Are You Feeling Responsible for Others' Happiness?
Today, I wanted to talk a little bit about feeling responsible for everyone's happiness. I have clients who struggle with this all the time, including myself. I think a lot of women, and maybe especially moms (I don't want to leave out dads, I don't know their experience), have that feeling of responsibility for other people's happiness.
I don't know why it's a thing, but I feel especially during holidays and things like that, we want everything to go perfectly. We want our kids to have a perfect experience and a perfect life. We want everyone to be happy. And often it's at the expense of us.
I have one client who always goes a little bit bananas around the start of school, the start of her kids' sports teams, whether they're going to be picked, and she puts a lot of her own value, worth and happiness invested in her kids' success. And often your kids don't care really that much, right? Like, "Oh, I didn't make the team. I'm upset for a minute." But us as parents feel it, right? We want everyone to be happy and everything to be perfect.
Separating Our Happiness from Others'
I have that myself, second guessing what we do as women, as mothers. And I think that also being able to separate, of course we are responsible for our children, right? We want them to have a great life, but I'm not responsible for their happiness. That is on them. They have to create that space where they can internally be happy as long as you're doing keeping them healthy and have a good environment for them and everything.
But you're also not responsible for your husband's happiness or your boss's happiness or your parents' happiness. I think that we really, really, really take that on.
So what do we do? Well, we need to separate that self because we're only responsible for our own happiness. And if I'm happy, it's a lot more likely my family is going to be happy, too. People have to work out their own shit because I'm not them and I don't even know what's going to make someone happy, really.
I always say to my clients, you could give someone a million dollars and they could be pissed off that you only gave them a million dollars, I don't actually know what's going to make you happy.
So I think separating that is really, really important. Really getting inside yourself and figuring out what's so important about that. What is it about me that's getting the payoff from feeling like I'm making other people happy?
Examining the Need to Make Others Happy
Is it control? Gee, I would hate to think any of the people who work with me have control issues or myself. Is it that I want to control how other people respond? Is it that I have a low self worth and my self worth is based on how other people feel?
There could be a lot of stuff going on in there. Let's peel it apart. So I would say do some journaling, and here's what I would do:
Close your eyes.
Like I do with my clients, go back to the first time that you felt like you needed to be responsible for someone's happiness.
Do some journaling about that, what was going on, and if it wasn't from that far back, try to find an event previous to that, and then an event previous to that and see what sticks out in your mind.
You want to get to that root cause. So it's probably fairly early on with something like this. And then look at those events that you've journaled about and think about what can I learn from them? How can I now create positivity in my life from the things that happened in these events?
So maybe I can learn that I'm only responsible for me. I can let these things go. And once you've looked at that and gotten those positive lessons from that, now I want you to rewrite them. I want you to rewrite these events now with what you've learned from watching the old events.
Rewriting the Past for a Better Future
Once you have looked at the writing you've done around those old events, you have your learnings of things that empower you and what you could learn about yourself that are awesome. You want them to be positive from those events.
Now, go back and rewrite those events with a better possibility. What could you have done? And there's no guilt or shame around it, it's just what could have been another possibility that would have been authentic to me. Because when we're trying to please other people and basing our worth on their being happy, we're not being authentic and true to ourselves.
Rewrite these events in a new possibility. And this is not something that you can do all at once. But this could be a work in progress that you do a little bit over time. But I think it can be really powerful because then you're giving your brain the idea that you're able to change, you're able to rewrite the past. You can learn from these old patterns, but now make new choices.
And then it gets a little bit easier when situations come up where you might start to do things because it will make other people happy, but not you. You can start to sort of think, okay, well, maybe I want to make myself happy today, or maybe there's a way to make myself happy and possibly make someone else happy.
It's not that we're being selfish, it's that we want to be true and authentic to ourselves. And sometimes that means saying no. Sometimes that means saying, "I prefer doing something like this," or whatever you need to do without feeling guilt around it.
Focusing on Your Own Happiness
Try that exercise, see how it feels and see once you start to really peel away the onion, how that starts to change now how you can act in the present. Because we're always looking at the past and trying to release the past in order to change the present moment.
And remember, you can only be responsible for your own happiness. You can never, ever, ever make someone happy. They have to make their self happy.
You can be an amazing, kind person and be wonderful to people. It doesn't mean someone's going to be happy. You have no control over that, which kind of sucks, but it is what it is.
So give that exercise a try and see how it feels. Make sure you're following me on all my channels at breakthrough with Eleni.
