Whose Life Is It Anyway? by Nina Brown

When to stop Taking Care of Their Feelings & Start Taking Care of Your Own.

This is a great little book aimed at those of us who tend to take on other people’s emotions a little more readily than we would like. It’s a relatively short and easy read, covering topics relating to emotional boundaries, and how to avoid becoming enmeshed in or manipulated by other people and their emotional states.

The early chapters deal with emotional susceptibility, avoiding taking responsibility for other people’s feelings, and allowing other people to experience their own emotional states without negatively impacting on us. Later chapters deal with psychological and emotional strength, creativity, spirituality and improving relationships.

There are lots of exercises in the book similar to those I was doing with my life coach at the time that I read it, so I skimmed over them… but they sounded pretty good and surely the book would have been more rewarding if I had done them. If you’re a self-starter who doesn’t need to be prodded to do your hard yards, you should get a lot out of these exercises.

This book is like a short course on building self-esteem by enhancing emotional resilience. A key theme is that of balance, particularly when it comes to empathy. We want to be empathic, because understanding how others feel is the basis of all meaningful human relationships. But we don’t want to get so enmeshed that other people’s emotions adversely affect our own emotional state. Nor do we want our emotions to be so easily triggered by others that our own feelings can be used against us. True empathy draws a line where other people’s feelings are understood, but not taken on board by us. I recommend this book to anyone who has difficulty saying “No”, or finds that their own moods seem to be at the mercy of the moods of other people.