Welcome to episode 11 of Let’s Talk Dirty. This is the second in a ten episode series about Love, Sex and Relationships and I’m excited to talk to you today about owning your emotions and releasing the desire to take ownership of other people’s emotions.
This episode is about quitting the belief that we can control how other people feel.
So this came up as a special request by a client friend of mine who I’ve been working with for over a year now and she knows a lot of the intricacies of my love life and we were talking about what she thought the number one dating or relationship mistake people make is and she said that it’s not something people do, like don’t put the toilet seat down or spend money on something the other person thinks is stupid, its something that we believe. And it kinda feels like a collective belief so I think that it probably resonates with you in some way with at least one person in your life.
And it’s the belief that we control what other people feel. And how thinking that we can control how people feel and change how they feel and use our sorcery to manipulate how they feel is all up in every relationship in some way or another.
We were talking about how this is such a sneaky little thought because it doesn’t usually sound like that in our heads like I control your feelings. I am all powerful.
It sounds so much nicer. It sounds like, “I want to make him happy.” Right. It sounds really beautiful and genuine and well intentioned.
My client friend told me that before this work she used to say stuff like, “I made him feel really bad.” Or “I couldn’t make him happy.” About her partner alllll the time. She’d say stuff like, “I’m trying my best to make you happy.” Or “All I want is to make you happy.”
Like how many of us have said that to someone? Or about someone. I’m doing everything I can to make her happy.
It’s nice. Like here I am doing everything I know how…I’m doing the chores, giving him a massage, listening to him complain, giving him advice, cooking delicious meals, being physically intimate, telling him I love you, complimenting him…I’m doing all those things to make him happy. And what we were talking about the mistake being is in believing that making someone else happy…or making them feel any kinda way…is impossible. So what happens is a lot of confusion and disappointment for us.
And my girl friend client said that she noticed after she had broken up with this guy, she said she thought one day…wow, he must be totally void of emotion now that I’m gone because he has no one to make him happy or sad.
And she was like of course that’s not true, but holy heck that’s the kind of mind fuckery that we go through when we are in this belief that we make other people happy or sad or that we need to make them happy or take away their pain. We are like he must just be feeling no feelings now that I’m not there to supply the feels for him.
So this isn’t about like taking away the power you feel in your relationships to bring joy and show up with purpose and presence and light in service of creating a beautiful connection with your people. Keep doing that, when you want to, in honor of your relationship.
This is about what kinda joy robbery we commit when we let ourselves cling to the notion that it is our responsibility to manage other people’s feelings. That our relationship success is based on how hard we work at molding the other person’s emotions into ones that fit the good relationship narrative.
Because I know that you can relate to this like sometimes you show up in relationship with a beautiful energy of love and openness and you’re smiling and laughing and the other person is matching that energy with smiles and laughter and feelings of love… and then there’s times when you show up with all of that and the other person is Eore. The other person is bummed or mad or disinterested.
If you could control someone else’s emotional state then there would never be a time where your happinesses don’t match, right?
So why sometimes is one person happy and the other upset? It’s because of what each of you, individually, is thinking. And we can only control our own thoughts, not the thoughts of others. So truly the only way to control someone’s emotions and feelings is if you could open up their brain and implant a thought that you chose into their head and what’s more is you’d have to get them to actually believe it.
So this thought that you want to take away someone’s emotional suffering, it’s kinda nice in theory, but impossible.
AND, I’ll show you why it’s only kinda nice in theory.
Because in reality, taking away someone else’s feelings would be taking away their humanity. Humans are blessed with the ability to feel feelings. A gigantic spectrum of emotions ranging from ecstatic to disappointed to giddy to mournful to relaxed to longing. And the human experience is such that we are meant to feel positive and negative. In fact we’re meant to feel negative emotions at least half the time. Half of our lives are supposed to feel not so great. And half, great. Right?
So when we believe that not only is it our responsibility to manage someone’s emotions but also that we should take negative emotions away, we are robbing people of their imperfectly perfect human experience and we are committed to the idea that people feeling normal human pain need saving. That they are wrong for feeling not good. And how can that be true? Feelings can’t ever be wrong, because they are the exact right combination of physiological sensations caused by the exact thought happening in that moment.
So I hear the sentiment. Someone else is suffering. I want to take away your pain.
But here’s what: thinking that actually makes US feel desperate. “I need to fix this pain”sends us into a spiral of desperate attempts to find a way to do something that you can’t actually do. You can’t do it. Remember, you’re not that powerful. Only a person changing their thought will change how they feel.
So when we are desperate to take away someone’s emotional sufffering, we try a million things, grasp at straws, don’t allow the other person to be human and have an experience of humanness, your efforts don’t work. If I’m like ughh I need to take your pain away I’m desperately seeking things to say or do to solve for someone else’s pain.
And then what happens is, you are in pain. And now you are both in pain. I want to take away your pain can feel nice for a moment but ultimately it backs you into a really painful corner when you can’t fulfill on that thought.
And it’s exhausting. Wracking your brain for answers that don’t exist for you. What can I do how can I make you happy what else can I give? It’s exhausting.
Wasn’t there a song. Oh god I think its Enrique Igelsius. What’s the song, Hero? I can be your hero baby. I can take away your pain. I think that’s the lyrics. I can take away your pain.
Thats a nice song. If I wasn’t trying to sing it it would be a nice song, haha. But like there’s that sentiment about taking away pain from other people you hear in songs or in movies and we think that’s how it works, kinda. We can be the hero and take away someone’s pain. Like I need to figure out how to stop your suffering, because I don’t want you to suffer. I want you to be happy. But in my desperate struggle to fix you, I’m hurting myself too, driving myself crazy because it’s not working. Feeling bad about myself because I don’t have the answers. That doesn’t sound like a hero’s journey.
And here’s the truth bomb I’ll drop on you right out the gate.
The reason we want anything is because of how we think WE will get to feel. So if we want someone else to feel happy, it’s actually because we think that we will get to feel good. It will be easier on us if the person we love is happy. Watching someone suffer or feel an emotion that looks hard is not something we wanna do.
Like, if they weren’t suffering then we could be happy.
Maybe that’s true for you. Maybe if your person was always happy then you could always be happy. Maybe you like believing that..but then what happens if your person is suffering? You can’t be happy.
Ugh, what a conundrum.
Especially because we can’t actually make anyone happy.
Not by trying to do a bunch of problem-solving, not by saying the “right” thing, and certainly not by making ourselves less happy.
This is another angle. The I can’t be happy until you’re happy angle. Or I have to be unhappy when you’re unhappy.
Who has done this? Tried to match someone’s unhappiness? Or thought like two mads will make this better. Two mads might make a happy. I can’t be happy because he’s not happy. Or like I have to be unhappy because it’ll make his unhappiness worse if I feel good.
Ok I’m going to get real with you right now about a dirty thought that I had been having, personally, that’s in this same category of trying to control someone else’s emotions. I want to share a little about my own relationship struggles here because this is what my client friend and I were chatting about. We were talking about my ex boyfriend and some problems I was creating for myself and my current relationship for a while because of thoughts I was having about my ex and controlling how he feels.
So lemme just say that I feel happiness and love in my relationship with my partner about 90% of the time nowadays. That’s a high ass number. Pretty bold of me to state this. Bc you know, I don’t believe that we should ever expect more than 50/50 when it comes to feeling good and bad. But I want you to know like I coach on this stuff and I also have to do lots of my own thought work on relationships and work with my own coaches on my own relationship stuff. I will always do lots of thought work.
So like if it triggers you sometimes to feel badly about your own relationships to think that my relationship is good or someone else’s relationship is good. I know that happens, but let’s let that go. Like If my relationship is good then yours is bad and something is wrong with yours…that’s bs. That’s a whole other thought we need to work on. Like making my relationship mean something about your relationship. Not related. Another episode on that later.
But when I talk about my partner or my life in respect to the relationship we have, I share from truth of course, but I also think that because I am extremely happy I can come off like I just magically have this person that is perfect and he just is happy and makes me happy and we’re all happy all the time and im somehow like a relationships queen.
And I want to make sure I’m not giving the the wrong impression of myself and my life experiences in relationship. Like I work hard and I have thoughts that fuck with my relationships.
No one really asks, “so tell me about your worst and most stressful shit that’s happened with you guys” they ask like what’s new with you, I saw you went to Mexico and rode horses on the beach that must be lovely, what have you been cooking together lately...like no one says what was your last disagreement about or what thoughts do you have about your relationships that are fucking with you.
Ok so I want to just offer this to you not only as a tool to teach about dirty thoughts but also to demonstrate how we are ALL human beings with feelings and thoughts that we don’t want. Including your therapist, including your mom and your friend who has 100k followers on Instagram and including a life coach that coaches on relationships. Okay? And I want to make sure that we can all agree that professionals are people. They are not robots void of emotion. We make mistakes and do things quote wrong alll the time. And I am learning that it’s really important to share that with you.
So here’s my story about when you think that you can’t be happy because it will hurt someone else or it’s not aligned with what your person is feeling so it’s not what you should feel…or in my case, being happy might upset your ex.
So my brain has gone through like 400 revamps since dating my ex. When we were together, I believed that all of my stuff was his fault. He was bad. I was good. My problems all stemmed from him not doing what I wanted him to do. I quit drinking while we were together, and I resented him for continuing to drink. Because I thought that was the cause of our problems. I mean, let’s just be clear—I had no clue about thoughts causing feelings causing actions causing results when we were together so it was veeery easy for me to do what many people do in relationship which is blame the other person. And then you do some personal development and you feel all high and mighty because obviously I was doing life better than him and if he would just change faster or in the ways that I wanted him to then it would be fine but he didn’t so then I felt super justified in leaving. Or at least justified in my sadness.
I just want to pause here and say that this is obviously a very paired down and almost flippant way of describing our relationship. We were together for 9 years, and there are intricacies of that relahsionship that will never be shared publicly mostly because how can you possibly accurately summarize 9 years of your life in 20 minutes especially after having gone through so many transformations in your thinking...so I just want to honor that relationship and remind you that as I am telling this story for our purposes here today, or noticing how thinking we can control other people and their emotions is not helpful….this is a distilled version of a very dynamic Lōve. I love this person very much and I feel love for what we and no two other people ever created together.
Ok so there I was, feeling like yes it’s your fault, all of my issues are about you...and of course that feels really good right to blame someone else....but then after doing some work on myself and realizing that that just wasn’t true—that I create my experience, and that he is not responsible for my emotions and he never was...I felt guilt because even after recognizing that I wasn’t mad at him or resentful or blaming him, I still am not interested in being together. And now I can no longer blame it on him. So I started struggling with guilt because if it wasn’t HIS fault, then it must be MY fault and I didn’t want him to suffer because I hadn’t had the understanding around that when we were together.
This is where is discovered that you can totally use thought work against yourself. And that’s what I started doing.
On the one hand I was like okay great, I can take emotional responsibility for myself. So I did. But then I went all the way to the other end of the spectrum and I started to believe that I could also take emotional responsibility for him and his feelings, to try to stifle my guilt.
Remember how I said that when we try to control other people’s feelings it’s actually about trying to make ourselves feel better. Yeah.
“I can’t be happy if he’s not happy, I need to make sure he’s happy before I can be happy.” is kinda the thought that can come from I need to take away his pain slash control his emotions. And then you realize you can’t take away someones pain. And then our brain is like well it’s impossible to be happy when this other person isn’t happy. I felt that even when we were still together. That’s called codependency by the way. I can’t be happy if you’re not happy.
And i thought it was unfair, especially after I started dating again and eventually reconnected with Michael, that I get to be happy and my ex isn’t. Guilt happens here. Guilt about doing things for yourself, guilt about feeling good. And then it becomes “If I’m happy, he’ll be more sad.”
When I am saying it now I remember thinking this when Michael and I started dating and living together. Like, don’t laugh too much because that somehow will make my ex more depressed. So I was doing this thing, to try to solve for his happiness, but remaining unhappy in my new relationship. By not letting myself get too overboard with loving Michael. By deciding ahead of time that I wasn’t going to go all in on Lōve and happiness because that was making it harder for my ex.
By the way I have no clue what his day to day is like now but can we all just take a second to appreciate all the times we’ve made an assumption about how what we do dictates how other people feel? How presumptuous of us, right? Like I’m sitting here in my house with my partner laughing and telling stories and then my brain makes this experience of joy somehow related to my ex’s experience of pain. Not related btw. Like people being happy in the world NEVER takes away from other peoples ability to feel happy. There is enough happiness to go around.
But guess what does rob happiness: thinking the thought “I can’t be happy right now bc my ex is not happy”—-like who does that help? No one, bc now you’re both unhappy. AND that’s assuming that your ex is sitting around at his house being sad. Like who do I think I am? I am just the goddess of happiness with my magical wand doling out happiness And then withholding it from some people because I think they probably don’t have the capacity to feel it right now.
Let me tell you what: everyone has the capacity to feel happiness at any time. So, I had to tell myself, after some serious noticing on my part and Michael’s part that I was doing this withholding of happiness from myself, I had to notice that what I’m doing has no control over how this other person chooses to feel.
Have you guys ever done this? I hope I’m not alone here haha. But thinking that you wanna make someone feel better so you make yourself feel worse either in the process or literally on purpose because your brain tells you that will somehow even things out. Allow more happiness to be available to the other person.
So if you have ever done this, ever told yourself that you can somehow control other people’s feelings, let’s not toot our own horns on this one…when it comes to other peoples feelings. I learned this through my own experiences so many times during my education to becoming a coach: I don’t fix people. I don’t make people happy. I don’t have that power. Right?
Sometimes the people we love are sad. That’s not an invitation to join in. That might be an invitation to allow. To stay present to your own feelings. That might not be an invitation at all.
You know, I thought, my ex might feel mad, he might not be Okay. He might literally hurt himself. And you know what—he might. He has agency over his own life.
People have agency over their own lives.
Whether they believe that or not.
But you’re not here to teach them that. You’re here to exemplify that.
I would think “What if he’s feeling hurt or he sees Michael and I together and he gets upset. I don’t want my happiness to rub him the wrong way.” I even lied to him about dating, to protect him. That was one of the things I frantically tried to do to make him happy. Lied to him to try to make him feel good. “oh thank you for lying to me!!” “Wow you are so great at lying”. Said no one ever….people-pleasing is just lying. I thought I want you to feel good…I need to figure out how he can feel good…but I wanted him to feel good because I thought that would release me from guilt and from my own insecurity and would let me love deeply. But that thought was only working against me, to hold me back from a deep love and commitment that was available to me regardless.
So maybe the person you are thinking about trying to make feel better isn’t your ex.
Maybe it’s your daughter. Or your friend. Or your partner. Maybe it looks like an easier job to do or a more important job to do than the job I gave myself trying to make my ex ok at the expense of myself and my current relationship.
But what if it’s not your job at all? Even if it’s the love of your life that you want to make happy. Is it possible that it’s even more important to lean into the ways that the person you love is already doing the job…the job of existing for you to love them. The job of showing up as a complete human with real emotions. What if this is an opportunity for you to learn more about what feeling love for someone is really like.
To trust that the people you love won’t intentionally use your happiness against themselves…or maybe they will…if they want to. And you know what, it’s really none of your business. Your business is to love them through this moment. To love them through their darkness, without trying to make them change.
If you can learn something from my experience: it’s to never reject who you are or the path you’re on in service of someone else’s feelings because if we have learned nothing else from this work: we can’t make anyone else mad, sad, happy, etc....so stop giving yourself so much credit for other people’s emotions.
“Being happy might upset someone else” is a lie. Always. Your people aren’t ever sad because you’re happy. Your happiness doesn’t crush someone’s happiness. Your sadness doesn’t comfort their sadness.
This isn’t about flaunting your happiness or pretending to be happy when you’re not. Feel your feelings too. But this is about loving someone enough to trust their ability to hold their own emotional weight. It’s about validating the human experience through continuing forward with your own human expereince.
When you believe that you need to take away someone’s pain, it only reinforces the idea that they need you to carry them. That they can’t be human on their own.
And to me, that doesn’t feel like love. You know? That feels like pity. That feels like distrust. That feels kinda like a god complex.
And when what we want is love, the thought that I wanna make you happy just blocks us from good ol love. True love has no expectation of reciprocation. True love is felt freely, with no requirements of the other person to feel good. You feel love when you think loving thoughts, not thoughts of “I have to change this persons experience”. You can go on wanting to make people happy all day, just manage your expectations …and manage your mind so that you can be happy no matter what.
Hey friends, why do we feel emotions?
Because of our thoughts! You don’t cause someone’s emotions. They control their emotions with their thoughts.
And you control your emotions with your thoughts! If you are interested in learning more about how to put this topic into practice in your own life so YOU can feel better…come join my five day coaching crash course Feel Better Fast. The live run begins October 13th so hurry up and get signed up right now. Visit my website hannakokovai.com/work and pay your $25, which is literally the cheapest coaching investment ever offered on earth so take advantage of this opportunity to listen in every day for five days where I will be teaching and coaching on managing your emotions so you can decide to feel good on purpose, process through emotions instead of fighting with yourself, stop worrying, stop stressing, learn exactly where feelings are coming from and how to generate the results you want in your relationships, and anywhere else in your life and get a feel for some of the coaching tools I use in my private coaching programs. If you can’t be there live it’s totally cool, you’ll get the replays, but if you can join live at least a few days do it! I can’t wait to work with you. See you there.