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Bruce-ism #2 (On Emotional Reactivity)

A view to consider is that any emotional reactivity I experience is best related to as 100% about my relationship with my own core, life-long vulnerabilities. - Bruce Tift

I love Taylor Swift. She has a lot of great songs. She also has at least one terrible one. The chorus to the atrocity in question goes something like, "Look what you made me do. Look what you just made me do. Look what you made me do. Look."

It is very bad.

But, it does illustrate (repeatedly and annoyingly) a pervasive attitude that plagues us moderns; namely, the view that other people make us feel and do whatever it is that we feel and do.

"I didn't want to, I wasn't going to, I wouldn't have, but... Well... YOU. You did that thing, and now I have to do this thing. This thing that, by the way, I swear is very unlike me to do."

It's dramatic. I guess it's compelling.

And it certainly lets us off the hook.

The moment I make you out to be responsible for my behavior, I can act as though I get off scot free. The burden lies on you, my friend. My depression? You treated me poorly. The plate I just threw across the room? You made me angry. My raping you? You wore that skirt.

I, the supposed actor, am reduced to nothing more than the end product of a chain of external happenings over which I have no control.

There is no free will in this. No personal agency. No personhood, period.

And yet, this modus operandi has its appeal.

As Tom Waits, in a much better song, puts it, "We are all looking for somebody to blame."

We all want to do whatever it is that we do, and we want to be able to be able to get away with it by pointing the finger at something outside of ourselves. We want something, or someone, to use as an explanation for the source of our miserable feelings and our miserable behavior.

If you pay attention, you'll notice that the people and circumstances we blame come and go. But the blame - the tendency to blame, the impulse to blame, the desire to blame - remains.

Bruce is getting at all of above in his quote.

He offers a view that would have us take full ownership of any and all of our emotional reactivity at any given moment.

This means that we drop the other person/situation from the explanations that we offer up about our feelings and behaviors.

No more: "You pissed me off," "She broke my heart," "You made me hurt you."

No more: "Look what you made me do."

Instead, it's something more along the lines of, "My feelings and behavior have everything to do with me, my life history, and I how I bring those into the present moment."

This is the reassumption of personal responsibility. The foundation of personal agency.

I take full ownership of my feelings and my behaviors. You can poke me, you can prod me, but you can't get me to (pretend to) give you my personal power.

This practice helps us come home to ourselves. It makes us less dependent on the ebbs and flows of an external world over which we have very little control. It puts us firmly in the driver's seat of our well-being, of the way we feel, and the way we act.

I hope Taylor re-writes her song. I think a much better, far more empowering version of it would go something like, "Look what you thought you could make me do. You can't make me do; nothing I do is because of you." That's true girl boss energy.

To end, I'll turn to another therapist, Terry Real, who gets at this same thing:

I don't believe in the conception of provocation. "The reason I raped you is because you wore a mini skirt. The reason I'm angry is because you're annoying me." Everybody is responsible for their own feelings, let alone their own behaviors. Nobody makes you feel anything; you feel that way because of a story you made up about it.

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