Can anyone MAKE you feel something? A commentary on sticks, stones, and how words will never hurt me

Let us not forget the power of language to shape our experiences. When teaching, I am ever-mindful of the words I use to explain a certain topic or to keep the class on schedule. I want the learning experience to be one that invites learning and doesn’t shut anyone down. That said, I also must remember that my students are responsible for their own reactions and responses to what I say.

Remember Aretha Franklin’s lyric, “You make me feel like a natural woman…”? I always loved the music but took exception (at the time, an uninformed, visceral exception) to the notion that anyone can make me feel something I don’t myself choose to feel. Since then, I have come to the informed conclusion that no one can “make” me feel anything.

Recently, a client of mine was describing a difficult conversation with an employee, one in which there were strong feelings on both sides. “He made me feel terrible,” my client said.

There’s nothing abnormal about that utterance — we say things like it all the time. For example, we might say, She makes me so frustrated, or, you’re making me really unhappy.

Without question, such statements serve a useful purpose–particularly when we’re able to express them in the moment–because they clarify and reveal our emotional state. Anytime we can articulate our feelings regarding another person, rather than require them to guess, communication becomes far more accurate, effective, and at times, fun.

But! The idea that someone can “make” you feel is also fraught with a kind of fatal flaw, one that often makes communication more difficult. Saying that someone else “makes us feel” an emotion suggests that they are responsible for our emotional state. Can you see how that is  highly problematic? When another person’s statements and behavior trigger an emotional response in us, it is inaccurate to presume that the other person is the responsible party and that we are some sort of innocent bystander.

We aren’t.

You are not a passive recipient of the data through which we interpret and make sense of the world. We are actors in absolutely every stage of the process of gathering, interpreting, and responding to those inputs, which inputs include other people’s utterances and behaviors. It is up to us, personally, to take those inputs, process them, and then take responsibility for how we respond.  

This process is nicely set forth in the so-called Ladder of Inference, developed by Dr. Chris Argyris, a longtime professor at Harvard Business School, who built on the work of linguist (and U.S. Senator) S.I. Hayakawa and philosopher Alford Korzybski.

There are four rungs on this Ladder:

1. From all observable data, you select specific data to focus upon.
2. You interpret this data and invest it with meaning; hence, inferring what the other person meant.
3. You develop theories and beliefs that explain your interpretation.
4. You take action on the basis of your theories and beliefs.

Consider the following when an interpersonal interaction is triggering an emotional reaction:

1. Our brains determine which of the other person’s statements and behavior to focus on, while at the same time ignoring a huge amount of other data points. The choices (yes, choices) we make regarding what to pay attention to, and what to ignore, are profoundly influenced by our cognitive biases. One example of such biases is the “Halo Effect,” whereby we project angel-like traits onto the other person and ignore their devil-like tendencies. Or, the “Fundamental Attribution Error,” whereby we selectively attend to data that renders the other person as completely at fault.
2. We then interpret the other person’s statements and behavior in order to render it meaningful. There are many possible interpretations; the ones we assign to this data are derived from our mental models. Mental models are the “lenses” through which we view the world. If your lens is cloudy, you are apt to see yourself as a victim.
3. Within a few nanoseconds, we arrive at theories and beliefs regarding the other person’s motives and intentions. These are our interpretations. Such interpretations are informed by our mental models and subjective memories of past experiences with this person and others. These interpretations are what we might call a “conceptual framework” upon which we arrive at a choice of responses or, worse, reactions.
4. Finally, we act. We react. We respond. But please note that our emotional responses are actions regardless of whether or not we express them outwardly. Emotions are physiological events, starting with the release of neurotransmitters in our brain that trigger a cascade of bodily reactions: changes in our heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, hearing, and vision, etc. These internal responses, reflections of an emotional state, result in external expressions, both large and small, and include facial expressions and body language, to our manner of speaking, to the actual content of our statements.

Can you see how each of us – individually – are responsible for how we respond to another person?

When we say, “You make me feel…” we’re shirking that responsibility and larding it onto the other person. At that moment we’re acting like a victim.

Go to your own personal “App Store”

What is needed is a kind of software re-set, an update to the applications residing in our minds. Various theorists refer to such brain software as “mindsets.” Which one would you rather have loaded into your head?

The Victim Mindset? This is to say, “I view myself as separate and disconnected from situations as they occur. Circumstances and events happen to me. I believe there is nothing I can do to affect the situation.”

Or …

The Responsible Mindset? This mindset says, “I view myself as an integral factor in all situations. Every situation occurs and unfolds as it does in some measure as a direct outcome of my actions, non-actions and interpretations. I believe there is always something I can do to affect the situation.”

Stanford professor Jeff Pfeffer had this to say:

Responsibility entails feeling powerful and believing one has some obligation to make the world a better place. The responsibility mindset is simply seeing oneself as an actor affecting what goes on, rather than being in a more passive role of having things happen to oneself…

In the end, it is all about which mindset to employ. You are either a victim or not. I choose not to be a victim. I choose to recognize my role and my responsibility in all interactions, both effective ones and the ineffective ones.

It is all about how you choose to see what is going on. No one can make you feel what you don’t want to feel.

PS: in searching for the graphic to use with this post, I found it hard to find the old proverb. Our world, especially in this day and age of #MeToo, is filled with the anger of words and how overly sensitive we have all become. I see this as a sad commentary. It can only lead to no good. You are responsible for your responses. You can choose to reject the words. No one else needs to do it for you.