25/10/2024
TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE EMOTIONS OF OTHERS
In my life, taking responsibility for the feelings or emotions of others has been one of the hardest things to get my head around🤯. I also owe it to horses for teaching me all about it.
Taking responsibility for how someone feels means you believe you can impact their emotions. It can also mean you end up using other people’s emotions as a gauge of whether you are a good person or not.
When you do this, two unhelpful things can happen:
1. It can make you manipulative, dishonest, and resentful.
2. It can set you up to be manipulated, controlled, and also resentful.
Both of these introduce stress and problems into your life.
You need to recognise that you’re doing this and learn to let go.
➡️What Does Taking Responsibility for Others' Emotions Look Like?
It looks like trying to keep someone happy, telling them what they want to hear, lying, hiding, or avoiding doing or saying things so you don’t rock the boat, upset, or worry them. This is people-pleasing.
It’s also letting someone push your guilt and shame buttons. Constantly feeling judged and defensive as you try to justify and defend yourself, avoiding conflict, and creating problems. Feeling controlled and resentful, and like you’re constantly not good enough or even a failure.
➡️You Have to Let Go
If you engage with others with empathy and integrity, you have to let people experience the emotions and feelings you may trigger within them. This is at the heart of having healthy personal boundaries.
When you worry about how someone may react to your thoughts, beliefs, wants, desires, or actions, your integrity and ability to make good decisions become compromised. This is because your motives become skewed; your goal shifts to avoiding upsetting the other person or trying to make them happy.
You end up doing and saying things you don’t want to do or say—like withholding, lying, and deceiving. You feel compromised, create trouble, grow resentful, and might even feel hopeless or like a terrible person.
You have to let people experience their own emotions and feelings. Let others own their emotional response while you own yours.
➡️This Doesn’t Mean Being Insensitive to People’s Feelings
Absolutely not.
It means that if you act with integrity or make someone accountable for their actions, and they get upset, you let go and allow them to process it. Allow yourself to feel the discomfort without trying to fix or change it. Sometimes that might mean ending a call or walking away, but it will also surprise you how often what you thought would be uncomfortable wasn’t uncomfortable at all.
What you’ll discover is that if you respect them and they ACTUALLY respect you, they will process it and reach acceptance. If they can’t, then this is a red flag🚩 that this person may not be healthy to engage with in your life.
In your life, you are responsible and accountable for your own actions and emotions. You are not responsible for the actions or emotions of others.
The moral of this story is: focus on managing your own actions and emotional responses… not those of others.
➡️The Same Problem Can Exist Between You and Your Horse
What does taking responsibility for a horse’s feelings or emotions look like?
It looks like avoiding doing things that might worry your horse or have worried them in the past. Trying to shut a horse down when they become worried. Becoming obsessed with analysing a horse and how stressed or worried they might be. Micromanaging a horse and focusing on correcting any sign of negative emotion or feeling. Being overly concerned about whether the horse loves you or is rejecting you.
When you do these things and try to control and manipulate a horse’s emotions or feelings, you cannot create a healthy relationship or partnership with the horse. You’re setting yourself up for problems.
Why? Because it makes you inconsistent, hampers the horse’s ability to learn and process emotions, and ultimately undermines their sense of security with you.
For instance, many horses need time to develop their balance in canter. Feeling unbalanced in canter can create worry in a horse. Practising canter and clocking up time cantering is how the horse can develop balance and gain confidence in the gait. If you avoid cantering to prevent worrying your horse, they can never get confident with canter!
Or if you worry about your horse becoming anxious in different environments and you never take them out anywhere, they’ll never learn how to process changing surroundings. You then set them up to become more anxious about even small changes in their home environment until they stress out about leaving their paddock.
➡️Sensitivity and Responsibility
We need to be sensitive to the feelings and emotions of the horse, and we need to set them up to learn without overwhelming them. But we must also understand and accept that a horse’s emotional response and stress levels will change as they learn and grow in confidence. A certain level of discomfort is normal in learning. Learning doesn’t take place in comfort zones—it occurs when the comfort zone is carefully stretched. You must accept and allow this.
Avoiding and protecting a horse against any kind of upset creates a paradox—you end up creating what you fear: a horse that can’t handle anything and becomes even more stressed and insecure because of your attempts to control and protect.
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Image📸: This is me in the round yard, remaining a calm consistent presence as I allow and accept the emotions of this horse as his body learns to coordinate his canter this direction. Because I allowed this without trying to fix it, stop it or punish it…within 8 minutes he was more balanced, loose and relaxed❤.
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