Allowing Other People to Have Their Own Choices

I have realised something about myself recently. When someone I care about makes a choice I do not understand, I can spend a huge amount of time trying to work out why. I will talk it through with family or friends, look at it from every angle and wonder what is really going on for that person. Usually, it comes from care. I want to understand them and see whether there is anything I can do to help.

Underneath all that thinking, though, I can feel frustration and confusion, and then I can add another layer by judging myself for feeling that way. Surely I should be more accepting? Maybe if I could just understand their reasoning, I would feel better about it?

Allowing has been showing me something different. I do not actually have to understand or agree with someone else’s why.

Their choices belong to them

Everybody else gets to make their own choices, experience the results, change their mind, stay exactly where they are or choose something I would never choose for myself. I can love them without fully (ore even slightly!) understanding what they are doing.

When I keep trying to work out their reasons, I can stay energetically involved in something that is theirs. I may think I am helping, while somewhere in that process I have started seeing them as someone who needs me to work things out for them.

I have never been one to judge others or tell them where I think they are wrong unless they actually ask me, but my confusion about their "why" starts me in that direction, even if it is only internally.

I have become much more aware of this because I am very different with clients. Before a client call, my starting point is always that the person in front of me is powerfully creating his or her own life. I am there to create an opening with her for greater awareness and more aligned choices. I trust their ability to choose for herself.

With family and friends, love, concern and in particular history can make that perspective harder to hold. I can slip into wanting to understand everything, when perhaps the more loving response is to remember that they are powerful too.

Feeling it without feeding it

Allowing someone else to have their own experience does not mean I suddenly agree with every choice they make. I can still feel frustrated, confused or concerned. I can let those feelings be there without talking the situation to death or creating another ten theories about what the other person is thinking.

There is a lot of freedom for me in the thought, “I do not understand this, and I do not need to.” I have actully brought the reminder of this into my morning routine.

Then I can bring my attention back to myself. What am I actually feeling? Is there support I genuinely want to offer, or am I trying to solve something that belongs to someone else, particularly when they are happy with what they are doing, it just does not happen to make sense to me...What choice feels aligned for me now?

I am beginning to see emotional allowing as giving people space to be who they are while also letting me have my own response. Their reasons can belong to them, and my feelings can belong to me, without either of us needing to be analysed into submission.

The video below continues this exploration of allowing through Emotional Release: Feel What You’ve Been Avoiding, looking at what can happen when we let ourselves feel what is present rather than immediately trying to understand, change or move past it.

Before you watch, you might ask yourself: Whose choices are you trying to understand right now, and what could shift if you allowed their why to belong to them?