Be With

Culturally, here, in the United States, we have a strong sense of responsibility for our lives, our thoughts, and our feelings. This is a great ideal because it creates motivation, creativity toward change, and ownership of our experience. Sometimes we react against this ideal because we understand it is not 100% accurate. We cannot always control what happens to us, and we have difficulty reconciling our sense of agency and responsibility with the circumstances of chance, fate, or luck. Sometimes we feel victimized by life. We work at understanding that while we cannot control everything, we do have a great deal of influence on how our lives unfold. In other words, it still matters that we take responsibility and do our best.

One problem with this view of personal responsibility is that when something happens that we do not want to have happen or when we have feelings that we do not want to have, we–and everyone else around us–believe we are responsible for those accidents of fate and for those unwanted feelings. In other words, if we are angry, depressed, anxious, irritable, frightened, disgusted or otherwise in an unwanted emotional state, we blame ourselves and other people blame us as if we have failed to regulate our lives.

The people around us may feel personally attacked, or personally responsible for how we feel, or we may feel that they are responsible for how we feel. In other words, unwanted experience becomes damaging to our relationships because we believe there is some cause in ourselves or in the people around us for the bad state of mind. As a result, We become emotionally isolated both in our minds and in real life.

This all leads to the concept that being in a bad mood is normal. And it should be allowed. And we should be willing to “be with” a person who is in a bad mood, or with other people when we are in a bad mood. Nothing is required. We need not cheer up. We need not cheer the other person up. We are conveying the understanding that we care about that person and that we care about ourselves, and that is not only when we are in the “right” frame of mind. It’s a simple notion, but not always obvious.