I have heard and thought a lot about buckets during the past phase of my life. Metaphorical buckets at least. The metaphor is of a bucket that is full, but instead of liquid or jelly beans or pebbles or sand or whatever else a bucket could be full of, this one is full of your good emotions, your optimal sense of fulfillment. If you are hurtful to another person you are emptying their bucket, and likewise your bucket is emptied when someone is hurtful to you.
It is a simple enough analogy, easy to explain to children, but utterly, utterly wrong.
I will give a rather horrible example from my own life to suggest that in fact no one can "empty your bucket", that the responsibility for retaining a full bucket lies solely on our own shoulders.
I was in an argument with a friend of mine who got angry and told me (and I paraphrase to keep this article PG rated) to "Go to a horrible place where we are no longer friends, and have fun never accomplishing anything because you are a loser with no talent."
That is not a really nice thing to say to somebody, and my bucket emptied, and I felt awful.
One way to perceive the situation is what the bucket analogy regularly does. It says, "I was happy before this was said to me and now I am sad, therefore I must be sad because of what was said to me."
(Buzzer sound) Wrong. Sorry, points for effort, but that isn't at all accurate.
The hurtful thing in this example is like an arrow designed to pierce my bucket, but the reason I am sad is only vaguely related to the arrow.
I am sad because I believe the things that were said, at least is part. It is true that I struggle with feelings that I will "never amount to anything" or that I am not good enough to be published. In fact, it would later be admitted to me the only reason it was said in the first place: he knew it would have the affect he was going for. Points for observation skills.
My bucket is empty because I emptied it. Perhaps it would not be empty had my friend not said anything hurtful, but that is not the most valuable point.
If I did not believe the "hurtful things" then it would hardly matter when someone said them to me. Sticks and stones and all of that jazz. When you are hurt by someone else's thoughts it is usually (maybe not always), but usually because your emotional state mirrors the attack. Someone calls you stupid, and you feel stupid. You are usually angry and the reason is simply that it sucks when someone breaks through the lies we tell ourselves and shows us that we really were kind of faking it, and we felt stupid today, so thanks for pointing it out.
With the bucket analogy it is the actions of others that cause your pain. You have no control over those actions, and therefore no control over your pain. The solution can be properly communicating your feelings to the other person (you have made me feel horrible with your hurtful words) but in any case it involves conflict with the outside world. Once these actions are confronted and defeated (hopefully through proper communication and mutual respect) you can return to your state of optimum self-fulfillment.
Let's continue the example. What will happen should I communicate with mutual respect with my friend? Well in fact we did communicate. He explained why he said what he said and apologized (sort of) and lo and behold our friendship, which seemed so on the rocks for a time, remained intact. The bucket analogy must be right because communication can heal wounds and repair damage to relationships.
If the bucket analogy was right, with a sincere apology and a repaired friendship, my optimal state of self-fulfillment should be back in place and I should be happy. Therein lies the flaw of the bucket analogy, or the bucket way of thinking, for in fact the reason I am unhappy is because of my own abuse to myself, and not the actions of the outside world. My friend merely pointed out something that I struggle with when I am being an ass to myself. His apologies and our friendship are aside from the fact that my emotions are abused by my own attacks against them.
If actions of others are arrows, then armor is our shields, but how can you defend attacks from within? Your own attacks on your psyche are the most damaging, and are the true bucket destroyers.
When you wake up and feel that you are ugly, or that you are not smart enough for that promotion, or that you are a mean person who has let the people around you down, or that you are not witty enough to be interesting on a date, or the thousands of other things that we say to ourselves all of the time, these are the things that empty our buckets. They are the hardest to admit and surely the hardest to resolve. The actions of others are easy to work out. You confront, conflict, and sometimes you manage to even resolve. In many cases the resolution gives the whole situation a miss and you end up with an enemy instead of a friend, or the loss of a job, or the loss of a family member (hopefully only metaphorically).
Most confrontations are just a way of avoiding working on your own bucket. Put off the work of refilling the bucket or repairing the leak by blaming it all on someone else. Focus your upset(s) on another person instead of focusing them on yourself. This is where hatred stems from, or at least one of the places. It is the creation of a fictitious entity who exists inside the real body of another individual. This fictitious entity becomes the focal point for all of your problems. You use grand words like "You are the reason I am unhappy. You make me not want to come home from work. You make me feel stupid. You have stolen from me." The fictitious entity is always easy to spot. It is always apparent in sentences where "You" can be replaced with "I" and the sentence still makes sense. "I am the reason I am unhappy. I make me not want to come home from work. I make me feel stupid. I have stolen from me."
When it comes to emotions there is only one conflict, and that conflict is eternal. It is the conflict you wage with yourself. It is literally all in your head. No one can hurt my feelings by telling me that I am stupid, or at least it would be a very rare day indeed if that were to happen. The reason for this is because while I believe many things about myself, being stupid is not one of them. Only an idiot would call me stupid, because a smarter person would have picked another adjective which might have had more effect, like loser or ugly or something like that.
Why do we say things like that? Why would I ever say to someone, "You are ugly"?
It is a defense mechanism, exactly the same as the stink from a skunk. Someone has probably said something to me, or done something, and my internal douchebag that lives in my head has gone to town, and so I lash out at somebody else.
It all starts with your bucket. You hurt me and emptied my bucket so now I'm going to hurt you and empty your bucket. It isn't that simple though, because usually you won't hurt the person who emptied your bucket because if you had enough brains to do that they couldn't have emptied your bucket in the first place. No, instead you'll hit someone easier, someone closer, someone who might put up with it and not hit back. So you'll find someone that you perceive to be weaker than you, or you'll find someone who you believe has to put up with your crap: the smaller kid at school, the shy guy from the copy room, your sibling, or your spouse.
Everyone goes around kicking everyone's buckets and all that happens is water splashes around a lot and the really wise ones of us go get a mop and fill up their own buckets with the liquid no one else seems concerned about losing.
If someone calls you a name and it bothers you and you think that maybe you should talk to that person about the name they called you, stop. Look instead at why the name bothered you and start there. If you can resolve the why then the rest will work itself out. The name will not bother you anymore, you will be happier than before the person called you the name in the first place, and you can in fact thank the person for helping you realize something that was bothering you and getting in the way of your optimal sense of fulfillment.
