I Cannot Make You Happy
I cannot make someone else happy. To try to make another adult feel an emotion is to claim an arrogant amount of authority over their well-being and to discredit their own God-given abilities of control over their reactions.
I can hardly fathom the freedom, and honestly the conviction too, in this to its full capacity. I have lived most of my life looking for other people’s emotional shadows to disappear in. I have taken on someone else’s happiness, sadness, or anger as my own and simultaneously claim responsibility for it.
As if I am supposed to have this kind of authority over someone else.
If you know that someone else depends on you to define or validate their self-worth, and you continuously give them affirmation without encouraging boundaries, you’re enabling their dependency.
This thinly-veiled control over someone else’s life is suffocating to say the least, because we were never supposed to have it. To be honest, I don’t think I ever wanted it. If we were all honest with ourselves, none of us truly do. We’re wired to be interdependent on one another, yes. We need others to survive, but we are also wired to be autonomous, independent, and capable adults as well. Now, we can also influence others’ emotions because there is some responsibility we do have. If you know of a friend’s insecurity, to push that button, them get upset, and then your defense be, “Well it’s not my fault you’re upset. You should’ve chosen your emotions better,” is not only careless, but cruel. We have a responsibility over our words and actions, and if you know that what you say will strike a nerve, or cause that initial pang of hurt in someone else, that is your responsibility for choosing to say or do that thing. If you know that someone else depends on you to define or validate their self-worth, and you continuously give them affirmation without encouraging boundaries, you’re enabling their dependency.
Think of Eleanor Roosevelt’s famous words, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” What this also means is that we cannot make others feel inferior or superior without their consent either. If someone does something nice for me, I can choose joy and gratitude. This choice is “automatic, “ right? But then think about the cynic: they might choose skepticism instead. If someone says something really hurtful to me, I can choose inferiority, self-pity, or anger. Did they make me feel this? Did they threaten me to feel this way “or else?” No. The initial reaction of hurt might be there, but I choose what to do with it. I can choose to acknowledge the hurt, process the emotions I’m feeling, determine my next steps whether it be to confront the individual or enforce a healthy boundary, but those are all choices.
I choose to relinquish self-given responsibility for others’ happiness.