Learning to Take Responsibility for Yourself

Choosing to take full responsibility for yourself is one of the most important decisions you can make in creating a healthy partnership. Taking one hundred percent responsibility means that you are choosing to be responsible for your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and your wants and needs. When you are expecting your partner to make you feel happy and secure, disappointments and conflict are inevitable. Once you shift to taking responsibility for yourself, you learn how to “show up” for yourself through your own self-reflection and self-expression. This requires a quality of mindfulness, allowing a sense of wonder and curiosity to enter into your awareness. It requires you to be kind and compassionate to yourself, allowing a nonjudgmental inquiry to take place. This type of approach makes room for self-acceptance as opposed to self-judgment and invites learning as opposed to defensiveness.

For example, you might find yourself getting angry at your partner over situations like not being on time, saying no to sex, or not communicating about something important. At such times, a feeling of abandonment typically surfaces but is often masked by the feeling of anger. Situations like these are opportunities to meet the fear of abandonment with tenderness and compassion. Once you learn to invoke this type of gentle understanding with yourself, you are learning how to be more present and grounded in relationship with yourself. Thus you can explore your own feelings of abandonment and discover the ways that you might be abandoning yourself. A question to ask yourself is, “Am I willing to be present and attentive to myself and my needs right now?” Or, “how have I been expecting my partner to take care of me?”

As you learn to take responsibility for yourself, you stop blaming your partner for your upset feelings. Then, when conflict occurs, you can invite learning about yourself and your partner and explore the deeper, more subtle issues of conflict, rather than trying to control your partner or be right. Perhaps you can examine some of your favorite ways to control in relationship (with a sense of humor!). Some possible ways to control include blaming, being angry and judgmental, playing the victim, being nice and compliant, caretaking, resisting, withdrawing love, defending, lying, denying, preaching, explaining and so forth! All the ways we try to control keep us from responsibility, intimacy, and the willingness to learn. Being willing to take responsibility and learn from any conflict is vital to thriving in relationship!

Julianna Pfeiffer