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Do you often feel responsible for how people around you feel?
If yes, it’s important to know why that’s a recipe for disaster.
Taking responsibility for how someone else feels means you believe you can control how they feel.
But can you really?
Imagine you give someone good news but they don’t see it that way or you’ve apologized to someone but they remain angry anyway.
How are you responsible for that? If you try to control other people's feelings, you can end up making things worse (for both of you)?
The Danger of Taking Responsibility for Other People’s Feelings
When you try to control someone’s feelings, the situation can play out in different ways. You might adopt people-pleasing behaviors because you end up telling them what they want to hear, you may soften your boundaries, or you might try to justify your own actions when you don’t need to.
Not only do you become inconsistent, but you also hand people the steering wheel to your own happiness. If your peace depends on others being okay, then anyone who is not okay controls you. And they don’t even have to be manipulative about it. If they go a little cold for a day it could be enough to stress you out. Once someone learns that their mood makes you rearrange how you treat them, that’s a power they’ll keep using.
One Question Fixes Most of This
If someone is upset with you, ask yourself: Did I do something wrong? Or did I do something they didn’t like?
If you said yes to the first question, that person deserves an apology. If it was yes to the second, they deserve a boundary. Most people apologize for both, which is exactly how “sorry” stops meaning anything.
3 Things to Do Instead
1) Make a list of people whose feelings have become your responsibility.
Think about all of the people you care about. Next, make a list of the people whose feelings you manage. In another column, write down the names of the people you’re totally normal around—people you can say no to easily, or ones who allow you to disagree.
That second list is valuable. It proves that you can hold boundaries. You’re just a person who can’t hold them with certain people. Now look at what the first list has in common. What connects them may not be who they are but rather how they react to things—and it’s probably something you can’t stand being near.
Say your mother cries when she’s upset. Somewhere along the way, you made a rule: Never make her cry. Then the rule spread to other people. Now you can’t tell anyone anything hard because they might cry too.
2) Ask who you’re assuming can’t handle feelings.
When you protect someone from a feeling, you’ve decided they’re too fragile to have it.
Say you can’t tell your friend her plan won’t work. You may call that kindness, but you’ve really decided she can’t survive a hard opinion from someone who likes her.
So before you soften how you deliver information, ask: Who am I assuming is weaker than me right now?
3) Predict the disaster before it happens.
Before a hard conversation that you think will end in a catastrophe, write down exactly what you are worried about happening. Don’t be vague, be specific like, She’ll cry, then not speak to me for a week.
Go have the conversation, then come back and look at what you wrote.
Do this a few times and you’ll probably see a pattern: You’ve been paying full price for disasters that never materialize. What you thought was a boundary problem may really just be a forecasting problem.
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