“No one can make me feel anything unless I allow it.”
Many of us, who are enthusiastic about personal development and spirituality, are already familiar with this phrase. The idea is that when we assume 100% responsibility for how we feel, we empower ourselves and stop being a victim of our circumstances.
However, something about this phrase never sat quite right with me.
There is something that somehow bothered me for a long time, and I’ve felt uncomfortable about it.
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As someone who grew up 100% depending on herself, this has always been ingrained within me before I knew about the world of personal development and spirituality. My mom is also the one who reinforced in me this valuable lesson, as she reminded me at times to focus on what I can do and learn from each misfortune.
If this is really something I adhere to, then why does it bother me?
After some time, and trusting my intuition while digging deeper into my own uncomfortable feelings, I could finally figure out why.
While there is truth in taking 100% responsibility for how we feel, taking this mindset to the extreme is actually a sign of a lack of compassion towards ourselves and a lack of acknowledgement of others.
What real victimization of self is
If you have an internal wound in your shoulder and someone hits your shoulder, you might roll on the floor in pain, and get upset with him or her especially if you didn’t realize that you have a wound, as you assumed that the other person hit a bit too hard.
However, whether or not you have a wound, hitting causes pain and it’s not something nice to do, whether the other person is aware of the pain he or she caused or not.
And yet, when it comes to physical pain, we don’t say things such as “I’m 100% responsible for my own pain” and assume that by acknowledging what the other person did or cause we are victimizing ourselves.
Victimization isn’t about acknowledging what the other person did and how wrong the action was. Rather, victimization is when we simply stay hurt and don’t acknowledge our power to change future circumstances.
What real responsibility for ourselves is
In life, we all learn as we go through different experiences. When we were young, we learn to regulate our emotions as we learn how different situations feel and how we can cope with them and feel better.
When we become adults, we learn how to handle situations by acknowledging how we feel and how we can react better towards other people and circumstances. For example, if we have conflicts with someone, we learn how to communicate with each other better and in a more empathetic way, while at the same time we try to understand why we feel and react the way we did so that we can build emotional resilience.
We also learn to have better boundaries and walk away from situations that would not serve us anymore, if needed.
Taking 100% responsibility for ourselves means acknowledging what we can do better, how we can build more emotional resilience and have better boundaries so that we can improve our life and happiness.
What happens when we take this mindset to the extreme
Somehow, I began to notice that those around me who take this to the extreme, including myself at times, are actually doing so not out of self-love but out of self-criticism.
They might blame themselves to be weak or vulnerable for reacting towards others or situations. But they might assume the entire responsibility of the situations because they were disappointed by others, to the point they couldn’t trust that others actually cared enough to do their part for them. They were clearly upset with the other person, but they chose to work on how they have felt and simply focus on what they had to do instead of working it out with others.
The problem of this mindset being taken to the extreme is the lack of acknowledgment not only of the other person’s action but also how we truly feel about the situation and the unmet needs behind those feelings.
Whether we have an internal wound or not, which requires healing indeed, being hit does hurt because we have a nervous system. And being hit is not ok. We all grow by learning better ways to handle different situations and having more boundaries and emotional resilience, and it’s important to honor our pace of growth. Even if we eventually mature and might even reach a state of little to no reactivity, until we reach that level of growth, it can still hurt and we still have inner needs that ask to be honored.
In other words, while we acknowledge our need for growth and maturity, we also acknowledge actions and feelings for what they are, instead of only acknowledging one side.
The lack of acknowledgment of what the other person has done actually blocks us from truly seeing others and actually having compassion for ourselves and for others.
When we acknowledge how we played our parts in a certain dynamic in a relationship, and acknowledge what we can do to change our situation, we empower ourselves to improve our lives.
When we acknowledge how others played their parts in a certain dynamic in a relationship, and acknowledge our feelings towards them, we honor and have compassion for ourselves as we stop invalidating our feelings and needs.
Acknowledging is different from reacting. We have the responsibility to learn and mature our reaction towards people and circumstances, to best serve ourselves and others. But acknowledging all sides is the first step to honor ourselves and truly grow.
When we can also acknowledge how others played their parts as well, we actually realize that often people, just like us, end up hurting each other not because we intended to do so, but because we were not aware of our own inner wounds and how they surfaced and had hurt each other.
Acknowledging other people’s actions, as well as the real reasons behind them, actually leads us to feel more compassion towards them, and towards ourselves. It then contributes to our own healing when we realize that despite other people’s care for us, sometimes they do end up hurting us because they were hurt inside.
Also, when we embrace everyone’s contribution to a situation, we are open to working together and trust that we do care for each other despite our differences and imperfections.
Voicing how we feel to others requires trust and vulnerability, which actually takes lots of strength to do so. But in doing so, we also allow everyone to learn from each other and to finally understand and better care for each other’s feelings.
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When we acknowledge and feel compassion for ourselves and others, and acknowledge what we can do to improve our future situations through emotional resilience, better reactions and boundaries, we can truly have a more complete healing and growth, of ourselves and together with those we care and love.
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Mónica Valverde is a mentor/coach, and a daydreamer navigating the experience of human life. In love with Spirituality, Inner Work and Relationships.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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