Once you understand the stages of self-responsibility, you empower yourself to move towards more peace and joy.
I keenly admire Frederick Law Olmstead. You may know him as the creator of Central Park, which he conceived as “the lungs of New York City.” He designed many other parks, though, and we are lucky to have several of them here in Rochester.
Each year, when spring finally comes after another one of our long, gray, snowy winters, my partner and I take a walk in one of them: Highland Park. I take pictures (like the one above) and marvel that Olmstead single-handedly created the dynamic art form of landscape architecture. He used trees, hills, and paths as his compositional elements, and he “painted” with the ever-changing textures and colors of leaves and blossoms.
This metaphor of blooming and unfolding is on my mind as I ponder the topic of self-responsibility. The blooming trees at Highland Park move from bud to blossom to leaf in the same sequence each year. Likewise, self-responsibility unfolds in three major stages.
As I describe these, I have two suggestions for you:
- Notice which stage resonates with you. Your answer may be multi-layered, because you may be in different stages in different areas of your life.
- Notice if you are shaming yourself about the stage you are in. We often do that. If you are, perhaps you can allow these beautiful cherry and hawthorne trees to remind you of the nature of growth. We are where we are. Whether we are in the bud or in full bloom, there is beauty and value in each stage of our development.
Stage 1: Not wanting self-responsibility
We each possess an intuitive sense of the way life should unfold. Ideally, your parents modeled for you how to handle your strong emotions and how to soothe yourself. They provided a safe haven to which you could return after stretching yourself to take risks in the world. In this case, you likely developed an internalized sense of sturdiness and resourcefulness.
But what if your parents or caregivers did not have the skills or resources themselves, to be attuned and responsive to you? What if they were not able to hold you safe and support you while you learned how to be responsible for yourself?
In that case, you may still be searching for that feeling of safety and security that you missed as a child. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel safe and secure. On the contrary. The problem here is that the “younger you” believes he or she can only get that from other people. You yearn to find another person who will be responsible for you.
This is completely understandable. Unfortunately, it is also completely ineffective. No wonder Stage 1 is the most challenging of the three stages of self-responsibility for highly sensitive people (HSPs.) In Stage 1, life is frustrating. Other people fail to cooperate. You feel disempowered, not realizing that you are unwittingly giving your power away.
Stage 1 is particularly difficult for HSPs because of the well-researched phenomenon of differential susceptibility. In plain English, sensitive kids suffer more in challenging family situations than non-HSP kids. So our urgency to fix this feeling of something missing is correspondingly greater.
This can lead to serious inner and outer relationship challenges, which are often the catalyst for us to seek help. In doing so, we move into Stage 2.
Stage 2: Taking responsibility—but only when you are motivated by pain
In the second stage of self-responsibility, you begin to take responsibility for yourself—sometimes. This is a big step forward. However, your commitment isn’t consistent. You attend to your pain only when it gets too bad to ignore. In short, your self-responsibility is conditional.
You may find it tricky to spot this conditional quality in your own behavior. If that’s the case, this thought-experiment should help. Imagine you have a real-life little girl. She wakes up one morning with a mysterious rash all over her body. You would take her to the doctor, wouldn’t you?
If that doctor couldn’t help, you’d try another one. You would never dream of saying, “Well, honey, I’ve taken you to three doctors. None of them knows what this is, so you’ll just have to deal with it.” No. You’d keep trying until you got her the help she needed. That is what unconditional care looks like.
In Stage 2, you might take time off to rest, but only when your body gets so run down that you get sick. You know what foods make you feel your best, but you only eat that way sporadically. You invest in learning powerful inner relationship modalities like Focusing or Inner Bonding, but you only practice them when you feel truly miserable.
As a result, you cycle repeatedly between pain and relief. This is the hallmark of Stage 2. There is good news here, though. You repeatedly experience the stark contrast between how you feel when you are taking responsibility for yourself, and when you aren’t.
This painful contrast is inherently motivating. You can only step into the same pothole so many times before you wake up and say, “Enough! I’m ready to take responsibility for preventing this.” Now you are on your way to Stage 3.
Stage 3: Embracing self-responsibility in a proactive way
In Stage 3 you decide to embrace full responsibility for yourself, without conditions. Only by making this commitment can you experience a true and lasting sense of safety, peace, and joy. Each stage presents its own challenges, and the central challenge of Step 3 is spiritual.
To fully embrace self-responsibility, you need more than just personal willpower. You need a spiritual commitment. By “spiritual,” I don’t mean “religious”, although the two can overlap.
Even if you aren’t religious or don’t resonate with the idea of “spirituality,” I’m guessing you have some sense of something bigger: a force or energy that exists in, yet beyond the material world, and that transcends the level of the personality. I haven’t yet met a sensitive person who didn’t have this sense of the spiritual, whatever name they gave it.
Why is a spiritual commitment necessary to fully embrace responsibility for oneself? Because we can’t do it alone. The areas in which you struggle most to show up for yourself are the areas in which your ability to be present to yourself is compromised. It may even be missing altogether.
Remember the source of the whole problem: an absence of modeling and support. The problem started in relationship, and we must solve it in relationship. We need others to learn how to show up for ourselves. Yet we don’t know how to be around others without expecting them to be responsible for us. How can we get past this paradox?
Einstein answered this question elegantly. He said that we cannot solve our significant problems in the same consciousness in which they were created. We must shift our consciousness in order to be willing to learn how to take responsibility for ourselves. This requires a spiritual commitment.
Here are five practices and resources that can help you make this fundamental shift:
1—Intent
Intent is a powerful force. To feel it, think of something you need to do today. Say, “I wish I could get that proposal finished today.” Then say it with intent: “I will get that proposal finished today.” Feel the difference? That is the energy you need to unconditionally embrace self-responsibility.
2—Meditation
Meditation is an essential practice to help you set a strong intent. That’s why I’m such an advocate of meditation for sensitive people. To get this effect, though, you must meditate with the conscious intent of connecting to your spiritual intuition. Then, from a place of stillness in yourself, you can open to receive the insights, actions, and resources you need to move towards greater self-responsibility.
3—Professional support
Learning to take responsibility for yourself is challenging. To move beyond Stage 1, you must face the grief, powerlessness, and loneliness of your childhood experience. It is very difficult to hold all this by yourself: you had to do that when you were small, and the thought of trying to do it again can be overwhelming.
This is why many sensitive people need skilled company to move towards taking more self-responsibility. There’s one catch, though: you must seek support with the intent to learn how to take responsibility for yourself. If you try to get your support person to take care of you, you are back in your old pattern, trying to make the world give you what you didn’t get. A skilled practitioner will help you with this by being responsive to you, while gently but persistently refusing to take responsibility for you.
4—Intimate Relationships
As I said earlier, close relationships offer a path for HSPs to earn an inner sense of security, as long as our intent is clear. Without this clarity of intent, you will fall back into old patterns of making others responsible for you and for your feelings.
However, if you see your relationships as safe places to take the risk of shifting your consciousness, they can become your most powerful resource of change. There’s nothing like bumping up against other people to help you see your patterns…and they will give you feedback as you go.
5—Focusing partnership
HSPs can support each other in making this shift of consciousness within the safe container of a structured Focusing partnership. Your Focusing partner lends you their uncluttered presence around your toughest issues, helping you develop that presence with yourself, and you do the same for them.
I’ve spent many hours developing a deeper sense of self-responsibility in the safe container of Focusing partnership, and I believe it is a godsend to sensitive people. (In my dreams, I’d find a way for every HSP to learn focusing partnership.) I did my training through Focusing Resources. I highly recommend their partnership training.
Where are you in your blossoming?
Whatever stage you are in, it will help to understand it better. Then you’ll know what steps to take to move towards more peace and joy within yourself and in your relationships with others.
Image: 2023 Emily Agnew
Note: This is a substantially edited and expanded version of the article that first appeared here on Mar 5, 2019.
As an HSP who is neither religious nor spiritual, hello! We do exist 🙂
Hello. I used to be religious. For almost 40 years. I had an intense panic attack and the religious beliefs I held have evaporated. It’s been almost three years since this happened. I feel much more like myself now. Sadly, my religious beliefs taught me to be irresponsible for my well-being. I am learning how to put myself and my health first
. I absolutely love being alone. I love nature.
I struggle with naming the experiences I have.
I don’t even like the term spiritual.
It would be great if you could elaborate on being an HSP without being religious or spiritual and explain how you define experiences that are typically defined as spiritual. Thanks
S, I understand the words ‘religious’ and ‘spiritual’ have negative associations for you. I’m realizing I didn’t define specifically enough what I meant by “spirituality” in particular. I begain to define the term above when I wrote, “Even if you aren’t religious or don’t resonate with the idea of “spirituality,” I’m guessing you have some sense of something bigger: a force or energy that exists in, yet beyond the material world, and that transcends the level of the personality.”
In saying that, I was attempting to include experiences like the way you feel in nature: a sense of expandedness, safety, connectedness. Unfortunately spirituality’ is what Eugene Gendlin called a “public word,” that is, a word that has many (and varying) layers of association for different people. So I need to be careful to be clear how I am defining it when I use it.
Dr. Aron talks about HSPs being in touch with and sensitive to the numinous. That sense of mystery, wonder, and awe is, to me, in the territory of spirituality as I define the word…and there are many experiences that evoke that. But in my experience it takes regular practices (like meditation) to sustain any kind of ongoing connection to that wonder and awe in the midst of the stresses of daily life.
Hi S, I’m sorry to hear about your negative experience with religion and glad you are feeling more comfortable now. That is a very interesting way to lose religious beliefs. I can see that being traumatic but it sounds like you are at ease about it.
The religious and spiritual experiences I have read about usually fall into several categories:
1.) Witnessing something powerfully beautiful (e.g. looking at a majestic nature scene) which I would describe as the emotion of awe, an intense form of wonder, or respect and amazement.
2.) The sensation of a warm and loving presence which I would describe as love and contentment mixed with awe and perhaps hope, excitement, peace, or safety.
3.) A feeling of connection or “oneness” with other people or nature which I would describe as perhaps joy, love, acceptance, or inspiration.
In short, I work on identifying the mix of emotions in lieu of using the phrase “religious or spiritual experience.” I find that an emotion wheel or intensity of feelings chart plus a thesaurus are quite useful. Once you have the basic emotion figured out you can get more specific. For example, a little bit of happiness could be contentment, but an overwhelming amount of happiness could be ecstasy. Hope that helps.
Christina, apologies, I somehow missed these comments back in August. I hear you about being neither religious nor spiritual, and I apologize for implying you don’t exist! I was wrong to make that generalization.
I’m curious what you DO experience. Do you have something you refer to or experience that feels like a deeper knowing?–like a place within you where you get a ‘read’ on whether something is right for you or not? If so, that might be a non-spiritual, non-religious element of what i’m trying to describe.
Please see also my response to S below…
Hi Emily, thanks for the acknowledgement and the question. While I don’t resonate with the phrase “deeper knowing,” I would describe my decision-making as values based while still leveraging my emotions.
When my values and emotions line up, decisions are an easy yes or no.
When my emotions conflict with my values, the values take priority while honoring the emotions.
When my values conflict with each other, my emotions help me determine the priority of each value.
Examples:
1.) Negative alignment of values and emotions: I value safety, don’t value thrill-seeking and feel unhappy and scared at the thought of going skydiving so that’s a no.
2.) Positive alignment of values and emotions: I value exploring nature and exercising for my health and feel excited about going out for a walk so that’s a yes.
3.) Values and emotions conflict: I value achievement, creativity, and learning but I feel dread at the thought of making the time to work on a personal project. The best long-term decision in line with my values is to set aside the time and do the work, so I focus on figuring out why I’m feeling dread and see what I can do to address it.
Maybe I got stuck and a different tool or advice would help me get unstuck. Maybe I need to acknowledge that this is hard for me, and it’s okay to dislike the hard parts. Maybe there’s some grief I need to experience physically so I can move forward. I can say I’ll work on it for 15 minutes and if it still really sucks, I’ll go do something else. That eases the dread since 15 minutes sounds doable. Often, once I get going I decline to stop when the 15 minutes are up. If that doesn’t happen after multiple tries on different days, I know I need to put this project on hold for a bit longer and possibly reassess its feasibility. Maybe it’s not the best way to meet my need for creativity and I should let this go and try a different project.
If I only listened to the dread, I would practice avoidance and procrastination which would stop me from doing things I find meaningful and cause more problems down the line. If I doggedly only listen to the values, I won’t know when a project is not a good fit for me and when to stop. Emma McAdam’s Therapy in a Nutshell course “How to process emotions” was invaluable for me on this and many other subjects and fundamentally reshaped how I live. The videos are available for free on YouTube with the worksheets as part of a paid package to support her work. Emma is a fellow HSP 🙂
4.) Values conflict: I value quality time with my loved ones but I also need and value time to myself. I receive an invitation to a family event and need to make a decision on whether or not to go. I ask myself how do I feel about attending vs not attending? Happiness, excitement, dread, sorrow? What would I regret more, accepting or declining? There will be a mix of feelings on both sides but if I am honest with myself, one side edges the other out overall. I am going to guess you might call this “spiritual intuition.” I call it “emotional intelligence” – specifically the self-awareness and self-management part of it as defined by Dr. Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves in “Emotional Intelligence 2.0.” It’s an excellent book I refer back to again and again.
Returning to your article, instead of saying “spiritual commitment” I would describe stage 3 as requiring you to accept, love, and value yourself, combined with developing your emotional intelligence enough that you choose to learn to do things that are difficult in the present but ultimately beneficial and fulfilling in the long run.
Wow, this article was so powerful and came at the perfect time for me. Thank you Emily!
You are most welcome Bianca!
I absolutely love the terminology’ uncluttered prescience”!
What a wonderful goal for all HSPs and introverts.
I am an HSP who lived in an alcoholic home. I did not receive the role modeling that I needed as a child to grow up to take responsibility for myself and responsively take care of my HSP introverted me.
I have been taking care of my mother while she was in hospital and now as her ‘ coach’ actually living in her retirement residence suite with her to help her become as independent again after being admitted to hospital with pelvic fracture 4 months ago.
I’m in overwhelm stage every night. I’ve been trying to set my mother’s suite up, to be walker friendly, with very little help from the retirement home staff where she lives. This has caused much frustration. Most recently I’ve been trying to get her suite door adjusted so she can safely open and close her door with or without using a walker. You would think a geriatric retirement residence would be helpful with this , but they haven’t been.
Makes me wonder why she is living here.
I haven’t had much time to myself. I will use your intent terminology to reframe my days and start regaining my space.
HI Suzanne, actually it was uncluttered presence I was referring to, not “prescience”, which would mean something quite different. I was simply referring to the act of “being with.” But maybe that was just a typo?:)
Yes, being present that way with yourself would be a big step towards regaining your space.