Other people are going to make choices you don’t agree with—your partner won’t go to therapy, your family says things that clash with your values, your friends act in ways that frustrate you. The real question isn’t how to change them—it’s how you’re going to show up for yourself when faced with choices you don’t like.
In this Coaching Hotline episode, I answer two listener questions that get right to the heart of accepting other people’s autonomy. I share why trying to control someone else’s choices only creates suffering, how to support yourself first, and how to decide what you’re actually willing to live with. You’ll learn how to speak up when it matters, let go when it doesn’t, and manage your own mind so you can stay grounded without burning out trying to fix people who aren’t ready to change.
Welcome to UnF*ck Your Brain. I’m your host, Kara Loewentheil, Master Certified Coach and founder of The School of New Feminist Thought. I’m here to help you turn down your anxiety, turn up your confidence, and create a life on your own terms, one that you’re truly excited to live. Let’s go.
Welcome to this week’s Coaching Hotline episode where I answer real questions from real listeners and coach you from afar. If you want to submit your question for consideration, go to unfuckyourbrain.com/coachinghotline, all one word. Or text your email to 1-347-997-1784. And when you get prompted for the code word, it’s CoachingHotline, all one word. Let’s get into this week’s questions.
Two different questions this week that are about dealing with other people and when they won’t agree with us or do what we want. So here’s the first question. “Hello, I have bipolar disorder, which I take medication for and have been stable for years. And my primary partner, who I moved in with two months ago, has mentioned that he thinks he might also have bipolar disorder. Additionally, my secondary partner, who lives in a different state than me, so I haven’t seen in a while, has mentioned that he has undiagnosed OCD, PTSD, anxiety, and depression. Do you have any tips for managing my mind around people you love not wanting to seek professional help or how to support people with mental health issues?”
Okay, so this is a great question and those are kind of two different questions. The first thing, right, is it sounds to me like what you’re saying is that neither of these partners have actually gotten diagnosed, right? These are their self diagnoses, which may be correct, may be incorrect. It’s just number one because you ask how to support people with mental health issues, and it’s not totally clear from this question what the circumstance actually is in terms of any actual diagnoses or issues. But the core question, right, is what do you do when people around you don’t want to get help for things that you think are impacting their life in a negative way, or even that they think is impacting their life in a negative way?
And the truth is this is one of the many things in the world that other people are allowed to do. They are allowed to live with undiagnosed, self-diagnosed, or professionally diagnosed mental health issues and not do anything about them. They have that human autonomy, right? And so the way you manage your mind about that is the way you manage your mind about anything, which is you let go of believing that they should just do what you think, that you know best, right? That they’re doing it wrong, and that they should do it differently. And you accept the limits of your ability to control them. And then you have to decide if you can live with how they’re choosing to live their lives.
That’s really it. And honestly, that’s not really different whether it’s diagnosed mental health issue, an undiagnosed one, a self-diagnosed one, or no mental health issue, or just any other habit or way of being. In terms of what you can control, all you can do is release your desire and attempt to control them and make your own decisions about what you’re willing to be around. So that’s number one, like anything else. Why do you want them to seek professional help so that you could think and feel something different than you do now? That’s up to you, right? You’re the one responsible for how you’re thinking and feeling. And any resistance you have to them being the way they are, or not getting help for the way they are, or whatever else, is suffering you’re creating for yourself.
And by the way, this is true even when people are really non-functional because of their mental health issues. I have had personal experience of being very close to somebody with debilitating, untreated mental health and drug addiction issues. And even then, you cannot really control other people or what they’re willing to do. And that’s true emotionally, and it’s actually just true practically. If they’re not your minor child, there’s not much you can do unless someone is actively a threat of harm to themselves or others in very limited ways, legally speaking.
So it really is always about your own mind management of this is what this person’s experiencing, this is how they’re choosing to live. And yes, sometimes they will see that the way they’re choosing to live is causing negative results for them and they’re still not willing to do anything about it, or they’re still not able to. And all you can still do even then is manage your mind around how they’re choosing to live and if you want to live with them.
In terms of how to support people with mental health issues, again, somebody having a mental health issue doesn’t make it a different category in terms of what is yours that you can control and you can own and what is theirs, which you can’t control or own. The better you manage your mind, the better you’ll be able to support someone else. But most importantly, the better you’re able to support yourself.
One of the most kind of harmful things I think that can happen is that people don’t manage their minds. They make it their responsibility to save someone else or to fix someone else’s life, especially if that person has a mental health issue. And then they think that they’re doing it for these altruistic reasons. And of course they genuinely care about the person, but what it turns into is just an endless desire and attempt to control someone else they can’t control, which ends up like consuming their own life. And they would say that they’re trying to support that person, but they’re not supporting that person and they’re not supporting themselves.
The way to support somebody with mental health issues, the way to support anyone else ever, is to support yourself first by managing your mind so that when you show up to think about how you can support them, you’re not coming from ego, you’re not coming from trying to control them so you can feel a certain way, right? You actually are able to come to it clean and actually decide what you’re willing to do, what you’re not willing to do, what you’re willing to live with or not live with, what kind of support you’re willing to offer or not offer. And you can then show up in the way that feels good to you. Like in my situation, what I decided was that I was willing to spend my last dime helping this person get help when they wanted help. But I was not going to be at all involved in trying to force them to get help when they didn’t want help.
That was my decision in my position. Other people in this person’s life made other decisions and they had different relationships with the person and that was up to them. I decided that was it for me and that I wasn’t going to try to control. The other thing we do sometimes is we try to control how third parties are going to interact with the person with the problem. So like this happens a lot in families where like one sibling will be trying to control how the parents interact with the other sibling, or you’ll be trying to get like if you’re married to somebody who has mental health issues that are disrupting your lives and you’re trying to get like their parents to agree with you about what should be done.
You can’t control any of those other people. You can only control yourself and you have to show up for yourself by managing your mind and then decide how you’re going to show up to support yourself first and then the other person. And then it will feel so much cleaner to you because you will only be trying to control things you can control. Like in my situation it was I will spend however much I have to help this person get help if and when they’re ready. That’s under my control. But I’m not in control of if and when they’re ready. I will let them know that resource is available to them, but I can’t force them to be ready or to want to change before they want to.
And that felt very clean and I was able to live by that and I lived through a long period during which the person was not interested in that and there wasn’t anything I could do and I did not stay involved in the drama of it. And then eventually that person was ready and then I’ve continued to support them in that resource way because that’s what feels good to me. That’s how I know I can show up and support. The answer is always, how can you support yourself by managing your mind and getting to a clear place before you make any decisions about how to try to support other people? But for sure, supporting other people does not mean trying to make them do what you want. Sad to say, we’ve all tried.
All right, y’all. I know you’re as tired as I am of having the top podcasts in wellness or health and fitness categories be a bunch of dudes who don’t know anything about socialization and who are not taking women’s lived experiences into account. So if you are looking for ways to support the show and more importantly, make sure the show gets to more people, please leave us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. And bonus points if you include a few lines about the way you use thought work and self-coaching or anything you’ve learned from the podcast in your daily life. Those reviews are what teach the algorithms to show us to more new people. It helps us get new listeners all over the world. And I’ll be reading one story from a recent review in each of these question and answer episodes.
This week’s review comes from Shells Creates, who says, “You don’t want to miss this. Kara is amazing and shares such deep insights to help you grow and face yourself with honesty and grace. I’ve grown so much as a person since listening to this podcast in 2020. It’s been life-changing. Everything is so relatable to all life relationships with kids, parents, partners, friends, work. It’s so real.”
First of all, it’s amazing to me to have people have been listening to my podcast for that long for five years. It’s like we’ve grown up together. And I absolutely love that this listener is embodying that honesty and grace is such a good description of how I want all of you to be able to relate to yourself. So thank you so much for sharing.
All right, second question. “In the last little while, we’ve talked a lot about speaking up and that is so important. However, sometimes I notice that I do this all the time. For example, my family can make remarks that are classist, racist, fatphobic, and speaking up all the time can be exhausting. So how to balance when to do it and when to use the of course they are? How do you use thought work to pick your battles so I have energy to actually help the causes?”
Here’s how I know that you’re not clean about it, is that you find it exhausting to say something, which means that you still have a lot of emotional drama around speaking up and saying something. So to me, these things are unrelated. You could say something every time and it wouldn’t be tiring at all if you didn’t have drama around it. Or you could never say something and feel fine if you’ve decided it’s really just not worth the energy.
So you’ve set up like a false opposition here of it’s stressful and exhausting to say something, so how do I know when to say something or when to just let people be who they are? Wrong question. People are always going to be who they are. You want to emotionally always allow them to be who they are because you don’t have any control or choice in the matter. And then you can decide when you want to say something or not. But like the whole fact that you’re conflating them is why you’re finding it exhausting, because I think you still are resisting that they are who they are, right? You’re like, sometimes I let them be who they are, but then sometimes I try to change them by saying something.
That’s not what it’s about. They’re always allowed to be who they are, just because they are. They have human autonomy and we can’t change it. And then you get to decide when for yourself you want to speak up. When we speak up, when we want to say something, when we want to call something in or out, whether the other person hears this or changes their mind is secondary, right? It’s how we want to show up for what we believe in. We can only ever suggest an idea to someone else. We can’t make them think it. But what we can always do is show up for ourselves and be clear and firm with ourselves about who we are and what we want to say and how we want to show up.
The speaking up is for our own values and principles. It’s great if someone else changes their mind, but we can’t control that. So I don’t want you to think about it as when do I use of course they are and let them be them and when do I speak up and get exhausted? That’s the wrong set of options. You’ve got some emotional resistance to them being them. You got to work through. It doesn’t have to be exhausting whether you say something every time or never. Those are two different things.
Go out, manage your own minds. Stop trying to control the people around you. I’ll talk to you next week.