How You're Hurting Your Feelings

I grew up thinking I had the power to hurt someone else's feelings and I carried that belief into adulthood. I have always been a person to tries desperately not to step on anyone's toes and sometimes that's worked and other times it (obviously) hasn't. I think this belief happens naturally when adults tell you to be careful not to hurt your friend's feelings or Grandma's feelings. Or to mind your manners when you meet someone so you don't hurt their feelings.

I've been listening to a podcast called: The Life Coach School Podcast. And one of the recent ones I heard (episode 37) really challenged this idea.

The host, Brooke Castillo, talked about our ownership of our feelings. That we create feelings with the thoughts we think. Now, my first reaction when she said this was defensive. How could we create all our feelings? People do things to hurt us all the time!

But then she went on to explain that we, sometime in our life and often in childhood, attach a belief to something that happens to us. Maybe it's that when someone's mad at me, I'm unlikable. Or if I speak up for myself, I get consequences. Whatever those beliefs are, we carry them into our lives and live as if they are truths when they might not be. But we shape our actions around them. So when some circumstance triggers our thought, we automatically have those same feelings.

One of mine is feeling stupid. I have an emotional reaction if I ever feel like I've messed up or said something wrong. It's because my subconscious mind believes a thought automatically and it causes a reaction. That thought is, I'm stupid, and then I feel embarrassment and shame. But the same situation may happen to someone else and they won't feel stupid because they don't have that thought attached to that action.

Castillo says that we must learn to recognize the emotion and back track to the thought. Then sit with the emotion, sort through where it came from and deal with it. Only then can we move forward and begin to change our thoughts. If we change our thoughts, then we'll change our feelings. She claims that all of us are responsible for our own feelings! We must learn to direct our feelings through our thoughts.

I find this a bit mind-blowing; it might take me a while to get my head around.