True Self Facilitator and Soul Adventurer - Empowering individuals to break through their limitations, unravel conditioning, heal from old wounds, and reconnect to their true selves.
IMAD Processing Prompt - Over-Responsibility - Are You Someone Who Takes And Holds Responsibility For Others?
Dear Reader
Over-responsibility, one of the greatest burdens you and I can carry through our life. Feeling and being responsible for adults and fulfilling their responsibilities. Responsibilities that are not yours or mine to hold and fulfill.
What was uncomfortable and confronting for me, in admitting I was over-responsible was that in essence I was parenting people whom I was not a parent to. I was parenting adults. Adults who are responsible for parenting themselves.
- Over-responsibility is a powerfully engrained and learned way of seeing other people, approaching relationships and way of processing.
- The conditioning comes from having taken on adult responsibilities at a young age. An age when in the ideal world you would not yet have been responsible for these responsibilities, until you were at the age it was your responsibility.
- Being over-responsible became familiar and normal to you.
- You learned to care for, rescue, save, protect, liberate, defend, safeguard, look after, insulate and shield people.
And in being over-responsible you carry the burdens of other peoples choices, actions and responsibilities.
And as a result of you taking responsibility for the person and their responsibilities you limit the growth in their ability to take responsibility for themselves and to fulfill what they are responsible for.
Questions for you:
- Who do you take responsibility for?
- What are the responsibilities that you fulfill for them, that are theirs?
- Why do you take responsibility for the person?
What if - instead of you taking and holding responsibility for the person, you supported them to take responsibility for themselves.
What if - you facilitated and assisted them to take responsibility so that they could fulfill their responsibilities.
Then potentially they go from dependent (and even co-dependent) to becoming independent.
What is important is to ask them, because does the person want to grow their ability to be self-responsible or not. They may not even be aware of this dynamic. And in them making a decision they take responsibility.
Your decision is whether you choose to continue to carry responsibility for people whom you are not responsible for.
Whatever your choice is, is your responsibility and the key is acceptance of what comes with your choice.
Melinda xx
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Melinda Cates
True Self Facilitator and Soul Adventurer - Empowering individuals to break through their limitations, unravel conditioning, heal from old wounds, and reconnect to their true selves.
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