Understanding Emotional Responsibility
Spoiler alert: responsibility means “ability to respond.”
Emotional responsibility is like so in right now. It’s the hot new craze in… emotions. Everyone who’s anyone (who thinks too much about feelings and communication) is talking about it. The miracle drug, the cure-all, healing everyone from the horrors of emotional projection… but also causing horrors of its own.
The emotional responsibility “movement,” so to speak, emerged as a remedy to a pattern of behavior that plagues so many interpersonal relationships, that of emotional projection. Projection is the pattern of believing, You are responsible for how I feel, or alternately, I am responsible for how you feel.
The behaviors that typically emerge out of emotional projection include blame, bulldozing, control, demanding, unhealthy attachment, unhealthy dependence, trying too hard to please, guilt tripping, and self-blame.
Emotional responsibility’s answer to this pattern is for individuals to step back and step up, saying, I take responsibility for how I feel. Rather than saying, “You make me miserable,” the emotionally responsible thing to say is, “I feel misery as a result of this situation.” What a wonderful trick, right?
