The Bittersweet Loop of Escaping Your Responsibilities
Chances are you’re living in a loop.
There’s a two-act tragedy that unfolds every day in every person’s life.
It goes like this:
- the challenges you face may or may not be your fault,
- but the responsibility for addressing them lies solely on your shoulders.
If you run from the second act, you never get the happy ending, the standing ovation, and the inevitable curtain call. No. If you run from the second act, the entire thing resets every time you go to sleep, and there we go, act one, on repeat, every morning anew.
And on and on and on it goes.
Embracing general responsibility in life is crucial for developing healthy coping mechanisms, self-regulating emotions, and, ultimately, living your life to the fullest. It’s the absolute foundation of building high-agency.
Being responsible means choosing your own path through various decisions and consequences. Doing so is called self-determination, a primary psychological need of any human being.
Research on self-determination theory suggests that people who experience a sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are more likely to be motivated and engaged in their lives (Ryan & Deci, 2000).
So, how do you learn responsibility?
The hard part is — you can’t. Learn it, that is. You have to love the idea and practice it daily. It’s like adopting any other value, such as bravery or justice. It cannot be learned from textbooks; it cannot be “hacked.” It’s not a skill to “obtain”; it’s a process to embrace.
There’s not much we really control in our lives. However, our reactions and responsibilities are among those rare, precious things we truly can control. Suppose you want to heal your heart and choose your own narratives. In that case, you need to accept responsibility for everything you say, do, and even for the things you don’t say or do. The consequences of speaking, staying silent, acting, or not acting are yours. It’s hard. But it also gives your life a purpose, a meaning. You stand for something. You are of value.
Research has shown that living a purposeless life can lead to negative effects on mental and physical health, such as depression and increased risk of cardiovascular diseases (Kim et al., 2013).
Unfortunately, lots of people feel overwhelmed or just plain tired. Coping with responsibility is always hard, but doing so in such circumstances is harder still. So we often decide to close our eyes, just for a second.
Rejecting reality, dissociating from some part of it, or devising a semi-true narrative to cover for a convenient excuse results in shifting responsibility, escaping, changing the subject, or avoiding decisions. These options still have consequences, even if we’d rather not face them. They are just dumped on somebody else or postponed until a later date. As with all maladaptive coping mechanisms, it helps for a second and hurts us deeply in the long run.
So, what can be done instead?
Let’s consider an example of being worried over the bank account balance. We might avoid the topic of money altogether, hoping that “maybe it will be enough.” Closing our eyes and crossing our fingers rarely works. Still, with sufficient dissociation, we might be able to pull it off and feel relief for a day or two.
The other option is: We can confront our fears.
Sure, reviewing our finances may be uncomfortable and stressful. Still, by doing so, we gain a better understanding of our situation and can take steps to improve it. Save a little here, earn a little there, and pause those streaming accounts. It’s upsetting for about an hour, and then we gain not only real relief (that’s not based on wishful thinking) but also something every human being needs to feel any kind of stability: we get a plan.
Research suggests that proactive living, which involves actively engaging with life and taking responsibility for one’s actions, is associated with increased life satisfaction and well-being (Batthyany & Russo-Netzer, 2014).
Remember, courage doesn’t mean the absence of fear; it means acting despite fear.
On the other side of most fears, there is nothing.
All it takes is to “press” them a little, and it’s done. They crumble and evolve into something else. Suddenly you’re on the other side, ready to act, armed with knowledge, and soothed by the satisfaction of being in charge.
If you feel like the “act one” of the aforementioned loop happens to you too often — open your eyes to the power of responsibility. Let’s see what happens then.
Take care,
a.
This article is part of a broader series focused on emotional self-regulation, cognitive reconstruction, self-determination, and, ultimately, high agency. The entire series draws from the following sources: “Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation” (Boon, Steele, van der Hart), “Emotion Regulation in Psychotherapy” (Leahy, Tirch, Napolitano), “Why We Sleep” (Walker), “Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain” (Barrett), “Fear of Life” (Lowen), “When the Body Says No” (Maté), “Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)” (Tavris, Aronson), “Taming Your Outer Child” (Anderson), “Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving” (Walker), “Conquest of Happiness” (Russell), “Meditations” (Marcus Aurelius), “Enchiridion” (Epictetus), “Man’s Search for Meaning” (Frankl), “The Power of Meaning” (Smith), “At the Existentialist Café” (Bakewell), “The Effective Executive” (Drucker), “Only the Paranoid Survive” (Grove), “Sapiens” (Harari), “Escaping the Self Consumes Regulatory Resources” (Vohs, Baumeister), “The Fast Track Intervention’s Impact on Behaviors of Despair in Adolescence and Young Adulthood” (Godwin, Dodge, CPPRG), and more.
Also mentioned:
- Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78.
- Kim, E. S., Sun, J. K., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2013). Purpose in life and reduced incidence of stroke in older adults: ‘The Health and Retirement Study.’ Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 74(5), 427–432.
- Batthyany, A., & Russo-Netzer, P. (Eds.). (2014). Meaning in positive and existential psychology. Springer.
