Trying to assume responsibility for the feelings of people around you is a somewhat paranoid and totalitarian impulse—but it is reasonable to be paranoid if you have been constantly punished for not having to control other people’s emotions.https://twitter.com/Meta_Aesthetic/status/1262155229803409409?s=20 …
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In my case, if I wasn’t able to control myself to the utmost degree, my father would begin yelling at me / bring down some punishment. Worse, I could never predict exactly what would make him enraged, and he never explained. It was easier to assume *anything* could set him off.
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If you can’t trust those around you to be emotionally stable, you have to enforce stability-by-proxy—by becoming the locus of control for another person’s experience. In the process you lose sight of yourself.
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That is the pinnacle of this worldview, where being alive and taking up space is a zero-sum game. If your existence brings about pain and volatility in other people, it is better not to know anything of it.
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Ironically, this flight from the self is exactly what will drive you to trample over other people (as covert narcissism), or make you into an impotent coward that could never help anyone else's pain. At least that is what it has done to me, and now I have the work of undoing it.
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In hindsight, all my attempts to keep the emotions of those around me in line only served to keep them in emotional immaturity and stagnation. Ex: Dad doesn’t have to learn to keep a handle on his temper if that emotional labor has been outsourced to his children.
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But in this sort of relationship, no one feels truly empowered and independent, and no one is satisfied. It's always hard to process and write through this sort of material, but I can see that there's another way, and try to act better with the people around me.
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