Joe discovered something deeper beneath the impulse to fix his partner’s emotions: “What I’m actually doing is I am trying to make them feel a certain way so I don’t have to feel a certain way.” Every emotion he struggled to sit with in his wife or kids was one he wasn’t allowed to feel as a child.
This reframes emotional caretaking from seemingly altruistic (“I’m trying to help”) to self-serving (“I need you to stop feeling that so I can avoid feeling it myself”). The airplane test makes it visceral: when a kid cries on a plane, the frustrated passengers are the ones who weren’t allowed to cry as children.
“What I’m actually doing is I am trying to make them feel a certain way so I don’t have to feel a certain way. It’s even more manipulative than I thought.”
This pattern is self-perpetuating — by managing others’ emotions, we never develop tolerance for our own discomfort, which keeps us needing to manage others’ emotions. The exit is learning to sit with the emotions in ourselves first.
Related Concepts
- Fixing your partner’s emotions is manipulation, not love
- Emotional avoidance creates blind spots
- Fear of anger drives conflict avoidance
- Doing emotions at people means you’re not actually feeling them
- Caretaking manages others’ emotions to avoid your own
- Caretaking is a strategy to feel love through managing others’ happiness
- Trying to feel your feelings is as much resistance as trying not to feel them