I’m STILL learning. I’m learning that I don’t have to do things that I 100% feel obligated to do. I’m learning to not get overly attached to anyone and let them take over all of my time (which historically has caused me to deter from my goals).
I am a very empathetic person and I was raised in a family where I played the role of the “therapist” of the family. It was unsafe for me to NOT anticipate the moods and needs of others. I have been undoing these traumas of my childhood (with a lot of therapy and self-work) but I still have a lot to learn.
Recently I found myself worrying about and feeling guilty about letting someone down before anything has even happened. This is my brain trying to predict the future and dream up the worst case scenario as it is want to do. I keep reminding myself that first of all, I cannot predict the future, secondly, I am not a mind reader. Also, I was using the cognitive distortion of black and white thinking here. Relationships aren’t black and white there is a lot of gray area and we can never know how they’re going to go.
Managing other people’s emotions is exhausting, draining, and unhealthy. Something I’ve done my whole life is automatically think about how the other person feels first, (never considering that my feelings had any significance whatsoever) this left me not knowing how I felt about so many things. This also caused me to be disingenuous because I honestly didn’t know another way to be.

When we attempt to take responsibility of other people’s feelings we are doing them a disservice and not giving them the credit of being a capable, functioning adult. It is assuming that they cannot manage their own emotions.
I am cringing thinking about how often I have done this in my past! Thinking ahead and assuming how they might react actually takes away from their own experience while making assumptions that might be totally false.
This is likely a projection and/or a distraction from our own feelings. This can hold us back and disconnect us from understanding our own truth. Rather than thinking about our feelings we’re thinking more about how the other person feels instead.

This was a huge realization I had today. It feels weird to say, but I am going to focus more on how I feel and to communicate said feelings. It usually takes me a while to process my feelings and then turn them into words but I think with practice this will get easier…