Personal responsibility: owning your reactions

Personal responsibility means owning your own choices, reactions and feelings, whatever led up to them. It doesn’t mean blame: you can be responsible for what you do next about something that was never your fault.

At Two Birds Church this is the core of everything we do. Our Welcome course puts it this way: “Each of us is responsible for our inner world: our thoughts, feelings and choices. When we meet life with honesty and courage, we stop blaming outside forces and grow for real.” Our FAQ calls it our principle of Inner Responsibility, which “means owning our emotions instead of blaming outside forces.” Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Responsibility is different from blame

A lot of people hear “take responsibility” and brace for a lecture. Blame looks backward and asks who caused the problem. Responsibility looks at right now and asks what you’re going to do with it.

If someone hurt you as a child, that was not your fault, and nothing in this post says otherwise. The person who did it is responsible for what they did. What you carry today, the fear, the anger, the way you flinch when someone raises their voice, still lives in you. Nobody else can do the work of looking at it. That’s the hard, fair part of personal responsibility: it isn’t about fault, and it’s still yours.

The same goes for smaller things. Your coworker took credit for your idea. That’s on them. Whether you spend the next three weeks replaying it at 2am, or say something to them, or let it go, is on you.

What happened to you and what you do with it

Psychology has a name for one side of this. In 1966 the psychologist Julian Rotter published his work on “locus of control”: how much a person believes the outcomes in their life come from their own actions versus luck, fate or other people. Nobody controls everything. Still, people who look for their own part in a situation have something to work with. People who put it all outside themselves are left waiting for the world to change.

Our post on the Buddha’s two arrows says the same thing in an older way. The first arrow is what happens to you. The second is the one you fire at yourself in how you react. You can’t always dodge the first. The second is up to you.

Emotional responsibility: your feelings are yours

Emotional responsibility is the part people find hardest. It means treating your feelings as information about you, and not making them someone else’s job to fix.

Other people do affect us. If your partner forgets your birthday, you’ll probably feel hurt, and that’s fair. The difference is in what you do with the hurt. Compare:

• “You made me feel like I don’t matter.” This makes the feeling their doing, and their job to undo.
• “When you forgot, I felt like I didn’t matter. That’s an old feeling for me, and it hit hard.” This names the feeling, owns it, and still tells them what happened.

The second version is what the psychologist Thomas Gordon called an “I-message” in his 1970 book Parent Effectiveness Training. It’s simple to describe and hard to do in the moment, because when we’re hurt we want the other person to feel it too.

Emotional responsibility cuts the other way as well. You’re not responsible for managing everyone else’s feelings. If a friend is upset that you said no, their disappointment is theirs to feel. You can be kind about it without taking it on as your job. Our post on setting boundaries goes into that side.

Personal responsibility in relationships

Relationships are where most of us get tested. A few situations we see often:

• Your partner is late again and you feel a rush of anxiety. The lateness is theirs. The story your mind writes in those twenty minutes (“they don’t care, they’re with someone else”) is yours. You can ask them about the first and look at the second.
• You go quiet and wait for someone to notice you’re upset. Silence that’s meant to be noticed is a way of making your feeling their job. Saying “I’m upset about earlier, can we talk?” owns it.
• An argument keeps repeating with different people. When the same fight follows you from one relationship to the next, the common thread is worth looking at, and you’re the one person who was there every time.

None of this means you should put up with someone treating you badly. Owning your reactions makes it easier to see clearly what’s yours and what’s theirs, and to act on the part that’s theirs: say no, set a limit, or leave.

What it looks like in a sharing circle

Every Sunday we sit in a circle and share on a prompt. Our Welcome course gives the guidelines: “speak only for yourself, no advice, no responding to others, no fixing.” Each rule is a small practice in personal responsibility.

• Speaking only for yourself means “I felt” instead of “you know how it is” or “we all do this.” You can only own what you say about you.
• No advice means trusting that the person sharing can work out their own life. Advice, however well meant, takes the work out of their hands.
• No fixing applies to the listener too. When someone shares something painful, the urge to jump in and make it better is often about our own discomfort with their pain. Sitting with that urge without acting on it shows you something about yourself.

People who’ve been in recovery groups or therapy groups usually recognize this right away. For people who haven’t, it can feel strange for the first few weeks. Then it starts to feel like relief: nobody is going to fix you, and you don’t have to fix anybody.

What personal responsibility isn’t

• It isn’t self-blame. Saying “that’s mine” is honest. Saying “I’m terrible” is just another way of not looking.
• It isn’t taking on everyone else’s stuff. Owning too much is as much of a dodge as owning too little.
• It isn’t skipping over feelings with spiritual talk. “Everything happens for a reason” can be a way to avoid being angry when you’re angry. We wrote about that in our post on spiritual bypassing.

Questions to practice with

Next time something sets you off, try these:

1. What actually happened, in one sentence, without adjectives?
2. What did I feel, and where did I feel it in my body?
3. What story did I tell myself about it?
4. Is this feeling familiar? When have I felt it before?
5. What part of this is mine to do something about, and what part isn’t?
6. Am I waiting for someone else to make this feeling go away?

If what comes up is heavy, like old trauma, depression or anger you can’t get a handle on, a therapist is the right help. Taking responsibility includes asking for that kind of help when you need it.

If you’d like to practice this with other people, come to Sunday Service, Sundays 3 to 6pm in Anna.