Manipulated

If you are clear that intense or "bad" emotions are a sign of things going wrong, you are being emotionally manipulated.

The passive voice is essential here—you will make the entire world the agent of your manipulation, but you are in the BEINGNESS of being manipulated.

No matter the course you have set for yourself, if someone else has a big feeling, it's an obstacle to navigate, a distraction from the original aim. Even if someone doesn’t want their emotion to change the plan, expression of emotion triggers your patterns of being manipulated.

But contrary to what you might have learned as a child, big feelings, bad feelings, these are not for fixing.

If you truly desire to provide for emotions, provide them with SPACE. Welcome them, rather than taking them as a rebuke, hurrying to fix something so everything can be alright again, shunting them out the door.

When you have set a course for yourself and for those you steward, let emotions be indicators of pacing and spacing.

The thing all women want to feel and hear and know from a man is "I got this."

When she's in a big feeling, the last thing she needs is for you to abandon your course. Safety for her big feelings means safety that her big feelings will not alter the course through their expression. You can always slow down, pause, and hold silence. The impulse to fix her emotions begins with making them wrong. Creating space and stillness for the expression begins with knowing they are alright.

If you have adjusted your personal course, your personal fulfillment, your personal nourishment, in accordance with avoiding someone else's feeling about your pursuit of certain courses, you are set up in manipulation and resentment.

It is only under these conditions that you can maintain the disempowerment that has grown to be a comfort around you, there's nothing, really, you can do! But damn it, you're trying at this thankless task. You're dragged about by demands because you have lost the thread of your own motivation; perhaps you've never held that thread.

If her big bad emotions are your failures, nobody is safe.

If there is space for her big bad emotions, if, in truth you recognize that she cannot have a "bad" emotion, she feels safe without you altering course. That's safety on two levels.

Emotions are not threats. Treating emotions as threats is a threat.

Like if there were sugar ants on the picnic blanket, it’s no threat, but spraying the picnic blanket and food with ant killer would be a threat.

Responding to a threat when there is only safety introduces violence.

Control is violence.

She wants to feel. She might also want to feel that she doesn’t want to feel the way she feels. She does not want to control you, and she does not need you to control her. She can feel.

Validating her feelings is worlds apart from endorsing her narratives. Narrative is another form of control. When you maintain control of yourself and your course, you allow her to feel her own emotions, to gain awareness of her own grasping for safety. You hold a bastion of reality for her to touch in on.

You can always say to her "I have reached my limit for hearing words about this. I welcome your nonverbal expression. If you need to speak about this I'd like to separate so you can call someone else to speak to." This is about your personal availability, creating space for the feeling while holding your boundary about narrative, creating space for her potential desire to speak (to someone else) honoring that she might prefer to vent her own way.

Being emotionally manipulated is a way of being, a set of practices, a reliable pattern. The way I said to my friend, “Peace be with you,” and he HAD to say “and also with you.” A habitual response is a powerful compulsion, something feels unfinished, a tension lingers in the air, if we attempt a new response.

So it will be if you make space for a woman’s emotions, true space without fixing them or taking them on. Your compulsive responses will hang about you in the air, you will bite your tongue and swallow your breath, and probably at first you will burst in with something, before too long.

Peace be with you,

I first did this with prayer. I asked god to please help me keep my mouth shut. Please god, help me keep my mouth shut.

And it takes the strength of the almighty, at times, to enter a new pattern, to let emotions linger in the air unfixed, to hear that someone has died and not immediately say that old impotent standby “I’m sorry,” to see a child you decided was too young complete a task with their patient parent standing by.

Yes, my love, in the end it is the emotions within us that truly need taming. The fear that fears there might be something to fear. The impulse, the hunger, the panic, the habit.

When I took my attention off fixing the emotions of other people, it HAD to come home to me. I had to see it was always my own emotions I was trying to fix, through controlling the world, through offering the right response.

and also with you.