Have you ever thought that being rescued, rushed and overworked is not a commitment, but actually a shirking of responsibility?
In fact, I have noticed a pattern: the more you do, the less responsibility you actually take. In this case, the focus is on rescuing, guiding, controlling other people, in short, on controlling life to make sure that everything is in order and done my way.
A full day of activities, putting out fires, doing for others, endless checks, messages, us, Teams links. It’s like there’s a rush all the time to get things under control. Under our control. But life happens no matter how much you try to can and control it.
However, control is one of the corners of the same relational dynamics of victim and rescuer. All three, victim, rescuer, controller, are characterised by a focus on others, or a lack of responsibility for their own lives within themselves. Also in the use of words such as ‘his, her, them, there, I have, etc’.
But it is not a liability. It is an escape from responsibility. We just call it responsibility.
Saving, editing and overworking give a sense that:
– I am needed,
– I am in control,
– if I don’t do it, the system will collapse.
It is very easy to confuse this with responsibility. In fact, responsibility is not life management. Responsibility is responding, responding to the process of life according to one’s own journey and essence. The ability to respond to the course of life, not the ability to try to control everything. I call this kind of “responsibility” escapist responsibility.
In the case of runaway responsibility, the deepest issues are left untouched:
– a deep or difficult conversation with someone (including one’s own essence)
– a decision that is long overdue, but the implementation of which is frightening (e.g., something has exhausted me)
– a need for rest for oneself (in silence, the truth would otherwise come to light)
– the courage to say “no” (this presupposes knowing in the I-language what I need in life, how I can control my will)
– an honest look at one’s role: am I really contributing or just keeping the system and the “dead horse” alive artificially?
Responsibility is not determined by how much I make. On the contrary, it shows how little you are really responsible for YOUR life when the focus is on others. The more we save and deliver, the less time we have to truly be HUMAN. Perhaps to deal with our own inner anxieties, concentration difficulties, fears and temptations to control the flow of life and change others; to develop our own human virtues, to spend quality time with loved ones, to take care of our bodies, etc.
It’s great to see the changes that are being made among our clients when they start to distinguish between responsibility and escaping responsibility. Suddenly life becomes more vibrant and what money buys is no longer in a hierarchy of values, where it is leading and controlling people. Because everything we try to control ends up taking control of us and begins to control us.
