REMINDER: Feelings are not facts

Reminder: feelings are not facts, and not every feeling needs to be outwardly expressed.

Every time a negative feeling is invoked within you is not an opportunity to feel righteously upset, hold someone else responsible for how you feel, or to externalize anger.

Instead, it is an opportunity for you to get curious about why you are having this feeling and what its origin might be. It's a chance to take some time and interrogate your reflexive responses and deep-rooted habits when it comes to interpretation of other people's intentions.

You must know: things are rarely as straightforward as 'this person made me feel this way'.

Whatever you are feeling is much more likely to have arrived within you via some roundabout path that began with your maladaptive childhood strategies or through someone - often unintentionally- pressing directly upon a pain point you already had.

Also: very often, your feelings about another person's behavior, actions, words, or existence are a projection or confession of your own.

If you laid out all the things likely to make you feel particularly bad, there are probably clear patterns that are more about you and your life trajectory to date than they are about any person in your relational orbit.

While some people are genuinely shitty and harmful, it is helpful to remember that MOST other people are generally NOT out here trying to locate and depress your buttons.

Generally, other people are living out their own childhood wounds and over-responding to their own feelings. Everyone is the star of their own melodrama, to greater or lesser degrees, and mostly they aren't even paying deep attention to you or their impact on your feelings.

Folks who live in a space of "everyone is out to get me" deserve empathy and care, but they are not entitled to entrap others into their emotional wringers. Being in relationship with someone with hostile attribution bias, where everything that is unclear is automatically filed under negative intention, is exhausting.

If this resonates with you, it's ok. If you're a person who personalizes everything that happens around you, or who over-responds to every fleeting emotional response you have, it's ok. No need to shame yourself! It just means there is an opportunity here. A big one. Receive this knowledge as an audit, and map it on your graph as the starting point. Here * is where you begin.

You're swaying a little too much in all the breezes is all. Your little tree self is fragile with shallow roots. Probably some shitty stuff happened to you a long time ago that disrupted the rooting down you might have otherwise been able to do. Some of it you may not even remember or be conscious of; that makes it extra hard.

But learning to root down now and stand firm is a gift to yourself. Practicing a default to curiosity is a gift to yourself. Learning to say, "I wonder what is happening here" and "Hmmm, that is interesting, I am feeling quite triggered by this" and "I don't think this has anything to do with me" and "I need to take some time and figure out how I want to respond to this" are profoundly generous gifts to offer to yourself and the people you're in relationship with.

It might take a fair amount of time and rehearsal for it to become a new habit. You may need the help of a skilled therapist for many years, depending on the depth of the harm previously caused to your root system. But it's worth it! There is freedom on the other side of emotional over-reactivity. There is safety and freedom in being able to self-regulate and de-escalate. There is freedom in being able to say "that is not my problem" or "I don't have to care about that." All of your relationship will benefit, most profoundly the one with yourself.

(Trust me! I am/have been doing this work myself and I'm much happier over here on the other side.)

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