Worry About Yourself

In this episode, we’re talking about one of the most exhausting things so many of us do without even realizing it: trying to manage other people's emotions - their moods, reactions, expectations, disappointment, happiness. For years, I believed it was my job to keep everyone around me happy (spoiler alert: it wasn't). 

This is for anyone who's ever found themselves shrinking, overexplaining, walking on eggshells, anticipating someone else’s reactions or otherwise abandoning themselves in an attempt to control the outcome of a situation. Because here's the truth: nothing you say or do can make someone change who isn't ready and willing to. Also, realizing and accepting that it is not your responsibility to manage anyone's emotional landscape but your own might just change your life (it changed mine!)

💥Key Takeaways

• Why trying to manage other people's emotions is really about control, not love
• How people-pleasing often stems from a need to create safety for yourself
  The difference between caring for someone and taking responsibility for them
• Why emotional dependence on other people's moods leaves you constantly disappointed
• How trying to control others disconnects you from yourself
• The role boundaries play in creating genuine emotional safety
• Why growth often means accepting that some people won't like the new version of you
• How letting go of control creates space to finally focus on yourself  

🔥 In This Episode, I Talk About:

• How a preschool teacher's advice to my son Luke unexpectedly became one of the biggest lessons of my adult life 
• The ways I spent decades trying to manage other people's moods, reactions and expectations
• Why I believed being a good wife meant walking on eggshells and anticipating emotions
• How people-pleasing slowly disconnected me from myself and created deep resentment
• The painful realization that I can't "fix" other people - including my own children
• What I misunderstood about boundaries for almost my entire life
• Why trying to change someone else's behavior rarely works - and what to do instead
• How learning to tolerate other people's disappointment transformed my relationships
• The freedom that comes from accepting that some people simply won't like you - and being okay with that  

And if this episode hit home, share it with someone who spends too much time worrying about everyone else. Because one of the healthiest things you can do is exactly what Miss Lisa told four-year-old Luke: worry about yourself.

Transcript

Worry About Yourself: A Lesson from Preschool

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My oldest son, Luke, had a preschool teacher named Miss Lisa who had a famous line that we still actually use relatively often in our house. Worry about yourself. That's how she sounded, so that's how we say it. Thinking back, it makes sense that she would have to repeat that to four-year-olds, but also it's advice most adults could use. Why do we spend so much time and energy trying to manage other people? I know I'm guilty of it. I know I've struggled with it. Should we talk about it? I think we should talk about it. Let's go. Welcome back to the Karen Confidential. We'll talk about real life and better communication. I'm your host, Karen Campbell Smith. And before I get into the meat of the podcast, I want to point out, because you may be able to see it, I have this band-aid right here. So I have a PSA. Wear your damn sunscreen. Please, people. I live in the hellish state of Florida. It is so hot. I've lived here since I was 10. And I grew up in an era where not only did I not wear sunscreen, I would lay out for hours at a time, frying myself with tanning oil that had no SPF. Tanning oil, uh, baby oil. There were a couple times I laid out and sprayed Pam cooking spray on myself. So it's no surprise that I had to have a scalpel taken to this shoulder this week to have something biopsied. Also, hopefully you can't see it because I have a lot of makeup on. I had something burned off of my face for a third time pre-cancerous. So yeah, please wear your sunscreen. Also, people think that they want to live in Florida. Oh, it must be so nice. It's nice year round. Yeah, until it's freaking July and then it feels like you're on the face of the fucking sun. Swamp ass. Is that do people know that term? Is that just a Florida term? Let me explain what it is in case you don't know it. Swamp ass is when you go outside and it's so freaking hot that your undercarriage sweats, so then your underwear gets wet, and then whatever else you're wearing, shorts, pants, if you're really stupid, or nothing at all. Everything, the dress, like if you sit down, it's the dress, gets soaked with butt sweat. That's swamp ass. The best is when you're a girl in a dress and you get into a car with leather seats, and when you get up out of the car, there is a sweat ass and leg mark on the seat when you get up. It's so sexy, so feminine. It's my favorite. Like my legs sweat like any grown big ass man. So now you know that about me, and that's fun. On to what this episode is actually about. Worry about yourself. Oh, Miss Lisa, she was a saint for dealing with four-year-old Luke, too. And it is my intention next season to have both of my children on as guests. So you will have the lovely pleasure of meeting Luke. He's quite a character. But at four years old, he

The Illusion of Control: Managing Others' Emotions

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had been on, he was on his third preschool. He had been kicked out of two. Not for being like malicious or me, what he just wouldn't nap. So one of the schools didn't know what to do with him. And another school, there was like a whole biting thing that was happening. And so he, being Luke, took it to the next level and bit a kid on the face, like went full, like Jeffrey Dahmer. And they were like, Yeah, he's gotta go. So anyway, Luke ended up at this preschool at a as a four-year-old. And I'm like, come on, buddy, we just gotta get to kindergarten. And he had this teacher named Miss Lisa, who was infinitely patient. But he would always come home and I would actually talk to her almost every day. And she's like, I told him again, worry about yourself, Luke. Yes, small children often worry about things that are not their business, right? But so do adults like a lot. My issue for the longest time has been trying to control other people's moods, emotions, reactions, expectations. And last episode, I actually talked about trying to control my own inner landscape through like never sitting still. In other episodes, I've talked about numbing it in different ways, whether it's exercising or drinking or whatever. That's a form of control. I was trying to control that. This episode, interestingly, is similar because when you're you're trying to control another person, it's about control. All of these things boil down to control. But it's a false sense because in these situations that I've talked about on this podcast, you're not actually controlling anything, especially when it comes to trying to manage the moods, reactions, expectations of other people. That is completely out of your control. But when you're in that moment and you think you're controlling it, it gives you a false sense of safety. And basically what you're saying is, I need you to act differently so that I feel safe in this moment. But the reality is it rarely ever happens. So I lived under the illusion that if I could just anticipate more, shrink more, um, be more communicative, explain myself in a better way. If I could just do the things better, if I could just get ahead of it, then I could control this other person's emotions. And that is an illusion because it never worked. And it's a horrible place to live in. I can tell you that from lived experience. So that's what I'm going to talk about in today's episode. But I will say that realizing that it's not my responsibility to manage anybody else's emotional landscape is one of the healthiest things that I've ever done for myself. Giving up the desire to do that has been relatively life-changing.

The Cost of People-Pleasing: Losing Yourself

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So, where this started for me was very young. Like, for as long as I can remember, I always felt like it was my job to keep everyone around me happy. When I was younger, I remember thinking like, if an adult in my life was in a bad mood or angry or whatever, feeling emotional, I felt it was my responsibility to behave better, uh, to stop doing what I was doing that was annoying them, to try to do more to make them happy. Never did it cross my mind, this is a grown-ass person and it's their responsibility to manage their emotions. No, for whatever reason, I took it on as mine. Like, if I can behave better, if I can, if I can, if I can do anything that will make them feel better, I'm gonna do it. So when I got older and I had friendships, I remember not articulating things that were like hurtful or that bothered me to my friends because I didn't want to make things uncomfortable and I didn't want to make them mad. So I would just keep it to myself and not articulate it, which wasn't great. And I thought if I did that, that then they'd behave the way that I wanted them to behave. Which it didn't work. And then after that, I found myself married. And as a wife, I thought being a good wife meant walking on eggshells around moods, trying to anticipate them to prevent them, um, trying to give up parts of myself. Oh, if he's upset that I go out with my friends, I just won't go out with my friends, like those kind of things. I thought if I did enough of that, that I could finally change his emotional capacity and get him to change how he treated me, get him to change how moody he was, get him out of a depression, get him out of an anxious time, but I can't do that for him, and I can't do it for anyone. I can do it for myself, actually. So, why do we do this? Because I'm not the only person that does this. I think, in my case at least, we confuse responsibility with love. So I know as a wife, I was like, it's my responsibility. If he's unhappy, I need to do whatever it takes to make him happy. The problem is when you are in that state of mind, when you are trying to fix someone else's issues and gathering your worth from that and waiting for the validation from that, you are emotionally dependent on somebody else's emotional state, which you have absolutely no control over. So living in that, you're constantly let down because you're trying to control something that you have absolutely no control over. Also, I think we really believe that we can make a person change who's not necessarily willing or is interested in changing. Or maybe they're not even capable of it. But

Boundaries and Self-Responsibility

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no matter how much we shrink or give or give up, the decision for somebody to change their own behavior is theirs. The only person's behavior that you can change is your own. I didn't realize that for a solid 48 of my 49 years, including with my kids. Like that's a pretty recent realization for me is I can't fix my problem, my kids' problems either, which as a mom is really hard. And I've talked about that in other episodes. Like seeing your kids struggle and wanting to fix it for them, coming to that realization of, especially once they get older, my kids are 16 and 20. So especially with the 20-year-old, like his decisions are his decisions. I can't make him do the things that I know are gonna make him a better version of himself and make him not hate himself because of his choices. And I've watched that happen. Thankfully, he lately has been choosing better for himself. And it's great to watch, and I hope it continues. But at the end of the day, I don't have any control over it. And that's really hard, but it's true. So here's where this topic gets interesting because I was a people pleaser. And in my mind, I thought I was being caring, compassionate. I was trying to make the situation better. I was trying to fix things, but really at its core, I was trying to control, not in a malicious way, but I was trying to control. I'll just take my extra example. I was trying to control his emotional state so that I felt safer. So basically, I was saying to him, I need you to behave in a certain way and stop doing what you're doing so that I can feel safe. It didn't work. And that's how I ended up so incredibly resentful, so incredibly lost from myself, because I was just giving up parts of myself trying to change something that I had no control over. I wanted to avoid being rejected, avoid being made upset, avoid emotions that came up by controlling him. When in reality, what I should have been doing is creating that safety for myself through boundaries, through deciding what I would participate in and what I would not, what I would tolerate and what I would not. And the problem is, I thought I had boundaries, and I talked about this in the boundary episode. I thought by telling someone else, hey, you're doing this and it's making me feel this way, that basically that was me telling them to change and that they would change. I thought that was a boundary. It wasn't. It was me putting it onto somebody else and expecting them to take the action that I wanted them to take. Where you take control of that situation is putting that boundary out there. Hey, when you do this, it makes me feel this way. So if you keep doing it, this is what I'm going to do. I didn't close that loop. I left it all on them, which is out of my control, right? But my reaction, my response to, I've put this out there, you know what this is doing to me. This is where it's going if you don't stop. And I actually follow through on, okay, you're not stopping. So I'm doing what I said,

Reconnecting with Yourself: The Journey to Self-Discovery

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that is what creates safety inside of you. I did not realize that. I did not have any understanding of that my entire marriage. And really until recently, once I started having actual boundaries, and once I started following through and loving myself enough to do the hard thing of, okay, my boundary is being disrespected. So I need to follow through with what I said I was gonna do for myself. And sitting in the discomfort of pissing off people when I do follow through on that. Again, I can't manage their reaction. But I wanted to. How would I manage their reaction? I wouldn't follow through on my boundary. They're gonna be mad at me if I do that for myself. So I'm just not gonna do that for myself. I gotta manage their reaction. Where does that get you after 47 years of doing that? Well, it got me completely disconnected from myself because their perceived, my my perception of their discomfort, their perceived discomfort mattered more than my actual discomfort. Over and over again, repeatedly, I would reinforce with myself that what I needed did not matter. What they needed mattered more. So I shut down the voice of, but this is what I actually want. I shut that down to try to make somebody else more comfortable, control their emotions. When the whole time my safety, my happiness was in my own hands, I just kept abandoning myself. God, I wish I had understood that sooner. And I can tell you there's a huge cost to living that way, to believing that you can control somebody else's emotions, reactions, moods, expectations. First and foremost, you stop being able to see the person who's actually in front of you. Because what you're doing is projecting who you hope they would be, who you want them to be, maybe who who they promised you they would be instead of who they're consistently showing you they are. So you're projecting, well, if he would just stop responding this way to me in these moments, then it would be fine. But he consistently responds to you that way in those moments. Like he, the person is consistently showing you who they are, and you're choosing to project who you wish they would be onto them. So that leaves you in a place of being constantly disappointed. Again, it goes back to you're trying to control something you have absolutely no control over.

Accepting Dislike: Growth and Change

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You inevitably become resentful because you're trying and trying and trying. And in the process of trying, you're giving up all these pieces of yourself. You're ignoring what you really want, you're not doing the things you want to do. Like insert whatever way you're abandoning yourself, you're doing that repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly. And then how are you not gonna end up resentful? Because you're wanting this person to give you safety and they never do. How would you not get pissed off over spending so much time and energy trying to get an outcome that you're never gonna get? You inevitably also lose yourself. Again, because you're not listening to your own needs. You are making their perceived discomfort, which you don't even know if that's how they're gonna respond. You're assuming that, you're projecting that. Their perceived discomfort in your mind is way more important than your own discomfort, your actual discomfort. That's where the disconnect happens. You, I know at my most disconnected, I had no idea what my needs were. I had no idea what I liked. I'm still trying to figure that out. I'm still trying to like get hobbies. Like, what do I like? At 49, I'm like, well, what did I like when I was younger? Like, it's it's a struggle. That's how freaking disconnected from myself I was for so long. Like, I have an entire day to do whatever I want. When I got that at first, it was terrifying. It was intimidating, it was lonely. Like, what do I do with that? I don't even know what I want to do. I have no idea. So learning myself, reconnecting with myself. I talked about that in the last episode. The first step is sitting still and learning about yourself through what emotions come up. Once you can get through that, then you can start building a relationship with yourself and start listening to that inner voice that's like, you know what, I'm tired today. This is what I need. Or, oh, I feel really creative. I think I want to do this. Like when you're disconnected and constantly focusing all your attention on controlling things that are out of your control and giving to other people and expecting them to give you what you need. Yeah, you don't know who the hell you are because you're being for everybody else. So, what does this look like through a healthier lens? Like a lot of the stuff I talk about, it's simple, but it's not easy. It's self-work, so it's never gonna be easy because it's uncomfortable. It starts with acknowledging what you're responsible for and what you're not responsible for, and repeatedly reminding yourself of that in any given situation. You are responsible for your own moods, reactions, expectations, emotions that come up, your your own disappointment, your own failures, your own, like everything that happens within here, your own projections, that's yours. That you have control over. You're not responsible for any of that shit for anybody but yourself. People are allowed to dislike you. People are allowed to disagree with you, people are allowed to say bad things about you, people are allowed to criticize you changing, you not showing up for them the way that you used to, because it's likely being told through their lens of how they were impacted by it. You're allowed to be made the villain. You have to understand you don't have any control over that. And if you chase after trying to control that, you'll drive yourself crazy and you'll never be happy. That's what I did for so long. I was so terrified of people being upset with me or saying bad things about me. So I just kept throwing stuff at people and giving up parts of myself. And you know what? They were still talking shit about me when I wasn't around. I still somehow managed to become the villain in people's stories. Even when I was contorting myself into a human pretzel, trying to be exactly what I thought they wanted me to be, it was still happening. So settling into the realization that I can't control what they think about me. I can show up in the best way that I can. I can be caring and considerate and kind, and I can be myself and I can be giving. But at the end of the day, if they want to feel however they want to feel about me, I can't control that. I've settled into that finally. I do still have to remind myself when I come across a situation where it's very evident that somebody is not happy with me or dislikes me, I have to show up for myself and be my own cheerleader and say, you know what, it's okay. They're allowed to. They're not my person. There's other people who are. I don't want that in my life. I don't need that in my life. I'm not gonna chase after that. Why would I? Why would I want to beg somebody to choose me? And that's basically what I was doing. When I finally stopped trying to manage everybody else's emotions and everybody else's stuff, I finally had the bandwidth to manage my own. And it takes bandwidth because, like I said, you have to reassure yourself. You have to be your biggest supporter. So it took me ending my marriage, having boundaries, learning how to say no, not arguing with somebody who doesn't have the emotional capacity to meet me in constructive conversation, um, scrolling past posts on social media that I don't agree with instead of engaging with them, like those kind of things. It took me finally starting to do that and letting people not like me, knowing that there's nothing that I can say or do to change that. And yeah, it's hard. And it does take constant reassurance from myself.

Conclusion and Future Insights

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But I'm not concerning myself with all of the stuff that I can't control. So all of that time and energy that I used to spend doing that, I can pour into myself, and that's what I've been doing. I guess I finally realized that growth comes with accepting that people will dislike you if you change. And those people are the ones in your life who don't want you to change. They want you to stay the same. That's actually what I'm gonna talk about in the final episode of season one on episode 10. What happens when you change? You know I like a cliffhanger. I gotta get you excited for the next one. So, with that, that is all I have for this episode of the Karen Confidential. I'm so grateful that you're here. I'm so grateful that you watch these and that you give me feedback. I love when you DM me and you comment on things and you let me know that you love it because I love it. And it makes me really happy to do this. And nothing makes me happier than when somebody says, Oh my gosh, I resonate with what you're saying. I feel it. That is exactly why I do what I do. So please let me know when you do feel it. And because it's like the best. It's the best thing ever. So I love hearing from you guys. Okay, we'll see you next time for episode 10. That was my dog getting up. He has a herniated disc, so it takes him a little bit to get up on tile. You good, bro? He's good. Okay, that's all I got. Bye. Hey, thanks for watching. Can't get enough Karen? Well, share, subscribe, and hit the notification bell for new episodes. You can also follow me on social or visit my website. And if you want to connect, send me an email. Okay, bye. Let's go. So it makes sense that she would have to repeat that to four-year-olds often. I'm looking at the I'm looking at the thing instead of I did it again. I was looking at myself instead of the camera, so I'm gonna look like Stevie Wonder. No, no, no worries, hold on. We have to do it again. Yeah. I'm like talking to myself. I've done that before.