Decisions, Feelings, Forgiveness, Happiness, Love, Moving Forward, Purpose, Regret, Relationships

Letting Others Take Responsibility

When I was about 11 years old, I found out that my emotional intelligence quotient (EQ) was 156. I fell within the range of people with incredibly high emotional intelligence. Although I hadn’t even hit my teenage years, I wasn’t too shocked by the result. I’d always known that I had a strong ability to empathise with other people. As I grew up, my ability to understand others continued to strengthen. I was the person everyone would come to for advice. I always knew exactly the right things to say to make someone feel better. I found it hard to judge other people, because I could always relate to where they were coming from. Now, at the age of 25, I am still that same person. But over the years, I’ve discovered that there is a downside to being so empathetic and understanding – the tendency to shift the blame from someone else onto myself.

Responsibility

I recently wrote about how growing up, in essence, is about learning to take responsibility for your life and your own actions. But I believe that there is another element to growing up: letting others take responsibility for their actions.

Letting_Others_Take_ResponsibilityPhoto Credit: photostock / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Being such an empathetic person, I’ve always found it incredibly easy to explain away other people’s actions whenever they hurt me. I find it easier to empathise with someone than to judge them, it’s just who I am. But I’ve realised that, at times, the line between explaining and excusing can become blurred.

Don’t excuse behaviour

Just like everyone else, I’ve endured my own share of emotional pain. At different times in my life, I’ve been insulted, treated unfairly, disrespected, told that I was loved when I didn’t feel that I was, and been consistently subjected to emotional abuse.

And in each of these situations, I still had the empathy to understand why this person treated me the way they did. Maybe they were extremely stressed or tired at the time, and their words got the better of them. Maybe their horrible upbringing lead to their inability to feel and express love. Maybe they knew what they were doing was wrong, but didn’t know how to stop. Maybe there was a perfectly valid or rational reason as to why they did what they did.

When a person treats you badly, you do have the right to rationalise it out. You’re allowed to be empathetic and to see things from their point of view. But at the same time, you have every right to see things from your perspective as well.

Understanding why someone has made a certain decision simply explains their behaviour, it doesn’t excuse it. In some instances, people can hurt us bad enough that an explanation alone is not enough.

Let people take responsibility for their actions

All too often we want to be the bigger person, the person who forgives, the person who doesn’t get angry.

But sometimes we have to let people face up to the consequences. We have to let them deal with the results of their actions. We have to stop taking responsibility for other people’s decisions.

It’s great to empathise with other people and to put yourself in their position. But never let that be at the expense of you and your feelings. Never let that override the fact that they hurt you, and the fact that they shouldn’t have. Never blame yourself for someone else’s mistakes, hurtful words or actions.

At the end of the day, you are the only one who can decide whether someone else’s actions are worth forgiving, and whether they deserve another chance.

It is up to you to let them take responsibility, but it is up to them to decide what to do with that responsibility.

Thuy Wood (formerly known as Thuy Yau) is a freelance writer, resume/cover letter writer and Youth Worker living in Perth, Australia. She loves to share her own personal experiences about overcoming adversity, as she believes that human beings are more capable than they realise. She writes to make a positive difference in the world and to inspire others to learn from themselves and their own experiences. Her writing has been discussed on radio, won writing contests, appeared on The Huffington Post UK and major Australian sites such as news.com.au, SMH, Kidspot and Essential Kids. She has just completed her first book – a memoir - and is on the search for a publisher.

4 thoughts on “Letting Others Take Responsibility

  1. Another great article. It’s always good to be caring and empathetic, but not to the point of being taken advantage of or hurt yourself. There are those that will take advantage of people and their caring personalities. It’s up to you to decide if they are worth the effort, or empathy.

  2. Hi Thuy,

    I find your article interesting, however I want to point out something.

    Emotional Intelligence is not something you can grade yourself on easily. I find it surprising you claim to have high EQ while it took you this long to realise that people take advantage of you when you over-extend to solve their mishaps.

    Yes you can work out the reasons why some people are the way they are, and meet them where they are at to come up with a reasonable solution, however many people play on this from a young age. There are 11 yr olds out there who would already have you figured out, think of spoilt brats and how they manipulate their mothers.
    You are the perfect kind of person to feed someone’s narcissistic supply.

    Please don’t try to brag about your high EQ before you actually have the ability to put it into perspective where you are really at. I recommend reading the 48 laws of power and what a narcissist is to understand really how vulnerable this behaviour makes you.

    But great article nonetheless 🙂

    1. Hi Pat,

      Thanks for your thoughts.

      Actually, it didn’t take me this long to realise – I simply decided to write about it because of the timing of a personal event. I just wanted to share my own experiences to help other people – that’s the sort of person that I am.

      And I wasn’t bragging about my high EQ – I was pointing out that emotional intelligence can have its good points and also bad ones too. It’s fantastic to empathise with other people, but never let it be at the expense of your own feelings.

      I understand where you’re coming from, but my article wasn’t directed so much at narcissistic people, but normal, everyday people who make mistakes. It’s about working out whether these mistakes are worth forgiving.

      Lastly, having such high empathy for others only makes you vulnerable if you’re not truly aware of it and choose to let others use it against you. I am fully aware. The article wasn’t about letting people walk all over me – it was about the temptation to let them. I wanted other people to know that it’s not selfish to be less selfless. That it’s okay to put yourself first, even if it might feel difficult at times.

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