If you’re always trying to be there for everyone and solve everyone’s problems, but you end up falling behind yourself, you may be overly responsible. A psychologist explains what’s behind the phenomenon and how you can get out of the behavioral pattern.
Keeping an eye on everything, regulating everything, always being there: in everyday life, excessive responsibility can initially feel like care or special empathy. Psychologically speaking, however, there is often a pattern behind it that is stressful in the long term. How do you find your way out of it?
Anyone who believes they can influence or control more than is actually possible acts overly responsibly, explains the psychologist and systemic family therapist Cornelia Stöckel in an interview with the magazine “Psychologie Today”. For example, the mood at the child’s birthday party or the outcome of a team meeting.
Over-responsibility: Typical in everyday family life
The exaggerated sense of responsibility is often particularly evident in everyday family life. For example, when parents want to resolve conflicts between siblings immediately, control processes at daycare and school, or can hardly stand it when their children are doing poorly. If possible, negative feelings such as anger, sadness or fear should not arise in the first place.
There is also the thought pattern that excessive responsibility can be unconsciously rewarded. Anyone who feels responsible for everything experiences themselves as indispensable, helpful and morally right. Stöckel describes it like this: You are constantly challenged, overloaded – and at the same time the good one who does everything right.
This is how you can overcome the behavior pattern
According to the psychologist, the decisive step out of this behavioral pattern is: recognizing “that I have a personal responsibility for myself and therefore also a scope for action”.
It can also be helpful to consciously allow time between stimulus and reaction, says Stöckel. When asked, you should get into the habit of saying, “I’ll have to think about it first.”
And how do you overcome the belief that everything works best when you take care of yourself? According to the psychologist, the point offers a chance at which you realize that it is becoming too much. Only then does a rethink and thus a change often begin.
Last but not least, in her experience, over-responsible people often reach their limits when those around them resist. Because if you want to design everything, you deprive others of space for their own ideas and responsibility. Corresponding feedback can then hardly be avoided.
** marked with ** or orange underlined Links to sources of supply are partly partner links: If you buy here, you are actively supporting Techzle\.com, because we then receive a small part of the sales proceeds. More info.