Do you control how you feel or do people make you feel things?

It’s a bit of a combination. People may push your button, but, unlike an elevator, you have the power to refrain from going to the floor.

I never think of other people “making” me feel a certain way; that would mean that I am giving them control over me. It’s more of, “when you put me in certain situation, I react by feeling____.” At any given time, I can control what I feel. It’s often very hard, but I can choose how I react to certain situations. I do that every single day.

Actually, I don’t think the construct is quite right. I don’t believe either of those things is true.

How we react to outside events and people’s action is a function of a complex set of things including much of our previous life experience including childhood wounds and defense mechanisms and, finally, to some extent genetics.

I completely disagree that we can control our feelings. In fact, I think many of our problems come from trying to control our feelings. Much of that attempts to suppress our feelings, which requires a large amount of energy.

What we can do is acknowledge our feelings, experience them fully, and in the course of that, the feelings will change or eventually fade. We can also use the experience of intense feelings to look at our pasts and to analyze why we might feel a certain way. In doing that, our feelings about a particular stimulus may change or the response may become less intense.

In the book, “The Waning of the Middle Ages,” Johan Huizinga talks about how very different the emotional life of man was. People experienced vast extremes of emotion constantly, weeping violently, laughing manically, filled with revenge or jealousy and all very publicly on the street and in public life.

Biologically, that is our heritage, but all of that brief, intense, changeable feeling is now bottled up by our mores about what is proper to publicly “feel.”

Thus, other people do not cause us to feel, but events including those in relationships do trigger emotional responses from us.

Also, we do better to acknowledge and experience our emotions rather than suppress them. By understanding them in the context of our own lives, we can transform them through that process.

Finally, what we do control is not how we feel about something, but how we act in response to it. We can consciously choose how we act or speak in response to something. We should not confuse that with choosing how we feel about it.

It depends on the person, but it’s a combination. You generally have a certain level of control over your emotions, but in certain circumstances, external influences can influence your feelings or create feelings.

I think both are true. We have feelings that are elicited by other people.

I also think that we control our feelings… Wow that felt wrong to type. Because I can type and say ” I won’t let that person dictate how I feel about myself” but that sure it hard to do.

I have to think on this.

Our feelings are based on our beliefs… not religion, but how we view things (which can be influenced by religion). I’d say your current emotional status (already in a bad mood, medicine making you more irritable) could intensity or dilute your feelings, but you’re overall reaction to something specific will always be the same so long as you always feel the same about that specific thing.

For instance, I can’t stand it when people don’t use their blinkers. If I’m in a good mood (like rocking out to Queen) I might roll my eyes. If I just got into an argument with someone I really care about, I might yell at them from inside my car. Either way, it is still something that annoys me, and I’m going to react in a negative way, but the intensity is dependent upon my current mood/how happy I am at that moment. Strong emotions (things that affect your overall ‘current mood’) from different things can leak into other situations and can dilute or intensify your original reaction, but the reaction will be in the same ballpark. Often people say “you make me feel…” because they don’t get past the situation and look at how they are reacting. It should be a “when something like that happens, I feel…”

I kind of lost myself for a second there, and this sort of thing is new to me (I was just told about it by someone who has a degree in this stuff), so let me know what you think.

I agree with @pdworkin! It’s a combination of both. Some people might say you’re not controlling the emotion so much as your reaction to it, but there are people I could easily dislike a lot, however I make myself see what there is to like and my feelings towards them start to gradually change!

I actually have had this question in my mind for several years now, so I am very interested in people’s answers. I have some things going on in my family that directly relate to this. What I have come to so far is that if we are more aware of why certain feelings are triggered in us; we can have better control over our reaction, or at minimum our outward reaction, internally we might still feel like crap. Also, if we understand the intent of the person who is making us feel badly it can help us overcome bad feelings. This is why communication is so important in a relationship. Sometimes a person (parent, spouse, friend) throws out a little pebble and it lands on the other person like a boulder. Neither party might understand what just happened.

If we think of extremes like the death of a close relative, do we expect someone to have control over their mourning and grief, or to experience it?

I think sometimes family, friends, and society are tolerant of loss of control of feelings and sometimes not, depends on the situation and the duration of the emotion.

How you feel is how it is for you. It’s not helpful to ignore it or deny it to yourself. Once you have checked in with gut, you can decide how (and if) to respond.

Constant stuffing and self-denying about feelings can have long term physical and emotional consequences.

My feelings are definately influenced by people and things around me. I’m kind of human that way.

I definitely don’t believe those people that talk about how words are just words, actions just actions, no one can make you feel whatever – bullshit! I say to that, because we don’t live in a vacuum and there are people we love or grew up with or just meet that can hurt us and yes that means they have control too over how you feel…obviously I, as a person, will control how I explore the feelings inspired in me by another but you can’t just call me a cunt and expect me to not flip you off

First I think about relationships, it seems that overall, if someone just doesn’t feel (put there emotions on the line) they will maintain an almost definate dominance. Yet, I think about this qoute from a Holocaust victim, it went something like, “you can take away everything accept how I will react” sorry to misqoute, sure that’s not quite right. Anybody ever date an IceQueen, yeesh, they only real warmth from one of them might give you a yellowish discharge.

Only those you care about can influence the way you feel.

No souvenirs from the days of glory have surfaced in my pondering here, as I have been hovering around this one for a bit. I think I will simply begin by leaping upon the word: control. Lub dub, Lub dub… The heart, I believe. And, both directions into the magical forest of life being offered here, above in the form of a brilliant question, seem to each possess something to take enormous pleasure in. “you feel” or “people make you feel” How can you loose? Bzzzz… So, I leap from control and launch myself into: feel. And that, for me, is my journey, which is fed by the beating of my heart. Brothers and Sisters, if you are wide open and fully available in the forest of life, then controlling or offering up control of the who, what, when, where and why of everything possible that you could feel – from whichever direction the magic in your life arrives – within or without – you are in for a delicious treat.

@FB can you clarify ‘fully available’ for me please? and what’s with all the buzzing? :-p

Certain people have the power to affect how I’m feeling but most of the time it is my own anxieties that cause my problems.

I think we feel; and we can choose how to feel about what we feel.

For the most part,I choose how I feel,but I do have my moments where I’ll blame someone else!lol!