Matters of responsibility

(Nimue)

Content warning for abuse.

One of the things I’m working on in myself at the moment is the issue of responsibility. I’m undertaking to change what I consider myself responsible for and this should enable me to dial down anxiety as well.

There are a number of ways a person can end up with problems around responsibility. That includes being made responsible for things you have no power over, being obliged to shoulder more than your fair share of responsibility, and being expected to magically get everything right. It can be an issue in both domestic abuse, and toxic workplaces where responsibility without power can feature heavily. It can also come about as a consequence of dealing with people who cannot manage their own boundaries or who refuse to be accountable.

For me, experience led to a kind of hypervigilance, trying to see problems before they happen and head them off. This isn’t an unusual state to end up in. It’s exhausting and makes it very hard to relax or drop guard if you’re constantly watching out for the next problem in the desperate hope of averting disaster. In normal and healthy situations you can just deal with problems if they arise and figure it out with whoever else is involved. If you don’t have that, then you can end up really struggling with responsibility.

The worst examples involve making victims responsible for the way in which they are being abused. Some abusers will be explicit that the victim is ’making them do it’ – by making them angry, or ‘failing’ in some other way. People who are subjected to a lot of that can end up with really distorted sense of what they are really responsible for, and it takes a lot of unpicking.

We do have responsibility for how we impact on each other. In interactions between functioning adults, that should be balanced and fair, and not result in high levels of anxiety. If one person has to carry too much of the load, that takes a toll.

So I’m learning to better recognise what I’m not responsible for. It’s tricky around other people’s responses to me, because I tend to feel it’s my job to make everyone happy all of the time. That’s something else to unlearn. I’m working on holding boundaries that allow me to feel comfortable, and not to accept responsibility when all I can do with that is feel compromised or ignore my own needs and feelings. I’m learning to make more balanced decisions about how my needs and feelings fit in with what other people want. Or don’t.

Healing is a process, and re-learning takes time. I can only do this because I have the space and the support to examine my own responses. Having permission to say no, is really helpful. In recent weeks, having active encouragement to declare myself not responsible for some things, has really helped me. Situations I would have felt obliged to sort out in the past I am considering not my problem. If things go wrong because I didn’t step in to sort it out, maybe that’s ok. Maybe that will give other people opportunities to learn some new things about handling responsibility.