Here’s another one for the emotional toolkit. It seems natural to most of us when we feel bad to look for a villain. Particularly when our uncomfortable feelings seem to arise around the actions of others, the impulse to blame them for our feelings and to direct our energy towards convincing them to change their behavior to resolve those feelings pops up pretty reliably.

One of the things Franklin Veaux says he learned the hard way in his (and Eve Rickart’s) book More Than Two is: “Just because I feel bad doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong.” So I started thinking about the whole idea of ‘you caused me to feel negative emotions, now I’m going to blame and shame you until you fix it’ through that lens.

First of all, did the person cause the negative emotions in question? Certainly it was their behavior that triggered the feeling, but that’s not the same thing. Often it’s more like, ‘I’m telling myself this story about why you did X, and so I feel Y’ Or maybe ‘I was in a bad mood anyway, so I seized upon X as a reason why’. Or perhaps ‘This thing you are doing reminds me of a bad experience I had, and now I’m upset.’

What would it mean to intentionally decouple that idea of causality? What if my first impulse was to say, you did X, and then I felt Y… instead of you made me feel Y by doing X?

For one thing, that gives control over the exploration and resolution of my feelings back to me. For another, it opens up more opportunities! When we approach someone with blame and demands that they change, they’re going to be busy dealing with that, maybe getting defensive. But if, in exploring my negative emotions without blaming anyone, I discover an unmet need at the root of the problem, now I can go to someone (possibly even the person whose behavior has triggered my feelings) and ask for what I need. I’m approaching them as a source of support instead of a source of my pain–and while getting that support is not inevitable, the chances do seem better! Perhaps there’s nothing concrete that a person can do to change the triggering situation or behavior for me. But maybe having them listen and recognize my feelings is a big part of what I needed from them in the end. What many of us really need, most times we’re feeling bad, is to have our pain witnessed! To feel understood, and less alone, is a powerful thing.

Certainly it’s up to me to manage my feelings. And up to me to share them, too, because when I’m in an intimate relationship, how I am feeling is important information for my loved ones to have. Maybe they hear how I feel and decide that they could treat me better. Not because I’m demanding they do so, but because they care about how I feel, and they needed to know about the impact of their choices on me.

So now I’m going to work to be able to say, ‘Hey, I’m feeling Y,’ and treat ‘you did X, and here’s why I wish you would make a different choice next time’ as a separate issue. I’m going to give not looking for a villain a try when I have uncomfortable feelings. Maybe I’ll look for some allies instead.