Do people make us feel things or are we always responsible for how we feel?

I think it’s a combination of the two. If I’m feeling low I can talk to a friend and they’ll cheer me up. Did I become happier all on my own?

On the flipside, you can always gain control of how things around you affect you. At one point in my life, even small things would set me off. Now it’s pretty hard to make me mad at all.

Our surroundings always make us feel, but we can control how strong the feeling is.

Neither is the truth – you ultimately get to say, if you learn how. Making them responsible makes you dependent on them – you are saying that what others do controls how you feel. Making yourself responsible gives you power over how you feel, and removes the dependence and other negative ideas you could otherwise create towards them. It’s not a matter of what is the ultimate truth – because the question is not in the realm of ultimate truth – it is in the realm of ideas, which are all invented. So what is most useful and helpful to invent?

Your feelins are just that… YOUR feelings. No one can make you feel any particular way without your consent.

I think it’s people who makes use feel things – but we have the power to remove ourselves (for the most part) from those who make use feel badly, so the repetition of feelings is up to us

People do make us have feelings. However, you and you alone get to decide exactly what that feeling is.

People can only affect how we feel as much as we allow them too. Personally, as I get older, I just try not to allow people to “rain on my parade” like I used to. Of course, we’re all human and I think it’s human nature to be affected somehow by those around us .. it just gets easier to not let it bother you so much as you go through life and realize we have more control.

Our attitudes and the hardwiring of our brain are responsible for how we feel. Our reactiions to other people are merely a manifestation of the above factors. Because of the defective hardwiring of my brain (autism) I find akmost all human contact to be painful and irritation in a F2F context.

Ultimately it is all up to you. I avoid people who are a bummer and that is not always practical I just practice positive thinking and for the most part I stay pretty upbeat.

On a whole separate level I personally can feel how people feel and that can affect me so again I have to be conscious and careful of that otherwise I can pick up some heavy baggage from the bummers! The happy people in that regard only add to my usually already good day.

I think our initial feelings can be affected by others and yes, I agree with you on the “no one can make you feel a certain way” but yet they do. I don’t give permission to other people to make me feel bad, but yet sometimes they do. I can then make a choice to not let them continue to bother me but that initial reaction is already there. So, Yes, I think they can make us feel a certain way.
My mom always used guilt to control us as children. My husband also likes to play this game and make me feel a certain way yet will deny it if I question him
Example: We’re in line at the grocery store, I pick up 2 bottles of booze to buy. He looks at them and says, “I skipped getting beer to save money.” Now to me, that was a remark intended to make me feel bad for buying the booze. Of course he denied it and said he was just stating a fact but I know what he was really trying for. I didn’t feel guilty though just because he was being an ass.
I think a lot of conditioning (life long) goes into our reactions to people and their actions/words.

Obviously you have never experienced the guilt a Baptist Mother can give you. Maybe its just mothers, or women in general.

@camouflage_pants
My mother started out Lutheran and then changed to Baptist. She did guilt ‘real good!”

You absolutely are not responsible for how you feel in all circumstances. Take grief for example.

The idea that we “allow” others to affect us is good rhetoric but does not relate to the reality of the human condition.

You made a good distinction however. We are responsible in how react to our emotions. And we are also responsible if we “feed the fire” so to speak. So instead of experiencing pure healthy emotion we allow it to change from anger into rage. That isn’t always in our control but at times it certainly is.

I think that while people can do things which have the potential to cause good/bad feelings, it’s ultimately up to us how we react.

@RedPowerLady
Excellent answer and example!!

@dani6119 Thank you kindly :)

@NaturalMineralWater at first I wasn’t sure I just got what you said… but… you’re saying that people evoke something in us…. but we can decide whether that is either happy or sad….angry or peaceful…. but doesn’t ‘feeling’ happen before the thought…

I’m not a scientist…but I do know that the part in the brain that ‘feels’... (can’t remember the name…) is activated before any thoughts about it… by the time we’re thinking…. we’re already feeling…so how can we decide what it is as such..

Aren’t our feelings therefore just part of the string of determinism, where they sit sandwiched between sensory perception and thought and reaction? How do we have any control over them?

That said, this still pulls into question how another can be responsible for the feelings we experience…

I’d like to point out, too, that is isn’t just a matter of your thinking. Feelings are also affected by drugs, brain chemistry/structure, etc.

(I had a bipolar roommate once. I don’t think he always had choice about how he felt or even how he reacted to stuff.)

@phoenyx indeed!.....

I believe that we are the ones in control of own feelings. However, I think it’s easy on our part to feel negative or down around specific people, in specific situations or about specific topics. I think it’s a learned response or a comfortable response to those situations.

Also I agree with @phoenyx. If there are brain imbalances and or drug influences the reactions may not be controllable.

I shall let no man make me sink so low as to make me hate him. Now who said that again…. got it. I’m 57% sure it was Pee Wee.

People may cause us to have certain emotions. The reaction we have to those emotions is our responsibility.

You take things in and… Depending on your process and experience in That situation depends on your final feeling.

I don’t think you can help what you feel, but it isn’t a question of others “making” you feel something – it’s simply your own emotional reaction.

You DO have choices about your feelings and you don’t have to let your feelings overtake reason. I think it’s good to acknowledge and accept your feelings as one aspect of a situation. There are other aspects as well, and feelings alone shouldn’t dictate your response.

I don’t think we are in complete control of our emotions. Certain events (such as the death of a loved one, a romantic break up, or being taunted by a bully) are so emotionally fraught that only a robot wouldn’t be distressed by them. But we can decide how much control the negative emotions can have over us. For instance, if we’re feeling angry, we can choose to either dwell on these feelings or to confront them and deal with them constructively.

While people may do things to which we respond with anger, joy, etc., no one can make us feel things. Our emotional responses are our own and we are ultimately responsible for them.

We may, intentionally or unintentionally give others the power to hurt us or cheer us up, it is our choice to allow others to affect us that way.

I know it does not always seem that way and we may prefer to think the responsibility lies with others, but it does not make it so!

If you go to a stand up comedy show, determined to not laugh or smile, with practice, you will be able to resist the effect of comedians on our affect (mood).

The same is true for people who say hurtful things. You are ultimately responsible for how you feel. Even depressed people can learn not to feel so sad. It’s hard work to learn this kind of control, but we all can do it.

Emotions are a type of behavior, and most of us can (learn to) control our emotional behavior. Until we do, others can exert undue influence on us.

In a loving, trusting relationships, we may choose to empower another person inside our personal boundaries and they acquire the power to easily induce feelings of great joy in us. They also can induce painful responses.

I’m not sure who to direct this to exactly but too many people have given what I consider to be an unrealistic answer.

Many emotions are a chemical reaction.
Most emotions have deep unconscious roots.
Immediate emotional reaction serves a purpose, most often a healthy one.

This idea that you can control them is
1. very unpractical
2. overestimates our control over our subconscious
3. is very unhealthy

You are always going to feel the way you want to feel.

Is this an extremely simple concept? Yes.

Is it extremely difficult to implement in your daily life? Yes.

Mastering your emotions is a daily struggle and can take years of hard work to achieve. That is the part people don’t want to hear. They would like to hear that it is impossible or someone else’s fault. It’s not. That is the first thing you have to realize before you can ever hope to change.

Indian fakirs are able to slow their own heart rate, and manipulate many other chemical reactions in their bodies. They achieve this through a strict and disciplined lifestyle. Mastering the way you and your body react to the stimuli around you can be achieved in the same fashion. You have to want it and be willing to work very hard for it.

Never make the mistake of letting someone tell you that something is impossible. It just means they were to lazy to do it themselves.

Imagine this feeling. You’re walking down the street and you see a friend of yours approaching. You start to feel happy, you smile and maybe even wave to them. Then, when you get close, you realize that it’s not your friend, it’s just someone who looks like them. All of those feelings you had came from inside you and were not transferred from your (real) friend to you. It’s the same way with bad feelings. You have a lot of control in what you feel but it needs to be learned and practiced. It can be done with effort.
I hope this helps.

@Blondesjon And how long does it take these Indian fakirs to learn these skills?
I argue that is just as healthy, or even moreso, to allow your emotions to exist as-is, letting them be affected by the world around you, and that the idea that anyone can achieve the same emotional mastery as someone who spends a lifetime mastering such skills is a bit far reaching.

Of course we don’t have to agree, just a different take on your perspective.

@Chatfe And what about the person with severe depression? Many many people with severe depression go through cognitive behavioral training to teach themselves how to overcome their feelings. Yet many of these people still end up committing suicide. I’m not saying it is impossible but I am saying it is a bit more complicated that something just needs practice (in some circumstances).

@many of the above users
I think perhaps people are too quick to pass over how healthy it can be just to accept our emotions (even the “bad” ones) as they exist in the moment. To allow ourselves to be affected and to react accordingly. Grief is a brilliant example of this. Another point to consider is to say that we all have the ability to control these emotions assumes a great deal of stability in each person’s life which just simply doesn’t exist in many people’s lives. For example do you think that people who can’t feed themselves still have the same ability to learn and practice how their emotions work. The basic hierarchy of needs suggests that when one is living in survival mode such higher level functioning is less possible.

I’m not really trying to “debate” the issue. I am having computer issues so know I might not be able to come back and respond. I just find the topic interesting. I suppose I felt the need to say that as on Fluther when we reply to each other like this we often get in big debates and I don’t want you to think I’m skipping out on my responsibility, lol.

Honest Abe said something like people are as happy as they want to be and I think that is true.

AA tells me to act myself into a way of thinking. That means the same thing in my mind.

Bi-polar and other similar situations aside, I believe it is up to me how I feel. To say I feel this or that way because someone else made me feel that way is giving control over my life to someone else and also an easy way out. Such as, I couldn’t help it, so and so made me feel it or do it.

I think this question produces confusion because of the overlap in meaning between “responsible” and “causal”. We generally do not cause our own feelings, they’re a spontaneous reaction of the mind to circumstances and previous thoughts, etc. If someone else flips me the bird in traffic, that may well be part of the “causal matrix” that made my anger bell go off.

But there’s a difference between describing the chain of causes that leads to the emotion, vs. discussing responsibility as an abstract principle. As a free agent in life, nobody can make me responsible for anything. Responsibility comes with choice. So with regard to my own emotions, there is an opportunity to choose to hold myself responsible for them, and if I do that, I have more power (as @Zaku points out and several others hint at).

So responsibility is a privilege, a gift one gives to themselves as a way of becoming more capable and centered. It’s not like everybody just “is responsible” because that is the way the universe is wired up. You’re not responsible until you choose to be.

we are all responsible for ourself….but that is not a free pass to insult whoever you want with no consequence….but I tend to over look the trivial BS unloaded upon me on a daily basis….I take it with a lemon little bit of salt and a shot of tequila

To say one or the other is directly responsible would be ridiculous.

As a result of experience you react to certain stimuli in a particular manner (let’s say feeling sad from being told something saddening by a friend). This is both the ‘fault’ of the friend and the collected experience of feeling sad all of the other times in your life.

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent” – Eleanor Roosevelt
I think that many people have already got it – people can affect how you feel but you have to decide if you want it to affect you. For example, someone was making me mad but soon I gave up caring and didn’t let it affect my (usually) happy mood :) GQ btw

I think one of the main purposes of country music is emotions. country music artists have a way with a country song, that makes chills run up and down your spine. some of their songs are so sad, that they make us cry(not here, i hate country music). this is one way one person can make another person feel…..emotions. but, sometimes we are responsible for the way we feel and sometimes it cannot be helped. i am talking about people that have psychological problems. answerbag had many people that would ask questions about cutting themselves. is this a form of how we feel or how we want to make us feel about ourselves? emotions…..from two different sources.

Lonelydragon also has an excellent answer to this question. i like the part about dwelling on a problem and dealing with a bully. great answer 1 point. john

@dani6119 I am going to laugh for days over your comments.

@Silhouette – Thanks! I’m glad I could give you a laugh. You should hear how I had to bail my son out of jail the day before Christmas and how he gave me attitude. omgosh! I swear someday I’m going to write a book about my life. If nothing else, it would be cathartic. I’m really a nice normal person. I swear. I’ve never even had a speeding ticket.

@dani6119 You’re great! All that and you still have an excellent sense of humor. It’s always the nice normal people who go through that kind of crap and the abbynormal people who carry it in on their feet. You have a great night.

People don’t make you have feelings; you choose how you feel about a given situation.

hmmm… so basically… other people are not wholly responsible and we are not wholly responsible… it is, as I said that the feelings are part of the causal matrix (thanks @HasntBeen ) I’m just not sure then at what point we can choose to take responsibility…

I like @RedPowerLady‘s thoughts about accepting emotions…maybe they are there to teach us a lot…if we stop and listen to them and try to figure out what part they are playing within the great…‘matrix’... still doesn’t solve where the responsibility lies though…maybe we are all one after all… :-/
ouch…my head hurts

thank you all for your answers x

@lynneblundell : Just to clarify, I’m saying that everyone is justified in not taking responsibility… it’s not only easy, but logically supportable to say “it’s not my fault, I’m a victim of others, or I’m a victim of my past, or of my conditioning”, etc. Legally, we hold people responsible for their actions, but ultimately the only true responsibility occurs as a result of an individual choosing it… anything other than that is more like “blame” or “credit”—i.e. it’s a judgment of others, rather than the creative act of ownership that characterizes responsibility.

I don’t think most of our encounters with people involve deliberate manipulation by people with the intent to make us feel bad. Most of the time, we feel bad because people are thoughtless or self-absorbed. We feel good when people are thoughtful and considerate. We can’t turn someone into a thoughtful, considerate person; they have to choose that behavior themselves. What we can manage our own expectation or reaction to how people react to us. Often we feel bad because we expect mind readers, and we don’t tell people what we expect until after we’ve been disappointed.

@HasntBeen I don’t think that by not taking responsibility one is saying they are a victim (in all circumstances, of course it is possible). I think what people are saying is that “I am allowing my body to react naturally to this occurrence and I am choosing to accept that”. Ultimately we are responsible for our actions that come from these emotions. I think that is where the argument really lies. I would argue that taking responsibility of our emotions perhaps involves a different way of characterizing things than what you are arguing. Not accepting that we are choosing our emotions, because by and large we are not. But rather accepting that once we acknowledge these emotions, even when a result of others, we have ownership of them and therefor can choose to take appropriate steps to either experience them or alleviate them. But that does not mean blaming ourselves for said emotions as we had no control over them beginning in the first place.

@RedPowerLady : I agree with you… it’s about taking responsibility for the response to the emotion, rather than the emotion itself. But, in practical terms, what happens is that the response of many people is to blame others for how they feel. So in effect, we’re talking about the same thing: do you blame others for how you feel (being a victim) or do you choose the perspective “I am responsible for my feelings”. The latter does not mean that you think you make up your own feelings spontaneously, it’s just a posture which allows you to relate to them in a more “adult” way.

@HasntBeen I am thinking more in the Grey area here. What about when someone is actually a victim? At what point does it become more harmful than helpful to take responsibility for your emotions?

For example someone who is violated physically. Say robbed at knifepoint. Now they are experiencing depression and fear. Normal reactions. They do take some responsibility in that they get some help or talk with others about their feelings. In part it is helpful to tell this victim that the person does not own your anymore. But the emotions one is experiencing, well it is okay to blame the other person for causing them.

In response to your question I have had experience on both ends of the spectrum. Grief would be my personal example of emotions that I chose not to own in it’s entirety. I allowed myself to feel miserable and be miserable and not try and cover it up for the sake of others and it helped me heal wonderfully. I think looking on this situation I can say that I wasn’t entirely responsible for those feelings. They were a part of me yes but they were their own entity as well that came from an outside source and operated on me in a way that I had very little control over. And as stated above it is okay in this circumstance to be angry and blame the world for causing you such pain, it is a healthy way of dealing with such an emotion.

Perhaps I should say upfront that I have some experience in the counseling field and have a BA in psychology so I am thinking of this from the perspective of helping someone heal from said emotions.

I would say there’s no obligation to take responsibility for your feelings—it’s an opportunity, not a burden or a “should”. The other thing that I think is a wire-crossing in this discussion is that taking responsibility for your emotions does not mean in any way suppressing them or failing to allow them to be expressed: if someone is grieving, they should grieve… they should be in pain. I think we would agree that there is a psychological process that is appropriate for reaching resolution with regard to things like that, and there’s no magic-bullet shortcut that involves fiddling with your attitude or beliefs… one must work through it.

But, in the long run, when you’re done with all that, where do you stand? If a person allows themselves to remain in the grips of the belief “I was a victim”, does that really work? Am I stronger somehow, more capable, more whole, more myself? I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s any event, regardless of how traumatic, which is ever fully resolved until a person is able to say “that was my experience, it is part of who I am, but does not define or limit me. My future is not determined entirely by my past, I am responsible for all of it”. To me, that’s freedom. All forms of victim-ness leave some trace of disempowerment behind.

This also doesn’t mean that you should let people walk all over you, or shouldn’t make people pay the price for their misdeeds. It’s not about letting anybody off the hook for malfeasance, it’s about returning to a stable foundation of self, in which “I” am responsible for everything—not because I have to be, or because somebody says I should be, but because that is fundamentally who I am.

@HasntBeen Well it seems as if we have a fundamentally different view on what it means to be a healthy human being.

Instead of saying “i am responsible for all of it”. I come from a worldview that believes that this absolutely unnecessary. That we can be responsible human beings while allowing forces to act upon us that our outside of our control. I do not believe that by being a victim you are therefor disempowered. In the case of grief for example. Outside forces control the events that cause grief. It does me no good to say that I am or was somehow in control of that or responsible for it. I do not see a way in which this grief returns to me in the form that “I am responsible for everything” because practically that is untrue (in my beliefs).

Having said that I understand and agree with your view of self-empowerment. I think it is a very powerful and helpful tool. But personally I would keep it as a tool, to be brought about when useful and possible vs. a foundation of self.

my..what happened whilst I was away!!

maybe if we let the emotions carry us and try not to react then they would find their way out somehow and…if we just felt them I mean, maybe they would have to go anywhere… I don’t know.. if we just…pfft… I don’t know;...

I don’t think we are responsible personally, for our feelings… but…
oh
damn
I don’t know

@lynneblundell I think a lot of that does happen when moving through something like grief. Or even when moving through trauma. It can be very healing to just allow ourselves to move through the emotions without regulation. I think we are on the same page :)

and that can only be a good good thing xx Red

agreed :)

@RedPowerLady : I don’t disagree with any of your psychological viewpoints, I’m just suggesting that there is a perspective which transcends that. It is true I am a “psychological being” and must respect those processes and principles… that is an aspect of being human which works a certain way and one ignores it at peril to their health.

But there is another dimension of being human which is broader than all of that, which does not depend on personality or history or psychological mechanisms: there is an aspect of being which is absolute and authoritative, in which the self is not a product of the mind’s machinery, but is rather more like the container in which all the machinations occur.

This kind of self doesn’t exclude psychology, it includes it, but goes beyond that. One does not “figure out” the rules for this kind of being by studying oneself, one becomes this kind of being as a creative act… an act of commitment, of taking a stand—it’s a transition from having ones’ identity defined by the content of life (on the one hand) to having an identity which is self-generated from nothing—or rather, from the simple and unformed possibility of life itself.

On a blank canvas, you can draw anything. It’s getting to a blank canvas that’s the real challenge.

I agree with what you’re syaing @HasntBeen apart from the fact that I would say that the self comes out of rather than is “the container” in which the body is…

and I love your last sentence x

@HasntBeen That sounds like Western individualism when I come from a collectivist culture. Which is precisely what I was saying above. I think we come from two different worldviews. You believe that self-generation is more fundamental and transcendent than being defined by what is around you. I believe the opposite. Now I have simplified what you believe so forgive me for that but perhaps you understand my meaning anyhow.

I don’t think that captures the difference accurately, no. This isn’t about Western or Eastern or individual or collective, it’s more about cause and effect: psychology relates to the person (or group, if you want to talk relationship systems) from a scientific standpoint: analytical, looking for chains of cause-and-effect, and attempting to answer the question “how did the person get to be this way?”—i.e. psychology wants to understand the causal connections which produced the effect called “this person” (or “this relationship”).

That’s a completely valid undertaking, and of course plenty of great work has been done on those lines. But, as an approach to understanding what a human being is, this is also fatally crippled by its presumption that the human being is only and always an effect, and never a cause. That is, the underlying paradigm forces all conclusions inexorably toward a model that claims the individual is merely the result of whatever processes took place or influences occurred, whether they be biological, psychological, or otherwise.

In short, psychology has no language or tools for dealing with the human being as a cause in and of itself… it’s not “wired up” to understand or relate to ideas like creativity or initiative or invention or generation, except by trying to crowbar them into a model of understanding which views them as effects of other elements or processes. In doing so, psychology falls short of being able to fully account for what a human being is—no matter how accurately you describe a person in terms of causal dynamics, unless you grant that person agency as a potential source of causation, you are in effect treating them as a mechanism—however complex—to be explained in terms of some natural laws.

What I am saying is that psychology is sort of like Newtonian physics: it’s correct up until you get to certain conditions. When relativity came along, we didn’t throw out Newtonian physics, it got re-contextualized and understood in a more complete context. Likewise, a model of being which grants true agency to human beings isn’t antithetical to psychology, it just says that “beyond these natural laws, the human being is also capable of developing into a source of original input to the system”. A human being can create, and those creations cannot be accounted for merely by tracing the prior influences. That’s the stuff that true responsibility is made out of.

@Silhouette – Thanks! Just now found your comment.
It’s either laugh or go crazy. I laughed ‘til I went crazy and now I laugh some more. :-)

you are responsible for your own feelings.

I am responsible for my own feelings as Lucille also points out. Just as I “choose” to interact with people who I know will make me feel good and avoid people who I know will rain on my parade. Further if someone “pisses” you off….whose fault is it? Theirs for being an asshole which obviously was their choice to do so….or is it your fault for letting them be that asshole to you? I choose the latter as it would be my choice to let that interaction occur and then it further becomes my choice to stay and let that interaction come to a completion and more choices are made on how to react to that situation. Do I calmly react or do I blow a gasket and KTA?? All part of my personal responsibility over my feelings and no one else is to blame.

Yes, I agree, we are responsable for not allowing others to set the emotional wheels spinning.

I have a friend/biz. assc. who struggles with some pretty heavy jealousy & envy issues.
I have learned to not share much about whats good or exciting in my life as her ability to be happy and complementary back is very comprimised. We work together well, but in order to avoid feeling frusterated or diminished in other areas, I CHOOSE to share only with those friends that are genuinely happy and supportive and complementary towards me. Problem solved! If I was attached to getting something from her in this way I would be setting MYSELF up for disapointment and anger. She is just not capable so why would I keep expecting a different reaction from her? The definition of insanity right? lol

people can make us hurt like hell

oh dear…. do you need an ear? or shoulder? x

hahah, no it’s fine… it was just an exaggeration! Thank you @lynneblundell

People DO make us hurt like hell and anyone who ignores that just keeps allowing people to be that way. If someone chooses to piss you off, it is their fault for doing so. You are not in control of every encounter. It takes 2 (at least) it’s a two way street. Both sides have to work together. You don’t want to give the control completely to others’ but it makes it so much better if we help each other along and try to give each other what each other needs. That’s the human way. Find the compromise. Why is the victim always to blame? It’s the perpitrator, the one slinging the arrows that people seem to let off the hook. We have to let these people know that their initial actions, words, etc.are wrong and not to be tolerated. Why? Because it DOES make us feel bad..or even can ‘potentially’ makes us feel bad, which can cause a whole host of other bad things to happen. They should learn to be nicer and considerate, etc. How could they learn that if we don’t let them know how we feel when they do the bad thing? We are not cold robots..we feel..and we shouldn’t be hurting each other. Yes, feeling an emotion is cool…we need them to weed out the crap, etc. but how we react could help a situation get better so the crap don’t happen again, so we don’t have to battle those emotions more. It’s good all around. We have to let the initial slinger know what they did ‘contributed’ (if you will) a bad feeling emotion that had to be battled with inside. We should not make each other have to go through that battle. The world will never be gentler and nicer if people keep blaming the victims (which is sick). We should blame what started it in the first place. That’s were the focus should be. We collectively can make people nicer (through better media, attitudes, etc.) which is the right way IMO and better for all. This should all be looked at the other way around. These days people are becoming more colder, selfish, heartless, with that stone face look, etc. while trying to have that cocky ‘responsible for my feelings’ way about them and they just seem to stay the hell away from everyone. That’s not good. They are too hard and become meaner and all. I always thought that we are here in this life to ‘help’ each other and not hurt each other. Learn to be nicer. It’s good for the soul…soul growth. You should love yourself too also of course…yes.. and do your part to try and be happy, but others’ should help also. That is what LOVE is. Just like you would try to help make someone happy that you love and helping to ease the way. It all makes a huge difference. THAT is what should be taught. Every situation is different, you are not always able to even be responsible. Others’ are responsible for their actions because they hurt others, they dish it out. You can try to not feel bad about being a victim for self preservation, especially if no one else is helping you, but you shouldn’t have to. Both sides are responsible in ways, I guess sometimes. Feeling the emotion is fine, but how you react can be different, but people shouldn’t expect you to smile and be happy with horrible things done too you. Also, why should the slinger go scott free? How will they learn not to do that thing again to you or to anyone if not told how it made you feel? They will always feel like they can keep on doing the same bad things (if nobody told them it made hurt and if they do it more than they are really bad and should be stayed away from and should get therapy), cause it doesn’t matter..I mean..if nobody is getting hurt by it. It encourages them to do it again and again and again. If they are a more caring sort..they may stop…they may realize and stop. They can have that choice sometimes. Feeling emotions (hurt, etc.) is like a barometer, it lets you know when something is bad or not right for you, so it’s good. You can then decide what you may be able to do about it. How would you know to stay away from a bad..or violent..or evil person if you didn’t allow your natural feelings, intuition, instincts to tell you so. You need them. If you try and ‘control’ them all the time….you may never know the ‘truth’ about someone or a situation. If someone evil made you feel bad, you would know they were by how it made you feel and would know to stay away…if you didn’t allow your natural feelings to guide you there and ‘chose’ to be all smiley and cool about it and ‘ignore’ how they are and what they are basically telling you how they are then you could end up in a worse situation or even dead.

@twinklepie I salute you x and welcome to Fluther x