What We Should all Learn in Grade One

This Much I Know

I was in a family restaurant with my husband last week (it was a Denny’s, not that it matters), and we overheard a mother say to one of her two children in an emotional voice (who were both under three years old and doing the sorts of things and making the sorts of noises that young children make when they are confined to a small space in a restaurant) “You’re hurting Mommy’s feelings. You’re going to make me cry”. I wanted to scream “Don’t believe her. Mommy is wrong!”

When they left, I saw in the faces of those children a glimpse of the emotionally crippled adults they would become if they bought what she was trying to sell him when he wasn’t even old enough to understand.

Not to single out mothers alone, because dads are just as likely to send children offensive messages, although theirs tend to sound more like “stop your whining now or I’ll…”

I could go on for days about how to use things other than fear and guilt to motivate children to be cooperative, but today I want to talk about emotional boundaries.

What We Should all Learn in Grade One

Can we get this straight? When someone else feels something, it’s not your fault. You did not cause it. You cannot create emotion (not even good ones) in someone else. Yes…you are off the hook! Shocked? I will explain.

Responsibility

Yes, there are behaviours that are more or less likely to trigger a certain emotion in others. Gestures of love or appreciation are more likely to result in a positive emotion in the receiver. Aggression or belittling…are more likely to result in negative emotion. And we DO have to be responsible enough, as adults, to be aware of how our behaviours affect others and we do need to not be hurtful or thoughtless.

But now …think about the person you know who tries for a lifetime to make a certain miserable person happy, but is never successful. Or think about the person who keeps getting knocked down by others or by life, and still maintains a state of happiness.

What we say or do gets translated through a whole quagmire of core beliefs, esteem issues, past experiences, emotional bruises, fears and strange thought patterns that have nothing to do with you!

And… your own emotional responses are just as much not the fault of other people. Gasp!

That kid grown up

Let’s go back to the mom who was programming her son. Picture him in twenty years… He’s living with someone and she comes home crying because he’s forgotten something important. He might dismiss her tears, appease her passive aggressively, or become defensive and angry, all in an attempt to avoid her emotion and his shame. The fundamental problem being that they both think he’s to blame for her emotional state. But I propose that he is not.

This is something I need to constantly remind myself of.

Lynda

Image from the Bloomington Playwrights Project, by Natasha Komoda.