My Therapist Finally Told Me Something I Hate

Last week my therapist told me something that I did not like. She told me that it’s not another person’s  job to make me feel good.

Logically, that makes sense — I shouldn’t rely on someone else for my feelings. But in practice it gets a little fuzzy for me. 

If I share something bad that happened at work with a close friend, I have grown to expect that they will offer reassurance and support of my feelings. They’ll commiserate with my frustration, and they’ll most likely assure me that I’m in the right, or they will gently explain another way of looking at it to make me feel better. If I share a concern about my relationship with my boyfriend, I have grown to expect that he will reassure me that my concerns are unfounded. I have in turn, grown to rely on these responses to feel better about my own feelings regarding these subjects. 

But apparently, I automatically expect too much. And this is a tough pill for me to swallow. Turns out, there’s a very fine line between leaning on friends and family for support and validation, and relying on their responses completely for my wellbeing, and I have been erring more on the latter side than the former. 

Most of the time, when we share our feelings, we are looking for validation. Sometimes we are also looking for solutions, but either way it can never be someone else’s responsibility to fix your feelings or your situation for you. Someone else can’t change your feelings and they also probably can’t change your situation independently of you, which means you have to take whole ownership of them yourself. 

What does the difference look like in practice? Here’s an example: 

Let’s say I am super nervous about my sister moving away. I’m worried they won’t have time for me, we won't see each other as much, and we won’t be as close. I go ahead and share these feelings with my sister. 

Now, in order for me to feel better, I want my sister to tell me that the situation I fear won’t happen, that they’ll call all the time, and they’ll visit and it’ll be just fine. That is the reassurance I’m looking for. But in this scenario, I have taken my anxieties about something, projected them onto my sister, and then made it their problem to fix for me. I have told myself that  I won’t feel better about this situation unless I get this reassurance. 

However, in the model my therapist presented, I must first recognize that these are my own internalized anxieties, probably based on some trigger event or past experience and then if I still choose to share my feelings with my sister, I have already done the work of owning my feelings. 

My sister should still validate my anxieties — ‘that makes sense why you’d feel that way’, ‘I’m stressed about leaving too’ -- and they could also still provide support --‘we can work together to stay close’ -- but they only need to offer that much . In this scenario, my sister should be able to say almost any variation of validating what I’m feeling, and because I have taken responsibility for them, that will be enough.

Recently if the first scenario didn’t happen and I didn’t get the exact reassurance that I’m expecting, then I left the interaction feeling disappointed and frustrated. I didn’t even realize this was happening because many of my friends automatically offer the response I’m looking for since we are so similar. Even when I would preface my interactions with what I was looking for (i.e. just wanting to vent vs. solution),  sometimes the other person just doesn’t know what to say, or there’s nothing for them to do, or maybe they can’t relate to your feelings and the most they can say is ‘it’s understandable you feel that way’. 

Honestly, this type of scenario feels cold to me. But maybe that’s because I’m not used to it. While having this conversation I actually straight up told my therapist I’d rather someone lied and gave me the reassurances I craved rather than the simple validation above. 

And when I said that out loud, I realized that maybe I am going about this the wrong way. If I’d rather someone was dishonest with me, albeit in a benign sort of way, then there might be something flawed in my approach. 

And the frustrating part to realize about myself is that maybe I haven’t been taking as much ownership of my feelings as I thought I was. I have such strong intimate relationships in my life that I have integrated those people into my coping mechanisms. I have learned to rely on their specific responses to get me through things. But as I get older, and my relationships change and new people come into play, maybe it’s not that simple anymore. 

I can’t just expect others to make my bad feelings go away, even if they are the root of those bad feelings. My feelings are my own and they are solely based on my immediate reactions to certain situations and my unique set of experiences. It is reasonable to lean on my relationships to help me feel less alone or to provide additional perspective, but only I can truly make myself feel better and maybe I need to be more aware of how much I let others influence the relationship I have with myself.

I know some people even have the opposite problem. They don’t lean on people enough and try to take care of everything on their own without even the barest validation or support. This also isn’t the right path. We need our relationships. What is important here is balance. It is taking ownership for oneself while still leaning on people to add to our lives, and our sense of place in the world. This is a balance that I thought I already had down, so it was rough to realize how badly aligned I have been. But maybe this is one of those things that is a work in progress your whole life. What do you think?

PC: Grace Margaretha; NY, NY