Who Is Responsible for Our Feelings?
I have been thinking about something we used to teach children almost without thinking about it.
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”
And then there was the other one:
“I’m rubber, you’re glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.”
They were childish little sayings, but I wonder if we have lost something important by leaving them behind.
I don’t mean that words never have an effect on us. Of course they do. Words can encourage us, frighten us, embarrass us, anger us, or make us feel loved. And people can certainly behave badly toward one another. Children need to learn that.
What interests me is something a little different: who is ultimately responsible for what happens inside us when somebody says or does something we don’t like?
I have come to think that there are four different things involved, and that we often confuse them.
First, there is what actually happened. Someone said something. Someone did something. That’s the event.
Second, there is what the other person intended. Why did they say it? Why did they do it? What were they trying to accomplish?
Third, there is the meaning I give to what happened. What do I think their words mean? What do I think they mean about me? What do I think they mean about the other person?
And fourth, there is what I do with all of that. How do I respond?
These four things can be very different.
Take something as simple as teasing. A child comes home and says, “Johnny was making fun of me.”
Maybe Johnny was.
But maybe Johnny was trying to be funny. Maybe he was trying to get the child’s attention. Maybe he was trying to make friends and simply didn’t know how to do it. Maybe he was being deliberately cruel.
How do we know what was going on inside of Johnny? How does Johnny know what’s going on inside of you?
One of the most useful questions we could teach a child might simply be: “Why did you say that?”Or: “What did you mean by that?”
That question introduces something that is easily lost when we immediately decide that someone has been hurtful: curiosity.
We don’t actually know what is going on inside another person’s head.
There is an old example of a boy pulling a girl’s pigtails because he likes her. The girl experiences the behavior as annoying, and understandably so. But the boy’s intention may be entirely different from what she assumes.
His intention doesn’t make pulling her hair acceptable. She can still say, “I don’t like that. Stop.”
But knowing what he intended changes our understanding of the event.
The same thing happens with adults.
Someone says something that sounds insulting. We immediately decide what they meant. We react to our interpretation as though it were an established fact. And before long, we may be arguing about an intention that neither of us has actually established.
“Why did you say that?”
“What did you mean?”
Those are remarkably useful questions.
They give us a chance to find out what actually happened before deciding what it means.
But even once we understand another person’s intention, there is still another step that belongs to us.
What meaning are we going to give it?
This is where I think the question of responsibility becomes especially important. Suppose someone deliberately insults me. I may conclude that the person wants to hurt me. Perhaps I’m right. Perhaps I am not. But even if I am right about the intention, the person still doesn’t get to decide what the insult means to me.
They can say, “You’re a failure.” I can believe them. Or I can think, “That’s what you think.” Those are two very different experiences of exactly the same words.
This doesn’t mean that feelings are something we can simply switch on and off. We don’t choose to become angry in the same way that we choose what to have for breakfast. Feelings often arise automatically. But there is a difference between having a feeling and believing that somebody else caused it. If other people actually had the power to cause our feelings, they ought to be able to cause whatever feelings they wanted.
If I could cause your feelings, I would cause you to feel happy. I would make you feel peaceful. I would make you feel confident. I would make you feel loved. But I can’t.
I can do things that might encourage those feelings. I can say something kind. I can give you a compliment. I can hold your hand. But I can’t reach inside you and manufacture the feeling. And if I can’t cause you to feel happy, why should I assume that I can cause you to feel angry?
I can certainly influence you. I can give you something to react to. I can behave in ways that make certain reactions more likely. But what happens inside you is not entirely under my control. It is yours. You are separate from me.
That doesn’t mean we should blame people for their feelings. That is an important distinction. A five-year-old who is frightened isn’t doing something wrong by being frightened. A teenager who is devastated by rejection isn’t somehow at fault for experiencing the pain of it.
But there is a difference between saying: “I am not wrong for having this feeling,”and saying: “I’m feeling this way because they made me feel this way.” The first can be true. The second is much more problematic.
Perhaps the better question is: “Now that I am feeling this, what am I going to do with it?” That is where responsibility begins. And that is also where resilience begins.
The Culture Teaches Us Otherwise
The difficulty is that children aren’t learning this lesson only from their parents and teachers. They are learning from the culture around them. In fact, the idea that other people can cause our feelings is so deeply embedded in our culture that we rarely even notice it.
Consider the old song lyric: “You made me love you. I didn’t wanna do it.” It is a charming song, and obviously it isn’t intended as a treatise on psychology. But listen to the premise. You made me love you. Apparently, you possess the extraordinary power to reach into me and produce a feeling that I neither chose nor wanted. We laugh at the lyric because it is playful. But the underlying idea is hardly confined to popular songs. We use the same construction constantly:
“You made me angry.”
“You hurt my feelings.”
“You made me feel guilty.”
“You made me anxious.”
“You made me feel worthless.”
We have incorporated the idea so thoroughly into ordinary language that we rarely question it. And language matters because it reflects—and reinforces—the way we think. If I continually describe my emotional life as something other people do to me, I gradually begin to experience myself as someone whose inner life is controlled by circumstances and by other people. That has consequences far beyond individual relationships.
It affects the way we think about fairness, victimhood, blame, entitlement, and even politics. If people come to believe that their feelings are caused by other people, then finding someone responsible for their feelings becomes an important social task. Someone must be blamed for my anger. Someone must be blamed for my anxiety. Someone must be blamed for my humiliation. Someone must be made to apologize. Someone must be made to compensate me.
The question gradually changes from: “What happened, what did I make of it, and what can I do about it?”
to: “Who did this to me, and what should be done about them?”
That is a profound cultural shift. The particular villains change, but the underlying psychological structure can remain the same: my experience is someone else’s responsibility.
Responsibility and Liberty
This is where the issue becomes larger than psychology. It becomes an issue of liberty. If I believe that your words can cause my feelings, then I have a reason to control your words. If your expression can make me feel offended, humiliated, threatened, angry, or excluded, and if you are therefore responsible for those feelings, then restricting what you say can begin to look justified. I am no longer merely asking you to behave well toward me. I am asking you to manage your behavior so that I do not experience feelings I find unpleasant. And that principle has no obvious stopping point. There will always be somebody who finds something offensive. There will always be somebody who feels insulted. There will always be somebody who believes that somebody else’s words are unfair, hurtful, threatening, or disrespectful.
If the existence of those feelings is sufficient reason to control the speech or behavior that produced them, then liberty becomes conditional upon everyone’s emotional approval. But there is another possibility.
I can say: “You are free to say what you think.” That doesn’t mean I have to like what you say. It doesn’t mean I have to listen to you. It doesn’t mean I cannot criticize you. It doesn’t mean I cannot walk away from you. And it certainly doesn’t mean that I have to tolerate abusive behavior.
It means something more fundamental: I don’t have to control you in order to control myself.
That is where liberty lives. Your responsibility is for your words and your behavior. My responsibility is for my feelings and my response. If I surrender responsibility for my feelings, I also surrender a measure of my freedom. I become dependent upon other people behaving in ways that protect me from my own thoughts and feelings that I don’t want to experience. And once I believe that, controlling other people’s behavior begins to seem necessary.
That is why emotional responsibility is not merely a matter of personal development. It is a foundation for living freely with other people. Perhaps that is what those old playground sayings were trying, in their simple way, to teach us. They weren’t saying that other people can’t hurt us physically or that cruelty doesn’t matter. They were saying something much more fundamental: You don’t have to give another person ownership of your mind.
Someone can say something about you. Someone can dislike you. Someone can misunderstand you. Someone can even deliberately try to hurt you.
But there remains a space between what they do and what you ultimately make of it. That space is where responsibility lives. And precisely because it is where responsibility lives, it is where liberty lives.
