Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott.
I'm right at the last stage of my walk as I walk back home to my mum in Exeter and I'm in some of the back roads.
They're quite quiet but you might hear the occasional car go by and today I just want to reflect on the way it works in life around whether somebody can make you feel a certain way and it's really helpful to realise that nobody can make you feel anything.
Nobody can actually make you feel sad or angry or upset because it's just not the way the system works or that's not the way our world works.
Somebody does not have that power over any of us although it can look like they do and I'm just going to give you a couple of examples of this and one of them is a recent conversation I had with my cousin who's now an adult.
She's a bit older than me and she had some challenges in her childhood so when she was a younger teenager she would come down and stay with us for a couple of weeks and we always used to look forward to it as a family to have the cousin come and stay with us for a couple of weeks.
I was a bit younger than her and when I met her recently she told me of an instance that obviously she'd remembered for quite some time and it was something I had no recollection of and when I was younger my family used to call me Libby.
My parents called me Libby and I think maybe my siblings called me Libby and it's it was a childish name that never really felt like it fitted me so I never really liked it that much and as an adult I call myself Liz and everybody calls me Liz nowadays.
But there was a time when my cousin came down that she called me Libby and apparently,
And I have no recollection of this,
As a child I said to her don't call me Libby only my family can call me Libby.
Now I'm assuming that as a child I probably didn't want anybody else to call me Libby because I didn't particularly like that as a pet name but for her,
Somebody who really enjoyed being around our family it kind of felt like a bit like a maybe a slap in the face or a rejection of her being part of the family.
I had no intention of that being the case and sadly that's probably how it landed for her.
So it made me realise it was really useful for me to realise that there are probably lots of times in my life that are littered with instances that where I've done something inadvertently and unintentionally that somebody has felt has slighted them or hurt them.
And there are also times when I intentionally go out to hurt people and for example just recently my husband and I were organising a meeting and we were just doing a little bit of a planning session for the meeting and I came up with an idea and he said I don't think that's going to work and I felt my ego flare up in this sort of self-righteous indignant way and I was like well if you don't think that's going to work you come up with some ideas then.
Now that was absolutely intentional to offer a verbal slap to my husband which was not my most charitable moment and we both instantly saw it and it was all fine but I guess it just goes to show that there are times when we say things unintentionally and they have an impact and there are times when intentionally we say things to have an impact.
So what's really good to know with both these stories is that it's impossible for anybody to make you feel a certain way and that's what I just want to share with you today.
You see it's not the words that I use,
It's not the actions that I take that hurt somebody,
It's the story that they hold about what I should or shouldn't do or the person I should or shouldn't be or the story they hold about what's the right and wrong way to behave.
It's the story that you hold and that I hold that is the bit that has us feel insulted or angry or feel like someone has intentionally gone out of their way to hurt us and without that story there are just words.
When I am in a place of deep settledness and groundedness people can say whatever they like and I am unperturbed.
When I am lost and unsettled thinking and I have lots of stories running about how people should or shouldn't behave it really looks like they have the potential to hurt me.
So today is just a reflection and my question to you is can you see this that nobody has the power to make you feel a certain way.
What has you feel a certain way is a story that you have running about the way life should be and whether or not somebody is living up to that expectation and I'm not saying stories are right or wrong I'm just saying it's really useful to see that that is how life works and nobody has the power to make you feel anything.
