well happen without the other. If I can't make you happy, How can I please or appease? 

The problem is that we don't have the power to make others feel a certain way. I know, I know, many of you that are listening are disagreeing. I know this from experience and working with my clients over the years. You might be thinking of my example of canceling my time with my friend and thinking, well, if I didn't cancel, she wouldn't be feeling sad or frustrated. So I did make her feel that way. Most often that's where women begin. And many times over time women will concede that maybe they didn't make her feel that way and they definitely were the trigger saying without my trigger she wouldn't have felt sad or frustrated. 

There is merit to the idea of being a trigger and how the person responds is always going to be determined by the other person, their wiring, and their brain state. Think about sharing something with someone who has tipped into the stress response.

 Maybe your partner has just returned home from a really tough day at the office and you let them know about something that needs to be done around the house. And then imagine letting them know while you're having a pleasant discussion, maybe you're drinking some iced tea, sitting out on the porch and relaxing. Would you expect the same response?

I've talked about this for so many years that I can imagine some of you are thinking, well, if I wouldn't have asked my partner after a long day, then they wouldn't have gotten upset. So I still made them feel that way. I know this is a hard one. In response to that, I usually share an example and an explanation based on the functioning of our brain.

So let me share the example first. I've had many different examples over the years, and this is the one that I've come to use most often. Imagine that I'm a supervisor and I call three employees into my office. I talk with them about some things that I want them to do differently, and all three return to their offices.

One person is livid, thinking, why would she think I had anything to do with that and make it sound like I did in front of the others? The other person is feeling really down and thinking, I can't seem to do anything right. And the third person is feeling relief. Whew, I thought we were going to get fired. And all she wants is for us to try to do something differently. 

All three heard me say the same thing at the same time and each one of them had a different emotional response. It doesn't make sense that I made the first employee angry since the others had totally different responses. 

What we see, hear, feel, and believe depends first of all on our brain state and whether our higher cognitive abilities are online ,and then it depends on our past experiences, our temperament and even our likes and dislikes. Most importantly, the brain determines how we will react by what it matches it with and it matches it with what's already there. 

And that's why our past experiences, our likes and dislikes, whether our cognitive abilities are online, are so important. Let me give another example. I love winter. I love the cold and the snow and the transition for me into spring is a hard one. Now I know that I'm an outlier when it comes to spring and when people say, thank goodness we are done with snow. I don't feel happy like they do. I feel sad. Did they make me feel sad? No, my sadness totally has to do with my love of snow and that winter is over.

Now in an entangled intimacy style, there is this common tendency to expect others, if they care about me, to know how I feel. So having grown up with that style of relating, I have to be careful and watch for my own thoughts and reactions about this.

It's very likely that I might think, doesn't she even know me or care at all that I wouldn't be happy that the snow is gone? Which is a totally unreasonable expectation and one that I might expect based on my upbringing within an entangled intimacy style. And I think that's a topic for another episode.

The important part for this episode and responsibility for feelings is that it was my like for snow and sadness that it was gone that resulted in me feeling sad versus what the other person said. It's funny, I can almost hear various clients over the years saying, yes, but...

So I know this is a difficult one to change. And my hunch is that it's so very hard to change because how am I going to keep people happy or not disapproving of me if I can't control how they feel? And unfortunately, it just doesn't work that way. If it did, I would be rich and have retired a long time ago. I would simply make people happy or make them feel the way they wanted to and they would be on their way. 

The problem is, is that the brain of the other person, my client in this case, is going to selectively take in what matches with their experiences or their fears. If you listen to my episode on body image, I think I'll put a link for that in the show notes. The eyes can't work independently of the brain. There's just way too much stimuli coming in for the brain to process all of it at once. 

And so the brain has to selectively choose what gets noticed or thought about. And since the brain is constantly trying to predict what will happen, to help us be prepared and to survive, it's likely that anything comes in will be matched with something from our past and that things that don't match will be discarded. They won't be noticed. 

So what I think about and feel will be determined by what is selectively noticed and then triggered in my brain.

So for instance, if I've always been a good speaker and during a presentation I slip up, my brain's not likely to notice that. I'm very likely to have a very different experience than someone who's terrified of giving a speech. That same slip-up would be matched with my fears, and I would likely have a very different reaction because of how that slip-up was matched in my brain.

I'm going to stop here because I know from experience that changing this belief about being responsible for others' feelings is a difficult one. And so what I'd encourage you to do is to be a detective, to notice interactions when you're in a group, or you could even do this while you're driving. Maybe how do different drivers respond to a driver who's driving slower than the rest of the traffic?

 Are they all feeling kind and accepting?

Or are some of them quite the opposite, feeling quite irritated? Or when you're with friends, see if you can notice different reactions to the same comment. And once you start to have some data supporting the idea that people respond based on who they are and their past experiences.

Then start to notice when you're feeling responsible for someone else's feelings and whether that makes sense to do that. Believe me, I know from my own experience and that of my clients that changing this wire is not easy and it really is essential to being ourselves in the world and blooming outside the lines.

Until next time, take good care and bye bye.

This has been Blooming Outside the Lines, a podcast dedicated to supporting you in blooming into all you are meant and wish to be. If you enjoyed it and gained value, please consider leaving a review, as it will help other women to find it and please share it with anyone who would benefit from it. And if you would like to be notified when new episodes become available, be sure and follow on your favorite podcast app. Until next time, how will you light a candle of self-acceptance? Because you deserve to be you, even if others disagree.