Making Marriage Work Part 3: Owning Your Feelings

Owning your feelings takes commitment and humility. Owning your own feelings is critical to making your marriage a good one. This can be difficult but when done correctly it is actually very liberating. Frequently we can feel that someone else is responsible for how we feel. This belief leads to a loss of personal control and power and leads us to further believing that we are not responsible for our own behaviours. This belief results in a loss of love that would otherwise potentially come your way.

For any effective mental health and therapeutic work to succeed taking personal responsibility is necessary but not necessarily very comfortable. Taking responsibility for our feelings, attitudes, and behaviours is key to our spiritual and mental health. Taking responsibility for our responses can support meaningful progress in counselling.

I wish to further qualify this by saying that there are many individuals who over-blame themselves for everything while others choose to blame everybody else for everything and then again there is a minority that choose to “own their stuff” by taking responsibility for those things that they are personally responsible for. I know this seems like tough medicine, and it sure is, but this is the pathway to personal power and freedom and the possible eventuality of having a good marriage.

To take responsibility is to be mature, humble and a person who desires truth. To take personal responsibility is to be willing to see your behaviour and attitudes and recognize that they are yours and nobody else’s. It’s my responsibility how I act. The comedian, the late Flip Wilson, popularized the saying, “The devil made me do it!” In that joke we can find what is called a psychological projection, this is where someone else is to blame for one’s impulses or qualities that are undesirable or harmful.

Ask yourself, who is it that is experiencing the feeling? I am! Am I responsible for what I am feeling or not? If not, then it wouldn’t matter how I act out then, would it? That is what we would like to believe. When we feel emotionally injured we need to take responsibility for it immediately. Now, I am not suggesting that you shouldn’t be feeling the pain or that the reason you are feeling the pain is your fault rather I am saying, what you do with what you are feeling is where personal responsibility comes into play. Think about it this way, I am feeling the feelings the other person is not making me feel though they could be perpetrating it. Sometimes the line of responsibility can seem blurred especially when we are in great emotional pain, but if we can more objectively ask ourselves some questions and observe we can probably come to some better conclusions.

Taking responsibility for your responses does not mean accepting blame for another person’s harmful behaviour. If your relationship involves fear, coercion or abuse, your safety and individual support come first.

To some degree we all have had a victim mentality at some point in time, while there are those of us who still carry that around in our injured soul. Staying stuck in this can have us believing such negative beliefs as, “I always get the short end of the stick.” “I am always in trouble or to blame.” “Bad things always come my way.” “I always get stuck with …” “My spouse is always hurting me.” “There is no point in trying.” “If I don’t do it nobody else will.” “I’m the one that has to carry the load around here.” These and other such statements indicate a victim mentality which keeps us stuck in a belief of powerlessness and in the emotion of self-pity.

Using self-pity or the victim mentality creates for us a sub-standard quality of life. If you are stuck in a victim mentality or self-pity don’t deny it or blame and shame yourself simply recognize it, own it and realize that you need some good qualified help. We all need help from time to time in our lives because some tasks, including our own soul, need help from qualified others to get unstuck, healed, and move forward.

Feeling stuck can be difficult. With appropriate support, it may become possible to explore new choices and ways forward. We can choose freedom but you should know that this will take effort on your part. Approximately 3,300 years ago we see ancient Israel in slavery under Pharaoh where the people wanted to be free from the oppression of slavery but when they became liberated they then had to think, live and believe differently. This involved making difficult choices and doing difficult tasks and having hurdles to overcome. Even though Moses did much of the intervention with God’s help there was still a lot of struggle and a lot of work for the newly liberated nation. Having freedom takes bravery and determination working with someone qualified that can help you to finally experience the freedom that all people are supposed to enjoy.

Marriage is the one relationship that can be the most rewarding, the most intimate of any other relationship but it is also the most emotional relationship you will ever have. If you are reading this you probably have experienced what it is like for your partner to “push the buttons”. This experience is the result of two people who usually are acting out of hurt feelings and therefore one or the other party is punishing their partner in return by their own reactive behaviour.

Sometimes you may experience your partner pushing your buttons and in turn you are being triggered emotionally, but they may not be doing it intentionally rather your negative experience is the result of some pain or painful events in the past that have not been processed by your brain as yet.

Think about a drinking glass. You and I are like that drinking glass and what is in that glass are all of our life’s experiences from the past and if filled with negative things then when current negative things happen our glass gets too full or starts to spill over resulting in feelings like you are going crazy from the emotional pain. If you don’t take ownership of this then the result will be a sense of powerlessness, a victim mentality, and self-sabotage of your most intimate relationship.

“Owning my own feelings” means that you refuse to be a victim anymore, you choose to get the help you need to begin your healing process and begin to communicate with your partner in a more meaningful way that supports healing, resulting in a better marriage relationship which will bring you closer and closer to the loving relationship you have wanted.