Part 4 - Other People's Emotions

I want to talk about how to deal with other people's emotions and I didn't intend to include this in this course but I think it would be incomplete without it. So here's your bonus material on how to handle the emotions of other people. And first I just want to give you permission to say I don't need to experience the emotions of other people if they are in a hurtful way. So I want to just say I've been on the other end of receiving emotional abuse. I know what it feels like and it is not okay. It is not okay that somebody takes their emotions out on you in a negative unhealthy way.

That is not okay in any setting whether it's a relationship, a workplace, a family that's not okay. You do not deserve to be treated like that. And I want to think about emotions and basically how we train toddlers, right? To deal with their emotions. When it's toddlers having a temper tantrum, we don't allow them to take over the entire family dynamic and make everybody in the grocery store stop what they're doing because the toddler is having a temper tantrum. We set them in a time out and we say you need to calm yourself down before you're able to interact with society again.

So same thing happens with adults except we don't have somebody enforcing temper tantrum timeouts. So I just want to paint that picture of like we are taught at a young age to handle our own emotions and maybe not everybody is taught that which is sad but you are responsible for your own emotions. So in saying that everybody else is also responsible for their own emotions and you are not responsible for fixing them. You are not responsible for handling them or calming them down. You are not responsible for taking the brunt of their negative angry emotions either.

So just recognize that if in a relationship you have recognizing signs of co-dependency in any way because you feel like you are responsible for that person's emotions just know that that is a lie. That's not true. And I can tell you from experience I thought that was my job as my as the wife to handle all of his emotions and figure out how to fix them and calm him down and just know that that is not a healthy dynamic that's a co-dependency. So I just wanted to point that out first and secondly I want to point out that if you are on the other end of that it's okay to say no and it's okay to set boundaries.

So I will give you an example of an employee that I was working with in the hospital setting who just was taken out everything on everybody. Nobody wanted to work with this nurse. She was just snappy to everybody. She had really poor patient rapport as well because she just was in a really rough place and she was just horrible and I being the the one that can handle crucial conversations and the leadership position took her aside and said you know what we need to talk about this because it's not okay that you're talking to people like that including me and I want to give you the space to share what's going on because I'm imagining something else is going on that you're not dealing with because you probably are having a lot of emotions that are hijacking you and you're not acting in the way that you want to act but what is at the root of this and maybe you need to take some time off.

So it is okay to approach this subject with someone especially if you recognize they are acting in a similar manner day in and day out they're probably experiencing emotions and not dealing with them not processing them not seeking the help that they need so it's okay to point that out in a loving way because what you're doing is you're allowing them the space to say you know what I do need to actually process my emotions so just know that that's an okay thing to do obviously you need to have a safe rapport or relationship with them in order to be able to point that out but it is important to recognize that you don't deserve to be treated with emotional abuse and that each person does need to take ownership for their emotions so maybe that looks like having a conversation with them and letting them know that you're not okay with how they're talking to you and that maybe you can get them some help or support them in a different way.

So thank you for tuning in with me on this series of emotions I hope it was helpful drop comments let me know if there's other topics you'd like me to exploring other courses and thank you again for joining me.