How to Stay Grounded When Someone You Love Is Frustrated or Upset with the Recover Your Soul Process

If you’re an empath, a people-pleaser, or someone healing from codependency, you know how quickly another person’s mood can affect your own.

In this episode, I share a very real moment from my own life that happened on my birthday, when my husband had a tense reaction over a small laundry mishap. It wasn’t a big moment, but it was a familiar one. His frustration immediately shifted the energy in the room, and I could feel my old patterns wanting to take over, the urge to fix it, smooth it over, or make it better and to make it my fault.

What made this moment different is that I stayed present with myself.

This episode is about learning how to stay grounded when someone you love is frustrated or upset, without absorbing their energy, abandoning yourself, or shutting down emotionally. It’s about allowing others to have their feelings while learning that you don’t have to carry them.

Through the lens of the Recover Your Soul Process, we explore how acceptance, awareness, and loving boundaries help us respond differently. Not perfectly, but consciously. Not by disconnecting, but by staying rooted in compassion and self-trust using loving detachment.

Healing doesn’t mean the people in our lives will neve

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This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not allied or representative of any organizations or religions, but is based on the opinions and experience of Rev. Rachel Harrison or guests. The host claims no responsibility to any person or entity for any liability, loss, or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly as a result of the use, application, or interpretation of the information presented herein. Take what you need and leave the rest.

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Energy Boundary
• 2:28 Birthday Morning And Separate Bedrooms
• 4:08 Calibrating The Day With Intention
• 4:56 The T-Shirt Incident Triggers Old Wounds
• 8:03 Awareness Over Reaction And Acceptance
• 10:38 Frustration Level Two Feels Like Seven
• 12:48 Family Patterns Of Anger And Modeling
• 14:48 Acceptance Without Absorbing Energy
• 16:53 Boundaries And Powerlessness In Practice
• 19:58 Choosing Distance Over Fixing
• 21:48 Each Person’s Work And Healing

Transcript

Rev Rachel Harrison: 0:48

If you're like me as a recovering codependent and people pleaser and empath, you feel people's feelings pretty deeply, and their energy can affect your energy. But what we're learning in Recover Your Soul is how to protect your energy. And how, even when someone has one of those snap reactions that used to really get to you, how to see it from the lens of spirituality, how to look at, feel it, be in it in a different way so that you can have compassion for yourself, for them, and to not be taking on other people's stuff. And also at the same time, how to be standing up for yourself and your strength and to be able to speak consciously, compassionately, kindly, and truthfully about what you need in each situation. It's not easy, but it's work worth doing. Enjoy the episode. Welcome to the Recover Your Soul podcast and community, a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life. My name is Reverend Rachel Harrison. I started Recover Your Soul after having profound changes in my life from my recovery of alcoholism, codependency, people pleasing, and control addiction. I was guided to share the tools and principles of spirituality and the recover your soul process to help others transform their lives as mine was transformed. For us to overcome external circumstances, we need to turn the attention to ourselves, focusing on our interchange and healing. Positive results in our lives will follow. Welcome to the Recover Your Soul Podcast. I'm Rev Rachel. Thank you so much for joining me today. Today I want to talk about other people's energy, and it's up for me because it's actually my birthday today, January 11th. And I woke up this morning and it's a Sunday, and I listened to a meditation in my bed before I woke up. And many of you know that Rich and I decided that we slept better separately when we went on vacation to Indonesia a couple years ago, and since then have separate bedrooms. So I've been married for a long, long, long time. And so I'm not telling anybody to have separate bedrooms. But for us, what we realized is that each time each one of us rolls over, it wakes up the other person, and that we've just decided that having our own bedrooms really allows us to sleep the way that we want to sleep. And now that he wakes up four mornings a week at 4:30 in the morning and goes to bed a lot earlier than I go to bed because of his new work and his new schedule, it actually has worked out really well for us to have our own spaces. And it kind of plays into the topic of today's podcast episode, which is really around other people's energy and how we relate to other people's energy. So having our own bedrooms has allowed me, when I wake up in the morning, I wake up nice and slow. I like to turn on a meditation so that I can lay in bed and just allow myself to be open and sort of settle into my body. And you know how I feel it's so important that we calibrate for the day, that we set an attention for the day, because when we just pop up and start on our phone or we get involved in emails or, you know, doing whatever, we're not being conscious and present in the moment. So I like to root myself into that moment. So I woke up, I listened to a really beautiful meditation. I felt really good. And then I came upstairs and Rich had made coffee, which is really sweet. And we do a pretty nice job of being nice to each other in the morning. I think it's really important as well to really witness the people around you and start with a positive affect. Good morning, good morning. And then somewhere in the midst of all this, I went downstairs and got a load of laundry out of the dryer and put it at the base of the stairs. And Rich carried his laundry up the stairs to his room and said, um, oh crap. Not that word, but another crap. Dang it, this brand new t-shirt that we got in Costa Rica got dried. And I so didn't want it to get dried. And oh, he was mad, right? That this t-shirt got dried. And it's interesting because this was a very old dynamic that goes into, if you've listened to this podcast at all for a long time, into one of my fundamental pain points, which is getting in trouble. And it's funny because this is a shirt, right? And my main pain point that happened when I was four years old was around a shirt. So if you know the story, you know the story. And I'm actually not going to go into the story right now, but the story is really around at four years old getting in trouble and how for my entire life I hate getting in trouble. I'm afraid to get in trouble. And Rich is upset about this shirt, and he's like, Oh, I didn't want it to get dried. So I, of course, have my immediate response, which is, this is my fault that I didn't pay enough attention in my doing the laundry to pull this particular shirt out, which I had said I will make every effort to try to not dry this shirt. But just as a reminder, I had said, I throw everything in the washing machine and I wash it, and then I take it out and I throw everything in the dryer. And if you don't want this shirt dried, I recommend that you put it to the side because I can't promise that I won't dry it because I wash and dry everything. And so we came out and he was, you know, he was upset about the shirt. And um, and it definitely changed my attitude. I was being very aware, and I think this is the piece of of spirituality that's so powerful, is it's not about changing what you're feeling or changing what you're doing, it's having awareness over how it feels, what the thoughts are, and how it feels in your body. And this year's theme, which is acceptance as a path to peace, is really interesting to me because I continue to mull around in my mind this piece of accepting. So we're sitting there kind of having our coffee, and and I'm I'm not like super affected, I'm not super triggered, but my sort of birthday wake up, gonna have a nice day with my friends, listen to a Pama Chotran live um webinar that's actually coming on here pretty soon. This piece that I was really excited about had this clamp down on it. But what I understand so much more than I ever did before is that this clamp down, this is me. This is this is something that I feel within myself because even though Rich was agitated, he wasn't saying, God damn it, Rachel, I can't believe that you that you dried my shirt. He he never had any of that. He just was mad that his shirt got dried. And it he knew, he knew that if he uh wasn't careful, it was gonna get dried. And actually, what he was saying as he was having these things, he's like, I knew I should have bought a double X, and I can't believe I didn't set that aside. So he was really being mad at himself, right? But Rich's energy has been such a determiner of my energy for so long. And I I know you relate to this because we have people in our families, and maybe it's your spouse, maybe it's your kids, maybe it's maybe your parents live with you, maybe it was living with your parents. There's somebody whose energy determines whether you're okay. And this is the huge umbrella of what we're doing in recover your soul. Can I be happy? Can I be okay even if someone else isn't okay? And is he entitled to be pissed about his shirt shrinking a little bit? Yeah, of course he is. Is he allowed to be upset? Of course he is. It's how I feel it. So we proceed to have a conversation around it, which, you know, I continue to be grateful that we can have conversations that feel a little bit crunchy, a little bit sticky, a little bit hard, these hard conversations in this new era. And, you know, the number one key in these conversations is that I stay present with myself, that I don't get caught up in what I perceive or believe or feel that I'm supposed to be doing or supposed to be saying or supposed to be changing. It's about staying really present in the conversation. And this is not a big deal, right? And the the thing that's interesting is Rich is feeling badly that he blew my birthday. This is the number one thing of this conversation. He's like, Are you okay? And I said, Well, no, I'm I'm not. I'm okay. And at the same time, it definitely switched the energy for the day. And he's saying, I feel bad that I wrecked your birthday. And I said, Well, you didn't wreck it necessarily, but your energy affects me. And so we ended up having this really interesting conversation around his frustration and how he interacts with that frustration, which I for all these years have taken as anger. And he said, But I don't think that I'm angry. And I said, But it feels angry to me. And he said, You know what I realized that I didn't ever realize in all those years together was that what I perceived to be a level two or three frustration, you feel or perceive to be a level seven anger. And I said, Yes, that's exactly what it has felt like to me. And he went into a story, his story, around how he felt like he was demonized, he was blamed, he was um told that he was bad. And I never felt like I was doing those things to him. But I was definitely in all those years trying to tamper down whatever it was that was causing that frustration to come out in the ways that it would come out, that was just him feeling the feelings that he felt. And we talked about how he was raised with parents whose whose nerves were he described his mom who rest in peace is uh since past uh many years, but that her nerves were always like on the edge. Like she was, it was just you never knew when she was gonna sort of just be pissed. And that's exactly what I felt in all these years. Well, if you have compassion for the person and what they're being raised was that this was the modeling, right? That there was this anger, this upset underneath. And his dad was the same way. And the truth was that he mostly was raised by his mom because his parents divorced when he was very, very young. But of course, your dad plays a role in it. But we're looking at these ancestral, really traditions that have been played out around frustration and anger. And we were able to talk about how even today he's, you know, 90% softer and and more gentle than he was in the years past. And a good part of that is me in acceptance, right? If this is the year of acceptance, of accepting that he actually is just expressing himself in the only way that maybe he knows how or the way that works for him. And that it isn't anymore about me feeling like I have to fix it. And that's what I was telling him is that in the past, when he would have this level of frustration, I would feel like, oh shit, he's pissed, he's upset, he's not happy. What can I do to make it be better for him? And I've gotten better and better and better at just accepting that this is how he feels. However, I don't need to feel how he feels. This is new for me. This is this is mind-blowing for me, that I don't actually have to feel what he feels, that I can allow him, accept him to feel how he feels. Now, the big part of this conversation that we had that I think is really important is that we also talked about how it isn't about accepting what doesn't feel good to you. So he was saying one of the gifts that he feels like he has over this healed self that he experiences from me is that I'm more accepting of who he is. And I said, yes, and we talk about this all the time in Recover Your Soul, and it comes up, and it just came up, I think I just mentioned it in another podcast as well, in the free recover your soul support group that one of the members said is as you get more and more spiritually healthy, it feels harder and harder to be present with people who have different energies that are um tense or angry or dysfunctional. It gets harder because you resonate at a different space. And so for me, I said, I don't have some expectation that everything's always super smooth and everyone's really happy and it's all peaceful, it's all woo-woo and good. That's unrealistic. It's unrealistic for me, it's unrealistic for him. I said, but when his immediate response, if he's he often will be on his phone, and instead of being like, hmm, I don't know why that's working out, you know, he's just cursing up a storm. He's just cursing at his phone, right? And that used to affect me so much. Like I would get so incredibly uncomfortable. And I've gotten better and better at the the step two in recover your soul. I am powerless over what he thinks about his phone. I'm powerless over why this gets him so riled up. I'm powerless over how he wishes technology would be. I'm power, I'm powerless over how he feels and thinks about all these things. All these things. And unless he asks me, unless he comes and says, Hey Rachel, will you help me with this thing? I generally remove myself from the area, which is my boundary. The boundary is not making them do do something different, the boundary is what you do. And sometimes it feels like I have to run away. And that can be, that can be sad for me, that that's the choice that I make. But inside of my mind, I get to decide. I'm I'm making the decision about am I resentful? Am I am I playing into it? Can I love him enough to be like, oh, it's really a bummer that you let these things get you so hard. But in this conversation that he and I had, which I think is really powerful, was his awareness around how he was raised and how it just was sort of given to him, and this is step three in recover your soul. This is a pattern belief and story that was instilled as a child. And so even though he is actively doing work to learn how to not have this frustration be an immediate response, this is his work to do. And his energy is his energy, and his responses are his responses. And my work to do today on my birthday and to be present in the things that are happening for today is for me to clean and clear my energy and to not be affected in the ways that I used to be and carry around this seed of discontent that then would be days, right? Then I would have a protection up, I'd feel, I'd feel far from him, I'd put him, maybe I'd do a silent treatment, maybe I'd punish him for being mad at me by not by withholding love. I'm totally used to do that. All of those are valid ways that we protect ourselves when we don't feel safe. And so we talked about what I think is so great is we talked about the importance of us each very consciously doing our own individual work to help create deeper and deeper safety in our relationship so that he, you know, he may never get rid of the part of him that just has immediate irritation. And acceptance means that I have to look at this human being, this soul in a human body who is my spouse for almost 34 years now. We've been together, and say, can I love him unconditionally enough to just let this be part of what he is? And have clarity in voice, which isn't easy, to be able to say, when you're so easily frustrated, I can't help but have it affect my energy. And sometimes that's hard for me. That is a valid and important and true thing to say, too. And what I love about the spiritual world that we're becoming more and more aware of is this isn't about somebody being right or somebody being wrong or somebody winning or somebody's, you know, answer being the right way. This is about us being able to be present with who we are and how we feel individually and in relationship to each other, holding space and compassion and grace for everyone involved. And so, unlike years past where we would, you know, be prickly for days, if not weeks, it actually is allowing us sort of come together and say, oh, that kind of felt kind of hard, but there's some things that are breaking up for each of us in our own mind. And I've stopped thinking, oh, good, this is going to be a place where he sees that this blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, this is about me and looking at myself and what I can accept more deeply within myself, and how I can be present in my life, my situation, my mind, my heart, and continue to be loving, continue to be compassionate, and continue to stand in strength and to be able to speak my voice and at the same time be able to witness myself and to heal even more deeply. So his energy is his. And in the end, just as a final, he was like, if I could go back, I would have, I would have said something about the shirt in an entirely different way. I'll work on it. That's all I can ask for, right? That's that's movement. And for me, all I can ask for is that I push off his energy and allow it to be his. And I claim my energy and I stand in the truth of who I am, learning to be okay, even when the people around us aren't okay. It's the gift of recover your soul. Until next time, Namaste. Thank you so much for spending this time with me and being part of the Recover Your Soul community. If today's episode spoke to you and you'd like to connect with the community even more, I invite you to join us on the first Monday of every month for the free online support group on Zoom. It's from 6 to 7 p.m. Mountain Standard Time, where I share a little bit more on the Recover Your Soul journey and then we break into small groups. You can register at recoveryoursoul.net, and if you've registered in the past, be on the lookout in your promotions folder for the reminder email and link. I'd also love to invite you to listen to the Recover Your Soul Bonus Podcast every Friday, either as an Apple Podcast subscriber or as a Patreon member. On Patreon, you can become a free member and have access to new episodes for the first week, or you can support this community with the tier that you choose. You can also follow me on social media, Instagram, Facebook, and join the private Facebook group for more connection with this amazing community. I hope you'll visit the website recoveryoursul.net and you can sign up for emails so that you can be up to date with everything that's going on, and maybe even join me for a retreat someday. Lastly, I thank you for sharing this podcast and community with anyone that you think might enjoy or learn from it. I also thank you for giving me five stars on any platform that you listen to and writing a review so that others can. Find the Recover Your Soul community too. Until next time, Namaste.