Nobody has ever "made you feel" a damn thing

I really, really don’t like the phrase “you make me feel happy/sad/angry/etc”. Saying that someone else “made me feel” something puts the responsibility for my feeling on that someone else. They didn’t conjure that feeling and beam it into my awareness for me feel. My feelings are a response to a stimulus, primarily a product of my own interpretive apparatus. The world and the people in it can stimulate my feelings by pushing the cascading events of my awareness in a particular direction, but they didn’t cause those feelings by summoning them forth from the void and handing them over to me. To the extent that I can control them, the cascading events of my awareness are my responsibility alone.

Putting the responsibility for my feelings on other people is harmful for several reasons. For me, it means that I’m out of control of my feelings, completely at the mercy of others to “make me feel” the way that I want to feel. It’s also unfair to other people, since it’s a lot like walking around with a loaded gun pointed at my own head with the label “BAD FEELINGS :(” painted on the gun, threatening other people with my own negative experience. You wouldn’t want me to suffer, would you? Is that why you aren’t doing what I want, because you’re the kind of person who just doesn’t give a shit if I’m okay? You actually want me to feel this way….? What kind of monster are you?

This isn’t to say that it’s wrong or unfair to share feelings, or that it’s wrong or unfair to expect things from people or to react to their behavior. We are social and emotional creatures, bound to care for each other and to be connected to each other, so feelings and expectations are inevitable. Expectations are totally warranted when someone has committed to do something, so it’s important to explicitly communicate and clarify what the parameters are whenever it seems like expectations are out of alignment.

What’s also important is the way that we talk about our emotions, sharing emotions as things which are alive in us rather than as truths about others and their behavior, inviting each other to collaborate on meeting our needs together rather than blaming and manipulating and shunning right away when our needs aren’t met. Detaching and leaving a situation is also a legitimate option! Sometimes people just are not aligned, and that’s completely ok.

Taking responsibility for our feelings is ultimately very empowering; fighting for freedom and justice on big political stages is critical for moving the world forward, but I also assert that a lot of power and freedom can be found right here and now just by changing the way we think and act about our selves - I also think that claiming our power and freedom on an individual emotional level helps us create a better world on those bigger stages too.

Taking responsibility for our feelings makes it harder to be manipulated. Powerful forces can disguise their power as vulnerability - boring but real examples include expressions of heartbreak and agony when you try to unsubscribe from a mailing list, or when you don’t keep up with Duolingo as much as it thinks you should. Declining to participate in our services has made us weep uncontrollably at our desks for days, since now we will have to let our office puppy starve to death. We will send you lots of pictures of the helpless little thing as it wastes away to nothing but a pile of dust and skin and bones. It could have lived, it could have loved life and spent its days frolicking in fields full of flowers and butterflies, but you didn’t want it to. You wanted it to shrivel and die whimpering in pain on the dark floor of an empty office, and we know this because your cursor is hovering over the “UNSUBSCRIBE” button. Do you want to bring that kind of evil into the world? Do you want us to remember you as a monster?

……How would that make you feel?