Crowdsource Question : Feelings

Hi Nova. Hi Fox. How are you? Good. It's good to see you. Yeah, good to see you too. I'm excited. Why are you excited? Because this is our first of a new kind of episode. A brand new kind of episode? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's called, we're going to call it Crowdsourcing. Crowdsource episode time. Yeah, we want to hear from people other than us. Yeah, you've heard a lot from us. Yes. It's exciting. And now we want to know what other people are doing.

Yeah. So, we're going to be doing a little bit of a live stream. Yeah. So, we're going to be doing a little bit of a live stream. Yeah. So, we're going to be doing a little bit of a live stream. Yeah. I can't wait to share it. One thing to note before we get started is that some people wrote in answers instead of recording them.

So, you will hear my voice and Fox's voice throughout the episode and that's not necessarily our answer, though we're just reading other people's responses so that they can get mixed in there. Right, yeah. Not everyone was able to have access to a recording studio or equipment and... Or let us throw a microphone in their face. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The question we asked all these wonderful people... Yes. ...was, can someone make you feel something? So, let's hear what they said.

Yeah. The question is, can someone make me feel? And I would say yes, given most every other movie that I have ever seen in my life and the tears that come pouring out of my face at any kind of emotionally compelling story. If it's something compassionate beyond all measure or just heartbreaking, then yes, I weep out of empathy for what that person is going through, what that character is going through. There are relatable details in storytelling, so yes, people can make me feel something.

I think yes and no. So because of what I believe is that everything happens because of something or some things that happened before it. So by definition, I guess yes, someone can make you feel a way because the way you're feeling results from other things that have already happened. So if I do a thing and then you feel a way, the thing that I did contributed to your feelings.

So in a sense, I did make you feel that way, but I think maybe the more important question is what do you do with that feeling? Like how do you respond? It almost doesn't matter whether people can make you feel a certain way or not. If you have mastery over how you react to your feelings, then people can't make you people can't derail your day or at least not as easily.

Right. So I guess in a sense, it's kind of irrelevant whether people can make you feel a way if you can let it roll off your shoulders and move on about your day. If they made you feel a bad way or they didn't make you feel a bad way. You're feeling that bad way and you have to deal with it regardless of someone else made you feel that way. Can someone make you feel something? Physiologically speaking, yes. Our bodies are designed to respond to external stimuli in a variety of ways.

If you were to pinch me, my nerve endings would convey a pain response to my brain. If you were to jump out from behind a door at me, my brain would release cortisol and my heart would beat faster as part of my fear response. With both physical and emotional responses, external stimuli can in fact make your body respond in certain ways. It's a survival adaptation and it comes down to a very basic set of mechanisms.

Good feelings, such as happiness, contentment, safety, as well as good physical sensations, come from our desire to seek out pleasure. If someone makes you feel good, they must be good to be around. Bad feelings, fear, anger, distress, etc. and sensations come from our desire to avoid pain. Given the right stimuli, other people can make you feel whatever they want you to. However, no one can make you react to feeling things.

Knee-jerk responses may be based purely on instinct and almost impossible to override, but what you do with that response is entirely your own decision. You pinch me, I feel pain, and then there are a number of things I could do after that. You have no say in whether I decide to pinch you back, or walk away, or ask you not to do that again.

If you're able to move beyond the impulse and sit with your feelings and sensations, you can control how you respond to those stimuli, and that's more important and powerful than any initial experience someone can make you feel. No, I would say not. People can instigate or something can happen that is supposed to make me feel, but an individual can have different reactions to anything that can happen.

It's... we all have emotions tied to specific things, and they don't always know what that tie might be. You get trolls on the internet trying to push an anger thing, but you don't know that you'll react. Or you get someone trying to be kind to you thinking, oh, if I do this thing that's nice, maybe they'll like me more, but really, it's completely up to you, not in a sort of sense that you have a choice of what that feeling is, but more sort of inside yourself how you feel about it.

It's never a choice, but you don't always know what that feeling is going to be, basically. No, I don't believe that they can. I believe that they can definitely catalyze you to feel something, sort of like a chemical reaction. Like, it has that catalyst that changes the things, but I don't think that somebody can actually make you feel a thing. And I kind of feel that way because people react differently to different things constantly.

So it's hard to say that you would get the same response to me. I feel like you would have to be able to repeat it over and over again and get the same response, and even the same thing twice may not elicit the same response. My take is yeah, I think they can, or at least they can play the largest and possibly an overwhelming factor in it. I think we have control over actions and behaviors, and I think through those we can influence our overall emotional state.

But I think feelings are a largely reactive thing. Like, I don't think you can make yourself feel something or not feel something, at least not in the immediate moment. Your feelings are a response to your environment, and they're informed by your emotional state. So I think the best you can try to do is understand your feelings, process them, and over time alter your perceptions or approach.

I think that can change the way you react to things and thus your feelings, but I still think of them as a reactive thing. Put another way, I think that's one of the reasons we like stories, movies, songs, books, etc. They can all be interesting in their own right, but for the ones you really like, it's because of an emotional response you had to it and how it made you feel. And the author or actors or whatnot, they're the ones that made you feel that way.

I mean, you probably wanted to and were looking for it, but it's still someone else making you feel something. On the darker side of it, concerning manipulation, jealousy, anger, resentment, I think other people can trigger those feelings in you for sure. But I think those kinds of things are or can be a fleeting thing. You can still have much more influence over your own emotional state.

So while someone else can make you sad, they can't make you depressed unless you let them, unless you sacrifice that control over it. I had a friend for since about 1999, about an over 20 year friendship. And something I initially didn't like about this friend was that he was so, his humor was so biting. And at first that was annoying to me, but then I got that it was coming from a place of that it's almost like kind of like a defense mechanism.

It's like if you can get on board with my humor that has language that would make you feel bad if you took it literally, if you can get on board with that, then you understand sort of like my love language or sort of kind of thing. So we had this really close friendship for 20 years. And we hit definite rough spots in that friendship. And I'm the kind of person that I'm a very empathetic person.

And so I take on, I take on other people's feelings in addition to my own, which my own are the worst because I will think through something way and go over it and over it and over it way more times than I need to. And this particular friend, whenever we got into like sort of rough patches or whatever, it was never, it was never his fault.

And it's the kind of thing, I guess you would call it a way of gaslighting because it would be like, what, I don't understand why, I don't understand why you feel this way. It's like, that's not the way that I see it or that kind of thing. And so I would take on the emotions like, did I, am I handling this wrong? Did I say that the wrong way? Am I the one that's caused all these problems? And I would have conversations with my wife and she'd be like, no, you're not the problem.

He's totally the problem in this situation. But I couldn't help thinking like, but I probably could have handled it better. I probably could have said things in a different way. I didn't need to get defensive with this response. And so as far as somebody making you feel something, it was almost like he did. Sure, I had the ability to not let it affect me, but that's kind of impossible with my, I don't know, with my makeup, my emotional makeup.

I'm very, I very much take on more emotional responsibility than I need to in almost any given situation. So it is tricky. Like I felt sometimes I was forced into feeling a certain way by this person. But again, he didn't make me feel that way, but he certainly pushed me into feeling that way. I mean, that's what I thought of when you said, when you asked the question, can somebody make you feel something?

I think that humans have so much power over each other and certain people really know how to use that power. So I really do believe that people can make you feel something. And in this case, this is, this is feeling negative things. So that's kind of a balance that in the past year that I've been trying to strike with my own, my, my own, so like self-talk and what goes on inside my head is how much I allow that influence in that would change the way I feel about something.

I don't think someone can make you feel something. It's your own personal responsibility to manage your reactions. However, if someone is consistently acting in a purposeful manner to elicit a specific negative response or feeling from you, it may be time to set a boundary or distance yourself from that relationship.

In my personal opinion, I do believe that others can make you feel the shared experience of previous events can be triggered by new experiences and ones that old friends and people that you know, bring you into. These feelings can come from shared auditory experiences, shared visual experiences or shared vibrational experience that then cause the stimuli to allow you to feel and move you into a space where the conglomerated experience that previously aligned you then aligns you again.

So yes, I do believe that others can make you feel. This came up recently with my newest partner who actually apologized to me saying it was never her intent to make me feel jealous. And I had to explain that I had done that all on my own. So while I don't think you can make someone else feel something, I do think the concept of intent is relevant. So more on that later. First, how could my new partner know that sharing what she did would stir jealous feelings?

Because the same action can result in a variety of feelings within different people. So for example, pinning someone down. That could cause feelings of fear, anger, arousal, or for a wrestler, excitement at the opportunity to show off their skill set and maybe get out of a hold. I think of the brain as this complicated machine with all of these cogs and whistles turning and spinning about.

And if you know someone really well or you know what societal norms they were exposed to, you can learn what lever to pull on the machine to fairly predictively result in a particular feeling. So in a monoculture, saying certain things to your partner about someone else's attractiveness often results in jealousy. But the person pulling the lever didn't design the machine or create the lever. They just pulled it.

And if the person being triggered accumulates additional life experiences or adopts a different cultural framework or does a lot of therapeutic work, pulling that same lever in the future might elicit a very different feeling because the design of the machine has now changed and the neural pathways now lead elsewhere.

So to both parties, it might appear one can make the other one feel something by pulling the lever, but in the end, it all depends on the design of the machine, which is not to absolve someone from the accountability that goes with knowing perfectly well that when they pull a particular lever, a certain feeling will likely be elicited. That is where I think intent comes into play and defines whether the person is being manipulative or even emotionally abusive in pulling that lever.

If people couldn't make other people feel something, musicians, artists, writers, actors, and anyone else involved in the arts would have a lot of explaining to do. I suspect this question is trying to create a conversation around the question, when is it reasonable to hold other people accountable for your own feelings? And when is it reasonable to hold yourself accountable for your own feelings?

I think there's great utility in recognizing the personal agency a person has with their own feelings and how that informs their actions. However, I think moving too far in that direction severs meaningful human connection in the pursuit of an emotional fortress of solitude. Consider, what is the prerequisite of betrayal?

It depends on the person as in me, I guess, because then yes, absolutely someone can make me feel something because I'm extremely open to the idea of someone being able to hurt me because it's very easy to do. Like, literally one of my friends said something very casual to me the other day and I just started crying because it made me feel something. So, can, yes, I mean, yes, yeah, people can make, they can try all they want and then sometimes they don't even have to try. But yeah, people feel.

People make people feel.

Hey! It's us again. Yes, we're back. This is the end of the episode. Welcome. What'd you think? That was pretty cool. Oh my gosh, that was awesome. Yes. Oh my gosh. I was blown away by the answers we got. Yeah. Holy cow. Like, I kind of hoped that's what the kind of stuff we'd be getting and I was not disappointed. Yeah. Yeah. I am really impressed by the thoughtfulness of the people that we know, the people in our lives. I feel very lucky to know all of these people.

Yeah. And I know going into this, I had my own idea of what I would have answered and I think that some of these responses we got really gave me something to think about. Yeah. It made me explore my own answer in a different way and consider some more layers of nuance to it. Yeah. So it's continuing to evolve. Yeah. And I hope that's true for our audience as well. Right. Because I don't want to necessarily think of myself as completely set in stone. Yeah. I'm still open to new things.

Absolutely. Yeah. I feel the same way. And also, I really just wanted to thank everyone who participated because that was amazing. You are so wonderful for, like we had this, we stuck a microphone in your face and asked you a big question and you all agreed to do it. And that was so cool. Very cool. I'm blown away and feeling very grateful. Me too. Definitely. And we're hoping to do this again next season. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks for joining us.

I hope you guys liked this new kind of episode and hearing some other opinions and voices than ours. Yeah. So this was almost the end of season one. Yes. Yes. Oh, that's right. What's coming up next? There's only one episode left. What are we going to do? Well, that's also kind of going to be a special episode. What we were thinking is we do kind of a recap of season one and open up the audience mail bag and answer some questions and read some comments.

Here's some feedback of how season one went and share some of our plans for season two. See you then. Yeah. See you next time. Bye. It's okay. Be kind. Right now. You're just a spirit having a human experience. Do it right now. We all make mistakes.