Do You Take On Too Much Or Too Little Responsibility?

There are patterns that will come up in many people’s lives around responsibility.   

Lately I have been working with a client around not taking enough responsibility in her life. This looks like putting off doing things she knows she is meant to. Over-emphasising the ‘light side’ of life: having fun, catching up with friends, going to the gym whilst ignoring every day tasks. Not looking at her finances and the numbers of incomings and outgoings. Burying her head in the sand. And other examples of day to day life of avoiding responsibility. A lot of the time it can come up strongest around money (a good way to gauge your level of responsibility in life).

She has come now to a point in her life where there needs to be a new level of responsibility taken. 

The fact is that without an awareness of why she is so irresponsible, no real responsibility can ever be taken. 

Growing up my client was treated like a princess – her parents wanted to give her the world. They did everything for her: she never learned to cook, clean, take care of her finances or do anything that remotely equated to responsibility. They thought they were doing the right thing by her. 

What this meant, though, was that my client had an overdeveloped ‘Princess’ part of her personality that had belief systems along the line of ‘life should be fun’, ‘responsibility isn’t fun, so I don’t want to do it’, ‘other people always do things for me’ and ‘I don’t want to do anything that doesn’t make me happy’. She was a princess at the expense of ever learning how to be independent, self-reliant and accountable.

Imagine going your whole life living this way, and then all of a sudden having the need to be responsible. All kinds of voices would come up – ‘fuck this’, ‘I don’t want to do this’, ‘I just want to stay in bed’, ‘someone else can do it’. These are self-sabotaging parts of her personality that would come up as she moved to being more responsible, as they did not want to stay anywhere but where they were. 

This sets up a conflict within the psyche that can present itself as self-doubt, all-out war in your thoughts, procrastination, beating yourself up for what you are NOT doing, and all kinds of weird and wonderful negative voices. 

The point is – if you take on too little responsibility in your life, chances are that you were taught somewhere in your life that you didn’t need to, or you didn’t want to. And now it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And if you have come to a point in your life where this reality is no longer sustainable or is no longer allowing you to move where you want to go, you need to learn how to move along to a more responsible path. You need to learn how to embrace the responsible parts of your personality, how to work with them and how to work with the negative parts of your personality that come in to sabotage you. 

If you take on too little responsibility, realise that this is a whole lifetime worth of belief systems playing up, and that you need skills, tools and dedication to create a whole new way of life.

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