Recently a family came to stay at campus. On the second day of their stay, the father addressed a child, “Can you please correct the spelling of the word Deit` on the board outside the kitchen. It has been bothering me so much since yesterday.”
I wanted to (but did not) ask the father, “Would you like the child to change the spelling or would you like you to change your feeling?”
What would happen if we took the responsibility of our feelings?
A three years old child (in our earlier centre in bangalore) would, when angry, punch and pinch other children. This is what we did. Whenever he did this pinching and punching, we would go up to him and say, “You are choosing to be angry” (with a deliberate accent on the word choosing). We're not sure what he understood by repeating this, but soon he stopped his behaviour.
(Caution: this example is only here for illustration purposes - please do not use this as a trick or technique).
And we say that does not matter. Even if I think I do not choose, when I say I am choosing (say after I have behaved or reacted in a certain way) - it gives a totally different sense of responsibility to us.
Typically many of us do not take responsibility for our feelings and when we blame others or events for them, we usually
Get defensive response from them
Feel helpless
Expect others to set our feeling right
Justify our aberrant behaviour
May even get into a vicious cycle of one emotion leading to another
Let emotions drive us rather than emotions help us
Now the last one above leads us to the most important benefit of taking responsibility for our feelings. We start realising that because it is me who is feeling something (and not the stimulus making me feel), the feeling itself could be something useful - like a signal telling us something. All I now need to do is use my ‘own signal’ for my own benefit.
To get a LIVE example of this listen to a conversation between Ratnesh and his son Dhrupad (when he was 16yrs) who was into playing football. The context of the discussion is his feeling nervous at the start of or during a football match.
Kindly excuse the quality of recording - this was done impromptu while driving in a car for his football practice).
The other advantage of taking responsibility is that our language changes from a blaming one, “You’re irritating me” to a responsible one, “I am feeling irritated”.
If you want to emphasize the ownership and the consequent onus, do consider adding, at least initially, the word choosing, “I am choosing to feel irritated”. And watch the change in you simply because you are acknowledging that you're choosing.