Dear Helen,
It seems like a popular thing these days, to tell people that they're in control of their reactions. I see it on Instagram a lot, especially. "You can't always control what happens, but you can control how you react to it." That kind of thing. I hear parents talk about needing to teach kids to "control their emotions," too. Someone recently suggested a mantra of "I'm in charge of how I feel." It seems a little...off. But I’m not sure why. What do you think? Is it true that we're in control of how we feel and how we react to things?
Thank you!
Not Sure
Dear Not Sure,
In a word (or 13): I don't see how we could possibly be in control of such things.
I mean, I get the sentiment behind these statements.
We like to feel we're in control. On some level, we know we're not, at least not ultimately—but in an effort to empower ourselves, to maintain some sense of agency, I think we sort of parse out which little components of an experience are "ours." We like to imagine that there are pieces that we consciously and capably decide for ourselves.
Surely our feelings are in our domain, we think. Surely we choose how to feel, how to view some experience, what words come out of our mouth in response to an experience.
But I don't see how this could be true.
Let's say someone mispronounces a word. It's not a mistake that they feel embarrassed about or even correct themselves over; more like they think this mispronunciation is actually how the word is supposed to be pronounced.
We could say the person who mispronounces the word is in control of how they pronounce it, right?
But that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, because a person can only pronounce a word in the way that occurs to them. They don't choose to mispronounce it, just as they don't actually choose a pronunciation to begin with. They just go ahead and say the word in the way that occurs to them, maybe in the way they've said it in their mind when they've read the word on paper.
The same could be said for any feeling or reaction of ours.
We're not choosing to feel a negative emotion. We're not choosing to say the unkind thing or to have the big, dramatic response. We're not choosing to make bad decisions (even though some of the decisions that are made turn out to have undesirable consequences).
We're doing what occurs to us in any given moment.
Only always!
Maybe some folks would still see that as choosing. They believe people have agency over what occurs to them—anger or gratitude, kindness or unkindness, right or wrong (as if we always know ahead of time which is which!).
If we could choose, if we were in control, wouldn't we pick the best feelings and responses and actions, though? Wouldn't we make it so that we're experiencing only positive feelings? Wouldn't we make only the right decisions?
So, while I understand the sentiment behind the statements you shared—the desire for it to be the case that we're in charge of certain things about ourselves and our inner workings—I just don't see how that's possible.
What I do see is that we're all doing the best we can, the best we think to do, every moment of every day. No exceptions.
Sometimes this looks lovely and sometimes it looks awful. But I'm not sure it's ever helpful to focus on choice in all of this.
'Choice' suggests it's our fault that better feelings and reactions aren't occurring to us. Which makes us feel even worse about the ones that are.
Maybe we're simply better off remembering that new ways of seeing are becoming available to us all the time. Change is happening effortlessly, without our involvement. Fresh feelings and reactions will occur to us, because that's the nature of life.
I hope this helps!
Love,
Helen