Okay, this is going to be a difficult one. It’s a bit difficult to explain and even harder to follow. Here is the general principle:
You CANNOT manage the emotions of other people! You can seek to understand them, but you cannot manage them. You can’t control the emotions of others, but you can influence them.
That’s hard, because we want to manage and control others’ emotions. We want to do that because we don’t like (none of us do) receiving bad emotions from others—we only want to be on the receiving end of good emotions from others.
I recently saw an old episode of The Big Bang Theory where everyone was mad at everyone else. Everyone was shouting. There was conflict everywhere. And Sheldon, the emotionally constricted figure, just went catatonic. He couldn’t control the emotional turmoil around him.
When you try to manage and control the emotions of others, you are, at that moment, in a precarious spot. You have taken on a responsibility you are not meant to have, and you simply do not have the resources to manage or control the emotions of others, so you will begin to use the wrong means to do so.…
