Why you keep managing other people's emotions?

Have you ever caught yourself saying, “I don’t really do that anymore”? Then, when someone asked why, you realised that you only stopped because someone else didn’t like it.

Are you one of those people who are really affected when someone close to you is in a bad mood? And you don’t even know what caused it. Or maybe you do. So, over time, you avoid doing anything that might slightly put their mood in the wrong way. Without even noticing, you adjust your life. You keep doing that for some time, and eventually you hear yourself say, ‘Oh, yeah, I don’t do that anymore.’

It could be any version of it:

• I don’t go out and party anymore cause it puts them in a bad mood.

• I stopped doing that. I actually don’t even enjoy it all that much. (Your friends would probably know that you loved doing that thing.)

• And there’s this version where you ask people to adjust on their behalf: “Could you please not play this song? It gets on their nerves.”

What I find frightening is the fact that the other person often doesn’t even know it’s happening. They didn’t ask you to stop. They just reacted enough times that your brain decided it would be better if you didn’t do that particular thing. I read the following slightly paraphrased sentence somewhere recently:

‘A grumpy person dictates everyone around them, without ever raising their voice.’

That was the inspiration for this essay because I started noticing this around me and how easily people change their own lives. Only because you don’t want to see someone in a bad mood. You would rather lie to them about going somewhere because if you told the truth, they would sulk.

You would not bring up your own reality of struggling with something because you know that you always have to manage this person’s emotions, who thinks that everything wrong in the world is happening only to them. Everyone else’s life is fun and dandy.

I wanna ask, is anyone’s life ever completely fun and dandy? It might be better comparatively, sure. Or maybe some people are less affected by things than others, but almost everyone you know has something they are figuring out or dealing with.

If one person is allowed to show their emotions all the time in a dynamic, it could be a family, or friends, or any other kind of relationship, and the other person is always managing their emotions, do you think that it stays sustainable?

It might seem like the answer is no. That is not the case, though. I think it works in the same way that Stockholm Syndrome would; people become so emotionally connected to their captor (an emotional one in this case) that leaving them feels impossible. I am not saying it is the same; only trying to draw a parallel here.

It makes you wonder: if you are doing so much for them, you must really love them.

Every compromise feels small on its own. But after months or years, you’ve invested so much of yourself that walking away feels less like losing a relationship and more like losing your identity. The one you have built around them.

It’s a very neat psychological trick. If you do anyone even a small favour, something like letting someone borrow a pen, you tend to like them more. Now, imagine if you do so much for someone, wouldn’t you believe that you care for that person with your whole heart?

All of us do this; some of us do this in a balanced way. Every relationship has a way of changing you. But if it is only you who is changing and you have forgotten what it feels like to do something because you enjoy it, there might be something that needs to be addressed.

If you’ve recognised yourself in this pattern or in my work for a while and think that you are ready to understand why this keeps repeating, reply to this email with this:

“I think I’m stuck in…”

Every month I work with a small number of people who are ready to understand and change a recurring emotional pattern. I’ll personally read and reply to every. If I think working together would actually help, I will let you know what the next step looks like.

P.S. If you are not reading this in your email, you can send the sentence to: unpackwithmehak@gmail.com with the subject: STUCK