"Stuff" That's Not Yours
“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.”
Unless you’re a hermit on a mountaintop, you have to deal with the ups and downs of the other people in your life, and surrounding you on this planet. Doing so is one of the biggest long-term challenges we face. I mean, imagine if everyone else in the world was completely at peace, and all you had to worry about was your own thoughts, emotions, and projects! Life would surely be a lot simpler! Come to think of it, that’s a pretty nice fantasy that might rank up there with an endless beach vacation. But it sure isn’t the life we live.
In reality, all the people around us are striving and often struggling with plenty of their own challenges. They’ve built up a lifetime of experiences that influence them in the present. They are working through confusion and old, unprocessed emotions just as we are. Even if they’re all doing their utter best, being around them won’t always be easy. You know how sometimes you can walk into a room and just feel immediately that there’s a dangerous charge in the air? Or take one look at someone’s face and realize that you’ve landed in the middle of a whole situation not of your making? Uh oh. Now what do you do?
There are, of course, many ways to react to someone else’s outpouring of emotion. Many of them are not terribly helpful, and you’ve probably tried and failed enough in this arena to know exactly what I mean. Sometimes it seems like you just can’t win around others’ big emotions! The good news is that, the more you do your own work on how you feel about your own old stuff, the easier it is not to be inappropriately drawn into other people’s emotions about theirs. It’s not that you’ll lose your ability to be compassionate, and offer that person empathy regarding their situation, but you won’t be automatically dragged down by what they’re experiencing. This is much better for everyone. You won’t be exhausted by reflexively getting upset whenever someone around you is; you’ll also stay more resourceful when someone else is in need. They can go through their own experiences while having someone more stable in the room, who can better support them for not having metaphorically jumped into the hole with them. Everything becomes a bit easier when you can be calmer. When you don’t immediately get upset around someone emotional, you have a lot more leeway to find better options for responding.
The best way I’ve ever found to de-fang our knee-jerk responses to others’ emotional overwhelm is to use Tapping to work on past events from our lives that still rankle and form the stuff of our greatest regrets and resentments. We all make mistakes, and so do the people who have come into contact with us at every point in our lives. Even someone who has lived the tamest possible life will have collected some unfortunate, hurtful experiences. Some people will have many more. Tapping doesn’t erase bad memories, but it does make them a lot less painful, and it also helps us to put them into healthier context. This, in turn, makes it easier to understand and forgive the others involved so that we can feel free of limitations that came into being as a direct result of those experiences.
You’re always going to be aware of other people’s emotional stuff, but you can build your ability not to be too distressed by someone else’s emotional state when it has little or nothing to do with you. People who are addicted to drama might not like your new, calmer demeanor, but only you get to decide what level of emotional involvement is right and balanced for you in any situation. As long as you’re still able to offer sympathy and caring, most people will appreciate your ability to remain grounded and open rather than reactive around their emotions. This frees them to feel as they do without worrying that you are very negatively impacted, and outbursts become easier for everyone to deal with and recover from. When we fear emotions less, they can become the useful signposts they are meant to be, and we can all live more balanced lives together.