A Relationship With Someone Who Just Won’t Take Responsibility

You’re not perfect and I’m not perfect. That’s a given. What makes us not perfect is the wounds that we carry with us. We may think we’re OK, but we’re not. We’re never OK. We’re only technically OK if we’re growing, which involves acknowledging our vulnerabilities and our wounds and taking action in our lives to address them and transform them. In that case being OK means I’m on a path towards growth and am executing that growth in relationship to my circumstances, which include my people, and my places and my things.

It’s not just our wounds that make us not OK, it’s the way that we’ve learned to compensate for them that get in the way. There are patterns of behavior, patterns of thinking that we exist in unconsciously that we consider normal and right, but are nothing more than defenses that live to justify and perpetuate the wound thereby inhibiting my healing. It’s not until a relationship comes into our life, when attraction becomes inflamed, and we enter into a shared experience with another person that these wounds and their need for care become really evident.

It’s at that point where I must take full responsibility for my wounds, and utilize the relationship in a way that helps me process and heal them. This is the very practical way that God addresses our need for healing. The way we heal in process is different in every situation for different people, but it involves being vulnerable with my feelings, and the “Why” that they exist. Typically we ignore the fact that they exist, thus expecting things around us to change or somebody else to act in a way that we see fit but this keeps me from actually healing. In other words expecting them to do what I say I need, like I need you to… However, a behavioral task is not a need. The need is far deeper. Furthermore, we judge other people and especially our significant others, but where and what we judge typically is revealing more about us and our insecurity than it does about them.

The needs we have actually has a why to it- a purpose. Why do I need that? Why am I vulnerable, why is you helping me and supporting me actually addressing my deeper fears. What I’m really asking you to do is asking you to help make me confront my fears- to help me prove to myself that I don’t need them anymore. That I’m secure. At least this is what I should be doing. This is what a secure attachment does. It makes us feel safe. If you don’t feel safe, it’s because you’re in an insecure attachment. And this kind of attachment has nowhere to go besides destruction unless I’m willing to take responsibility for how I’m feeling, and for my needs, and then requesting the person to validate and support them and their expression.

Many couples come into therapy to discover this truth only to realize that they have their own work to do individually. Very frequently it’s one partner alone trying to figure everything out. While the more dysfunctional partner is having evident issues with trauma, emotional regulation, and self-care, and yet they do nothing measurable to work on that in themselves. Yet they place all the blame on the other person and the relationship.

This is backwards. We have an “I” issue before we ever have a “we” issue. Responsibility falls on me because I carried these wounds in the first place and I’ll carry them out of the relationship and they’ll go with me and haunt me until I decide to take responsibility. In the dysfunctional equation we’re working from we have flipped the scenario up upside down, and I put the owness on the other person. This then is going to fail, as it surely already is, and I’m going to be perpetuating my experience of woundedness thus justifying that the relationship is the problem.

A partner who insists that the relationship is the problem, even though they may acknowledge they have issues, but does nothing to address those issues in of themselves which they need to do no matter what, is no partner at all. They’re actually hindering my growth. Now this truth is not evident to everybody, and everybody deserves a chance to respond to this truth. But that’s it, you have to respond to this truth. If not, I will grow, and I will grow right out of the relationship.

With that being said, it’s imperative that we realize this as we engage in partnership with our significant other. It’s fair for me to expect you to work on yourself in a measurable way in light of your need to grow. This includes self-care, spiritual activities, physical health, and other actions by which we intervene on our wounds. With that being said, that also means that I must be responsible for my needs and my wounds. Carrying around responsibility for your own need to grow, while also harnessing the other person’s responsibility and trying to fix a relationship you think is a “we” problem, will bring you to exhaustion, and end up blowing the relationship anyways.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.