What is Emotional Responsibility?
If you’ve ever found yourself either taking on responsibility for other people’s emotions or blaming others for your emotional experiences—truly, who hasn’t—this post is for you. Keep reading to learn about the concept of emotional responsibility and how to reclaim it in your life.
“You demonstrate love by giving it unconditionally to yourself. And as you do, you attract others into your life who are able to love you without conditions.”
I don’t know about you, but what I’m craving in these rather divisive days is heaps of humbled authenticity, ✨true✨ open-mindedness (a topic I’ll be dissecting soon), and radical responsibility. Most especially radical emotional responsibility.
Are you familiar with the concept of Emotional Responsibility?
Most simply put, it’s owning the fact that our emotional experience is wholly and completely an inside job.
Being emotionally responsible means…
✓ We accept that we’re solely and independently responsible for our emotions and our emotional states.
✓ We take back the power to meet our own emotional needs instead of outsourcing our power to others to do it for us.
✓ We don’t blame others for how we feel. And we don’t depend on others to make us happy or to “fix” anything for us.
✓ We release expectations for others to keep us emotionally safe, stable, happy, joyful, etc. and accept the fact that we’re independently responsible for what unfolds within our hearts and minds.
✓ We accept that we’re not responsible for others’ emotional experiences either—only our own.
✓ We humbly embrace the fact that others aren’t capable of letting us down, because disappointment, too, is an inside job. One that arises when others fail to comply with our own projected expectations and attempts to control.
✓ We reclaim power over our well-being.
✓ We accept (empowers us to create our own well-being) instead of blame (puts others in charge of our well-being).
✓ We, first and foremost, derive our sense of satisfaction, joy, contentment, well-being, and love from within.
✓ We don’t sit around and wait for others to change their thoughts/feelings/behaviors before we allow ourselves to feel happy. We have too much self-respect and self-love to be handing our power away to others like that.
✓ We treat negative emotions as internal calls to action (CTAs) and respond accordingly. But we don’t over-identify with our emotions. In other words, we recognize that our emotions are important neurobiological signposts, guiding us in the direction of beneficial change, while also recognizing that we are not our emotions.
✓ We free ourselves from people-pleasing and rise above victimhood.
THE PEOPLE-PLEASERS
So many of us have considered or do consider ourselves to be people-pleasers. 🙋♀️
We’re the ones who are keenly aware of everyone else’s eggshells and find ourselves constantly tip-toeing around them to keep the peace and please.
There’s an intense outward pressure for us to constantly give, give, give. A silent but suffocating belief that our primary purpose here on earth is to bring joy, happiness, and satisfaction to others. As if our virtue and sanctity resides within our willingness to give our attention, care, and focus away in pretty little packages tied up with bows.
We’re inundated with messages that suggest that “good” people are the ones who keep the peace, make others happy, and choose compliance with others’ expectations over honoring our unique intuitive callings and truths.
The undertone of these messages suggests that releasing ourselves from the societally imposed duty of pleasing, satisfying, and attempting to “happify” others would be an act of selfishness.
I used to buy into this idea, too. That the more I gave away to others, the more peace I kept, and the more I attempted to make others happy, the “better” I was. I suppose it’s part of the reason why I became a psychologist in the first place.
But the truth is…
We can’t make others happy in any sort of meaningful, long-lasting way. We can offer guidance that could potentially illuminate a brighter path for them, but it’s ultimately their choice whether or not they want to walk.
And when our focus is solely on giving to others, pleasing others, or “fixing” others, we both sever the divine connection to ourselves and weaken the power of our outward offerings. We also disempower ourselves and perpetuate victimhood in whomever it is we’re attempting to help.
And so the constant giving away of ourselves without persistent self-replenishment is inevitably fruitless for all involved.
We lose ourselves as we gently bend, break, and tip-toe around all those darn eggshells everyone else has laid before us. 🥚 We’ve mistakenly prioritized preserving them when perhaps what we need more than anything is for those eggshells to be nudged, tapped, and illuminated so that we can all begin to hatch. 🔆🐣
It’s wonderful to give to others, but we must first give to ourselves. And we must learn to prioritize our personal truth over the pressures to please and conform.
THE EMOTIONAL VICTIMS
We’ve all succumbed to emotional victimhood at one point or another.
Believing that we were the victim of someone else’s emotional carelessness.
But with the acceptance of a victim mentality comes the disempowering undertone of fragility.
When we embrace the energy of emotional victimhood, we outsource the problem to others. Which means we outsource the solution, too.
This leaves us to contend with both the initial emotional turmoil and the frustrating belief that someone else needs to “fix it” for us before we can move on.
We wait for apologies, for acknowledgment, and for others to take ownership of the emotional upheaval that’s been spurred within us before we allow ourselves to feel better. All of which move us further into the disempowerment of emotional victimhood.
AN ACT OF SELF-LOVE + A RECLAMATION OF POWER
Being emotionally responsible means we rise above both people-pleasing and victimhood.
It doesn’t mean we let others walk all over us or that we dismiss bad behavior. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Emotional responsibility empowers us to form clearer and healthier emotional boundaries with others. We guard ourselves more powerfully because we’ve defined what we will and will not accept in our relationships and we’ve disentangled our well-being from the outcome of those delineations.
From this space of newfound emotional empowerment, we actively seek and pursue what lights us up instead of sitting around hoping, waiting, and praying for others to do that for us.
We essentially say, “You keep doing you. I’ll be over here pursuing my own joy and honoring my power to be well no matter what you’re doing, saying, or thinking.”
At the same time, this doesn’t mean we deny our own need to grow, change, and improve, but rather that we actively embrace the practice of radical self-reflection. This also doesn’t mean that we never lean on others—rather that when we do lean, we do so with intention and without expectations of outward fixing.
Being emotionally responsible involves a deep and honest commitment to peering within as we work to unearth the thought patterns and habits that hold us back.
In other words, we learn to reflect on our emotional experiences in a way that is game-changing in terms of our growth. We untangle our emotional baggage and examine it without judgment for ourselves or others.
Through this process, we take responsibility for our internal experiences to such a profound degree that we elevate to new heights of consciousness as we bravely gaze deeper and deeper into ourselves.
This is true power. ✨
Emotional outsourcing (dependency) relies on the depleting energies of force and control whereas emotional responsibility harnesses the energy of authentic power.
Instead of fighting to subdue the waves (which we cannot control) as we swim upstream, we enact our right to grab an innertube and float with the waves as we ride them downstream. Examining our emotional experiences from a place of both keen awareness and disidentified empowerment.
EMOTIONAL RESPONSIBILITY AS A PRACTICE
Emotional responsibility is a journey rather than a destination. It requires a persistent dedication to fine-tuning our capacity to self-reflect as we release others from our expectations for them.
As we embrace emotional responsibility, there are likely to be situations and people that trigger us to revert to people-pleasing mode or victimhood.
This is normal and to be expected, especially within long-standing relationships (hey there, family drama 👋🏻) and hot-button belief systems (hellooo, politics)—those are always the touchiest, aren’t they?
The most powerful thing we can do once we’re aware we’ve reverted to outsourcing our emotional power is to offer ourselves grace as we work to reclaim it.
INTENTION
I am responsible for my well-being. I honor my emotional power each and every day.
intuitive WRITING PROMPT
Think of a situation where you outsourced your emotional experience to someone else (blamed them for the way you were feeling) or you took on the responsibility of someone else’s emotional experience. Write to your intuition* (higher self) to answer the following question.
What was this experience trying to show me about myself? What was the lesson I needed to learn?
*If you’re unsure how to write to your intuition, read this post to learn how to access your intuition in 5 easy steps.
