Actually, I don’t think the construct is quite right. I don’t believe either of those things is true.
How we react to outside events and people’s action is a function of a complex set of things including much of our previous life experience including childhood wounds and defense mechanisms and, finally, to some extent genetics.
I completely disagree that we can control our feelings. In fact, I think many of our problems come from trying to control our feelings. Much of that attempts to suppress our feelings, which requires a large amount of energy.
What we can do is acknowledge our feelings, experience them fully, and in the course of that, the feelings will change or eventually fade. We can also use the experience of intense feelings to look at our pasts and to analyze why we might feel a certain way. In doing that, our feelings about a particular stimulus may change or the response may become less intense.
In the book, “The Waning of the Middle Ages,” Johan Huizinga talks about how very different the emotional life of man was. People experienced vast extremes of emotion constantly, weeping violently, laughing manically, filled with revenge or jealousy and all very publicly on the street and in public life.
Biologically, that is our heritage, but all of that brief, intense, changeable feeling is now bottled up by our mores about what is proper to publicly “feel.”
Thus, other people do not cause us to feel, but events including those in relationships do trigger emotional responses from us.
Also, we do better to acknowledge and experience our emotions rather than suppress them. By understanding them in the context of our own lives, we can transform them through that process.
Finally, what we do control is not how we feel about something, but how we act in response to it. We can consciously choose how we act or speak in response to something. We should not confuse that with choosing how we feel about it.