The Feelings Hot Potato
Those aren't mine, thank you very much
I was in my basement, stacking piles and piles of wood that my coparent and I had hurled down through the bulkhead. I was hot and sweaty, and kind of marveling at this thing that people did in Vermont to stay warm for the winter—namely, ordering cords of wood, stacking it, and then spending the whole season loading it into a behemoth of a woodstove to heat their houses. It was quaint, but I was enjoying the self-reliance aspect of this adopted home of mine.
We were listening to some music on my phone, which was in my back pocket, and as I went to skip through a song, I (compulsively, stupidly) checked my work email on a Saturday. NOTE: I don’t do that anymore.
A panicked parent had emailed me over the weekend, anxious about an impending deadline for their senior who was applying to colleges. She was afraid that an early decision form has been missed, and could I please check it as soon as possible and get back to her?
I kicked myself for opening the email, because now I had a gross decision to make: should I take care of the form and get back to the parent so I could prevent this nagging task from hanging over my head? Or should I leave the email ‘til Monday morning—which was the right move to train them about communicating about professional matters over the weekend, but would leave me feeling annoyed and anxious for two days.
That parent was feeling overwhelmed, nervous, and worried about her kid’s college application process, and instead of being able to hold all of those feelings ‘til Monday, she made a move to offload some of the worry onto me.
Classic human move.
Many years later, I was sitting in a pretty terrible meeting about one of my students. One of her parents was very upset about how the student was acting, claiming she was “out of control,” and that she “wouldn’t listen to anything she was told to do.”
Now, this student wasn’t terribly motivated at school, but she wasn’t a big trouble-maker, either, and she was pleasant enough to work with.
The parent was angry. Yelling, accusing the team of being ineffective, and demanding to know why we didn’t MAKE her follow directions and do her work. Their face was getting red, their voice was increasing in volume, and those of us sitting around the table were all feeling pretty uncomfortable and even a bit unsafe.
“Well, we have a hard time here the same way you do at home,” I said. “She’s 13. We can’t physically force her to pick up a pencil and write. We’re trying to make inroads where we can by building relationship and making small steps of progress.”
The parent exploded, and the meeting ended soon after without resolution.
I didn’t love the parent’s approach. In fact, it was a pretty awful meeting to be in. But I knew what was happening. The parent was feeling powerless and out of control. They wanted their kid to succeed, and she wasn’t. All of that worry and anger and feeling of helplessness was scary and big for the parent, so they tried to give those feelings away to us on the school team so we could hold some of them instead.
These examples are about my professional life, but this phenomenon happens all the time in human relationships. Emotions, especially big ones, can be shared by people, passed around, offloaded. A lot of us are trained in our early relationships or family constellations to be emotional caregivers by picking up those emotions and taking them on ourselves. Then, we do a dance our whole lives paying attention to how others feel and trying to ease their emotional burdens - often at the expense of our own feelings, wants, desires, or mental wellness.
This rings true for me. I find it’s most present in my closer, more intimate relationships. I want people to feel good, feel ease, feel happy. I hate when I cause people pain or sadness. One example: I deeply hate breaking up with someone. I can be in a relationship that I know isn’t working, or even in a non-relationship with someone I’ve gone on a couple dates with, and the moment when I have to tell someone “This isn’t working for me,” is so deeply troubling because somehow, I feel like it’s my job to manage the other person’s emotional landscape and not cause them any pain. (Spoiler: It’s not. No one will die because I break up with them. I’m awesome, but I’m not that awesome.)
But with time and practice, I’m starting to learn to pay attention to the opportunities I have to let people hold and feel their own feelings. I’m also starting to learn that I can tolerate the discomfort that causes me…though that takes a lot of practice.
I’ve learned, over the years, how common it is for people to try to play hot potato with their negative feelings, throwing them to the nearest person who might pick them up. It’s normal, and it’s human.
But we can choose not to take that emotional hot potato someone else is throwing at us.
That anxious parent concerned about the college application? I didn’t reply to her email until Monday morning. When she pushed back and told me how disappointed she was not to have heard from me over the weekend, I let her know that my time off of work was for focusing on my family and she should not expect to hear from me outside of school hours. I gently gave her back her anxiety (with an explanation that she, as a parent, could relate to), so she could do the work of figuring out how she wanted to manage those feelings.
It wasn’t my job to take care of those feelings for her.
I talk a lot with friends, colleagues, and clients about decisions they have to make that involve other people. And inevitably, they’ll tell me some version of “But I’m just so afraid of making them feel [insert hard emotion here].”
And I remind them that it’s not their job to manage other people’s emotions.
To be clear, I have this exact same conversation regularly with my own therapist, too, where she gives me that same reminder. This is work, and it takes time and slow progress.
It’s ok—important!—to be mindful of other people’s feelings. It’s good to think socially and have an awareness of how your actions affect others. But when you are making good, reasonable, ethical decisions that will, nonetheless, have an emotional impact on others, it’s ok. Their world will not end because they have to experience a hard feeling.
You have your own big beautiful messy emotional landscape to take care of. And that’s the garden you need to pay attention to. If someone in your world is not willing to take care of their own emotional garden, they can hire their own landscaper.
When’s a time you’ve given someone the gift of holding their own emotions?
Awwww such a good reminder as always. This is one I don’t tend to personally struggle with but I do struggle watching others struggle with it 🤣 particularly my best friend. That woman is holding A LOT of potatoes.
My therapist once suggested that I was wearing my catcher’s mitt when other people threw their emotions at me. Instead, she suggested that I visualize their criticisms sailing over my shoulder - I should just let them fly by. I practice that regularly. With a somewhat more aggressive stance, Maya Angelou writes: “I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back.” I think your point is kinder - you don’t need to throw something back, you just need to let it sail on by.