Responsibility

While people demonstrate varying degrees of responsibility, genuine, healthy responsibility is actually quite rare.

What does genuine, healthy responsibility look like? When you possess truly functional responsibility, you take responsibility for your own issues. When you are triggered off, you own it and do not direct that issue at other people.

Furthermore, you do not take responsibility for other people’s issues. When other people are triggered off, you can remain separate from any energy that is directed at you.

While you are not responsible for another person’s energy, even when you have it in your space, you are responsible for how it got into your space and what keeps it there. In this case, taking responsibility means you heal how you engaged with the other person’s issue to separate from it and get it out of your space.

From another point of view, anything you can process through with an emotional process is your responsibility. And anything you cannot move through with your emotional process is probably not yours.

The first requirement for developing healthy responsibility is to have a functional emotional process. Without a viable emotional process, you have no way of knowing for sure what is your issue and what belongs to someone else and, therefore, cannot practice or understand healthy responsibility. Furthermore, without a method to distinguish for certain whose issue is whose, any guidance you wish to provide to other people regarding responsibility will be limited at best and totally wrong at worst. 

Without an emotional healing practice and the understanding this practice provides, parents and teachers cannot teach their children and students about healthy responsibility. They will not know what to do when they are triggered off in relation to a child or student’s words or actions and will usually direct any active issue at that child or student. Thus, a functional emotional healing process that leads to a healthy practice and understanding of responsibility is required to teach healthy responsibility. Directing issues or expectations at a child or student teaches them to take responsibility for other people’s issues and expectations rather than teaching them about taking responsibility for themselves, their body, their choices, and their issues.

When a parent or teacher (or anyone else) has a functional emotional process, they will be able to heal themselves and learn about whose issues are whose. Then any interaction they have with others will be healthier and the responsibility will be clear. They will also be able to teach responsibility by guiding others in taking appropriate responsibility for their own issues and energy.

I have had two students whose teachers strongly encouraged them to pursue vocational training instead of higher education. Both were performing at less than their potential and were mislabeled as having lower capabilities. However, for both of these students, when they could separate from their teacher’s invalidation by healing how they trusted their teacher’s opinion, they thrived and became stellar students, successfully pursuing difficult courses of study at the university level.

To discern what is and what is not your issue, try to move through every issue that arises. If you can move through it, it was your issue. If you get stuck in the issue, it may not be yours. To be sure that the issue is not yours, you must discover how you engaged with the issue and heal that. If the original issue disappears after healing how you engaged with it, it was not yours to heal and you will now be free of it.

(For more guidance, please refer to the chapters in Book I titled, “Responsibility” and “Avenues of Engagement.” Also, some additional notes about the Avenues of Engagement will be added to this blog in the near future.)