14. You’re not responsible for “their” feelings

Many people have the misguided idea that they emotionally hurt other people. The reality is that we simply don’t have that kind of power. If people feel hurt by someone, they’ve chosen that feeling. Consider it this way. If someone you don’t like says something derogatory about you, you really don’t care much do you? On the other hand, if someone close says the same thing it could hurt a lot. But if it did, the hurt would be because you let those remarks in and chose to believe something about them or the author of the words.

Or look at it another way. Let’s say someone said something “bad” about you yesterday. You didn’t hear it then and you’re not affected by it at all. Then today you hear what they said and you’re devastated. If what they said was hurtful it would have hurt when they said it wouldn’t it? Doesn’t it take your hearing and interpretation of it before it hurts? If you interpreted the remark as a non-event it would just float by wouldn’t it?

Somehow, we’ve gotten the idea that we have power over other people’s feelings. With that belief comes also the belief that they have power over our feelings. Then we’re left with this: If they do what we want we can be happy. If they don’t we’ll hurt. The logical conclusion then is that we have to make people change so we can be happy. That’s a pretty big and insane job don’t you think? I’ve found it’s a lot easier to just see that life plays out its game and when we try to insist on the game being played our way we’re miserable. Let it go its own way and we’re naturally happy. And in the end if we say something, and someone is hurt, that may be their wakeup call to take a closer look at the reality of life.