Denise feels horrible her marriage fell apart. It’s all her fault, she’ll state sadly. She didn’t love him enough. She harped at him too much and she was too hard to live with. It was all her, not him.
Marco knows his 20 year-old son is struggling in college because he can’t seem to motivate the boy. Isn’t a father supposed to look after his kid?
Teresa and her boyfriend of two years just broke up. He says she’s too controlling. She tearfully admits she asked him not to go out to bars with his friends every weekend, coming home wasted.
Are they right? Is everything their fault?
People tell me all the time that their messed up relationships are all their doing. I tell them they’re giving themselves too much power. Relationships between adults are a fifty-fifty situation. Everyone contributes. Otherwise, only one person in the relationship has power and that would be just wrong.
Everyone in the relationship has power and power is unavoidably linked to responsibility. If you don’t have the power to make another person behave differently, you’re not responsible for his actions. It’s hard enough in this life to be responsible for our own behavior. Don’t assume you have the power to change others.
It all gets murky because love involves being emotionally impacted by one another–caring what the other person does or feels. You must remember, though, that no matter how affected you are by what other people do, you don’t have control of their actions or their feelings. No matter how much you love them or how much they say they love you. In turn, your feelings and your actions aren’t their fault, either.
This is a very difficult concept for many, but while love confers the ability to impact the other, it doesn’t give power or responsibility.
Responsibility is always linked to power. If you don’t have control over another, you can’t be responsible for what she does…or what she feels. You are responsible, however, for what you do. If you behave or speak in demeaning ways–that’s your responsibility and you should seriously look at what’s going on with you. The other person’s feelings, though, can’t be your fault because she has an involvement in her own emotional reactions.
She gets to choose how she thinks about a situation and that assessment will feed her emotional reaction–the key here is that she gets to choose.
Don’t use this to say that your behavior–your actions–shouldn’t have any impact on those with whom you have relationships. You’re still responsible for how you behave. You don’t have, however, responsibility for someone else’s feelings.
This is tricky, but hugely important ground in relationships. Make sure you don’t give yourself too much power over others. You just get to be in charge of your own behavior and your own emotional reactions. That’s a massively complicated responsibility itself.