"You made me do it!" "You made me feel guilty!" "You made me depressed!" "You put me in this mood." "I did it because you made me do it!"
Many people actually believe that other people made them do this or that or put them in this or that mood. Nobody, but nobody, can make you feel this or that. Nobody can make you feel guilty, etc. If you feel depressed because Max (who could be a boy friend or girl friend, wife or husband, boss, colleague, client, audience or anybody else with whom you have or desire to have a relationship) said something, did something, etc., it is you who are making yourself depressed, as a reaction to Max, but Max is not making you depressed.
Let us look at a fairly common statement: "So and so made a fool of me." Can anyone make a fool (or a wise man) of you? Of course not. You either are a fool or you aren't a fool or you feel like a fool or you don't feel like a fool. Nobody can make you a fool, any more than anybody can make you a doctor. They can give you the books, the instruction, but you must make a doctor of yourself. But you can use what someone says to make yourself feel like a fool. This comes with special ease to those who have poor self-esteem and who are always terribly concerned with what other people think, and who are also terribly suggestible.
It is extremely important to clarify this issue. Putting responsibility for how we feel or act outside ourselves deprives us of the possibility of governing our own lives. This makes each of us a will-o'-the wisp, subject to the moods, words, and decisions of other people. This would mean that in order to change our particular situation, feeling, status, etc., we would have to change another person or persons with whom we come in contact. Fortunately, this is not so. We only have to change ourselves, a completely possible task. But in order to do this, we must take responsibility for ourselves. We can take that responsibility only if we realize that we may react to other people, but that we are doing the reacting. They are not making us do or feel anything.
I have heard parents say, "For the last twenty years I have lived only for and because of you." If a parent has lived only for you, then remember this is not your doing. It was his or her choice, not yours. You did not make them "live only because of you." You owe them nothing special for this. You still very much deserve to live your own life. This "last twenty years" kind of statement is based on this muddle and is designed to manipulate by generating guilt. It is a terrible burden to put on a young child who, in his innocence, feels that he not only now has responsibility for his own life, but also the crushing responsibility of his parent's life as well.
A friend of mine is a psychoanalyst. He told me that a patient said, "Doctor, I'm putting my life in your hands. Just take over for me." Whereupon my friend threw up his hands and replied, "Oh, no! I have enough to do living my life without taking over yours." He went on to add that he would help the patient resolve problems so that he would be better equipped to live his own life with greater success. Of course, what he said, in effect, was that each of us lives his own life and is responsible for it and that nobody makes you do anything. If you feel that someone is making you do something, chances are you are using that someone "to make you do what you want to do," unless you simply can't say no to anyone's pressure. But the problem, whatever it is, is yours, and this is good because it means that the possibility of resolving it is also yours and therefore can be done.
* Excerpted from the book, The Winner's Notebook, by Theodore Isaac Rubin, M.D.
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