If you’re lacking something in you, look for where you’re giving it to others.
I think that whenever we take responsibility for the wellbeing of others, we’re borrowing from our personal responsibility bank. Responsibility symmetry: where the responsibility we take for others, we’re taking from ourselves. Then we burn out, get sick, and compensate with sketchy mechanisms from addictions to rescuing. Eg:
A leader who spends all their energy fixing the problems their co-founder creates, ends up chronically fatigued, and ironically dependent on their co-founder in a way that makes accountability/splitting up that much harder, meaning they have to spend all their energy fixing their co-founder’s messes, further depleting them, in a self-reinforcing cycle.
A participant who always directs groups to ‘include the quiet,’ never getting the attention they really want for themselves. Since they constantly direct attention to others, they perpetuate their own not-getting, which they project onto people they need to include, perpetuating the cycle. They move from practice to practice, never realizing their high-minded ideal is their shadow. A similar cycle happens with the facilitator who has to make sure everyone has a breakthrough (instead of trusting the group and individuals in it); in a few months they dread showing up for something they used to love, assume they need a breakthrough, and perpetuate the cycle.
A facilitator who chronically extends sessions because ‘trauma’, spending all her free time on follow up calls and messages, never getting to enjoy the community she’s working so hard to maintain, reifying a culture of crisis management and rewarding-the-most-problematic-with-attention, again perpetuating the problem.
Of course we should help people. Service is amazing. Ethics are great. Sacrifice is powerful and sometimes necessary. And what’s ours to be responsible for can include our children, families, organizations. These are different from responsibility symmetry (I believe the difference is where we draw the boundary around “self,” but that's a different essay). The power of this exploration is not as a universal claim, but in using this symmetry as a diagnostic tool:
(1) when I notice myself doing a lot of taking care of others, are there any personal responsibilities I’m ignoring?
(2) when I’m not taking care of my responsibilities, am I investing my “responsibility points” elsewhere?
The second I find the most useful. Eg: If I don’t know what I want, am I helping others get what they want instead? Then I need to stop doing that first, before trying to find out what I want. I can’t reinvest money already deployed elsewhere.
Often, the mirror is exact: the therapist who always coaches his wife needs to share his inner problems and be coached by her. Or said the other way, the person who doesn’t feel like they get seen enough is doing too much seeing others. If symmetry is active, they’ll need to stop that to free up space for getting seen.
Why can’t we just grow our responsibility-capacity to take care of both? We can, but the symmetry is still there. Shadows grow up too.
For whatever reason, you have unique access to the body-mind system you wrap your “I” around; no one else has as much control (aka response-ability), so it’s your comparative advantage as much as your obligation. Could this lead to excessive self-interest? Perhaps. But it’s a risk worth taking: when we take care of ourselves, we tend to give more, better, to others.
#TTT