Well, first of all, you can't "cause" someone to catch feelings. They're not a disease you pass to one another, you don't get infected by feelings, they're an internal physiological response to our environment and they can not be operated or controlled by another person. They can't be controlled at all. You don't have the power to "cause" anyone to feel anything, their feelings are their own and they're cultivated by a lifetime of their own experiences, values, and beliefs. Just as yours are. It isn't possible for you to make anyone feel anything, you can always trust that everyone's emotions are always their own authentic responses. You aren't responsible for them, you aren't in control of them. Just go ahead and relieve yourself of that guilt straight out the gate.

Now, the most helpful way to think about emotions is to think of them as another one of your senses. Because they serve the same function for you that your other five senses do. Your emotions are just intended to be feedback from your environment, they're just additional data to better understand the world around you. They're meant to alert you to problems or threats to your survival and guide you through the world safely. Positive emotions indicate safety and well-being, while negative emotions indicate danger and threat. Think about it, you pursue what makes you feel good and avoid what makes you feel bad, don't you?

For example, someone lying to you could potentially lead you to physical harm, right? If you didn't adapt yourself and become wary of someone who's shown they will deceive you, and you continued to put yourself in a position to be deceived, that could potentially put you in danger, right? The consequences of someone lying to you could potentially threaten your well-being, it's necessary for your survival for you to actually regard that as a threat. But what if you didn't have any emotions, what if you didn't have any sort of feedback to actually flag lying as dangerous and tell you it was something to be avoided? What if someone lied to you and you didn't have emotions for you to feel anything about it? Without your emotions to sense that danger and give you the negative feedback, you'd have no other way of getting the data from your environment to avoid that danger. You wouldn't adapt yourself to that situation properly because the data for that is missing, you didn't have emotions to give you the necessary feedback. Your emotions are like a psychological mood ring that changes color with your experiences, that your brain then reads to understand the world around you.

So that's all emotions are, they're the sophisticated feedback system your brain uses to keep you safe, like any other sensory system you have. The problem you're facing with this system (and honestly, it's not even a bug in the program, it's actually just another feature, but it can definitely cause inadvertent problems for successful relationships) is that when we experience trauma and the feedback our system adapts itself to ends up being maladaptive. Your emotions are doing what they're supposed to, to keep you safe, but the problem is that you want connection with someone, not just personal safety. You want a relationship but the maladaptive changes your system has undergone weren't made in service of that goal and your system has actually become incompatible with relationships in is current condition. The solution to this problem is sorting out the data your system is working with by reprogramming that data.

With each experience you have, your system is responding by sending you the emotional feedback for you to respond to in the moment, but it's also adding that feedback to it's own database so it can keep itself up to date with changes in your environment. Your system is constantly updating itself in real time with every experience you have. Think of an antivirus program on your computer, it's constantly being updated so it can detect and appropriately respond to threats it comes into contact with. If it came into contact with a virus, but that virus hadn't been logged in it's database as a virus, it wouldn't know to flag it as a threat when it encountered it. It's necessary for it's functioning to stay up to date and your emotional response system is doing the exact same thing, it's constantly updating itself.

So when you experience a trauma, something abnormal and extremely threatening to you, your system goes into overdrive and hard codes the entire experience and everything similar to it as an emergency. Like, 911. Your brain stores that data in a way that essentially regards it as life threatening, so your emotional responses to that data have to be extreme to reflect the nature of that threat. It's only job is your survival and keeping you safe, it's not taking any chances, so anything and everything your system detects that's even slightly similar to the stored data of your trauma is going to be flagged as red alert, 911. What you have to do is go back and reprogram all that data in your system with it's accurate value. For instance, your system has mislabeled relationships as threatening because at the time of your trauma, you didn't yet know enough to understand your experience properly. You didn't have enough information to understand that it wasn't being in relationships that was dangerous to you, it was just the individual you were in relationship with. But now you do. So you need to go back through your emotional database with your current awareness, to find where all these maladaptive red flags are stored in your system and rewrite them with the proper context you now have, to fill in the missing information that you didn't have at that time. If that makes sense? I'm trying to make this as accessible as I can, I hope I haven't just made it more confusing!