Still on the emotion-dismissing thing

[flamingsword]

Today has just been one long literal headache. It is mostly better now, but still. Ugh. But when I get feeling better after periods of pain it makes me introspective.

So: since I always feel responsible for other people's emotions when they are around me, and I have anxiety that says that in order to be truly helpful I basically have to predict the future and head all ill-feeling off at the pass, I am basically a neurotic mess on the inside when I am not on anxiety suppressing meds. I don't really have very many skills for coping with other people's bad feelings other than to feel bad right alongside them or to over-function and try to fix things that are not mine to fix. And I do this in all of my relationships. It's why I'm a bomb-ass massage therapist and occasionally an invasive and overly "helpful" friend. But it gets taken advantage of by people with learned helplessness, and worse, it can teach people in relationships with me to let me do everything instead of telling me to back off and let them take care of their own responsibilities and emotions.

So it is a huge piece of how I got into a codependent relationship; even though the beginning of the relationship looked healthy to me, I was slowly training the boy to not take responsibility for his feelings. Which is kinda shitty in hindsight. And he probably didn't even notice that part of things. So I guess I have to forgive him for a few of the things that went wrong, seeing as they were effectively my doing.

Introspection is uncomfortable. Boo. Does anybody have some good podcasts or book recs for emotional skills about letting other people handle their own feelings? I already know about Brene Brown, her entire bibliography is on my list.

Comments

[lokifan]

This isn't quite a book rec, but Captain Awkward talks about this a lot and her archive's linked at the top of her site. I'll see if I can have a look through and see if I remember which ones talk about this most explicitly - a lot of them from 2019/2020 (where the blog's theme was "do less work") and some of the saying no/setting boundaries stuff discusses this, plus an old post called something like "a girlfriend is not a pacifier".

Also strongly rec reading the comments, and potentially asking for recs on this in the forum, I bet you'd get some good ones.

[flamingsword]

I have read some of CA’s stuff, or I would not be emotionally articulate enough to have made this realization. She’s a treasure, and it is a good idea to ask in her forums.

[lokifan]

Haha ofc, she's helped me so much too! I hope the forums help - I've never been in there but the comments there are so good, I bet they'd have good ideas/recs.