One of the trickiest places to hold my personal responsibility is when someone else is enabling me.
Ohhh, how tempting to blame them for enabling me, for cocreating their side of the cocreation that makes my personal responsibility harder to hold.
But that's the kicker with personal responsibility—what is my personal responsibility is my personal responsibility no matter what.
If I experience that someone else is enabling me, I look to how I'm enabling their enabling, how I'm allowing that, benefitting from it, getting off on it.
And how can I stop exposing myself to their enabling practice? What do I have to do now that I see that their way of being is enabling me in some way to be how I don't want to be? How can I steward myself to climb this latest hill in my commitment to being responsible?
An old way it used to show up was partners who supported me emotionally. They were so supportive, it enabled me to go to them instead of showing up for my own emotional nourishment. My eventual dependence on them was my enabling of their enabling.
I'd find myself in a dynamic where all we were doing was talking about my emotional experience, and while that's sooo egoically rewarding, it was NOT the ultimate potential of our connection, nor was it how I wanted to spend my time with my loved ones.
I had to see where I was enabling this unbalanced support dynamic to enable me to outsource my nourishment to the connection, and eclipsing all else the connection might have offered us both.
In order to experience more in the connection, I had to stop playing into the role of the emotionally needy one. Sometimes this opened up new doors for us. Other times it revealed there wasn't more there, that my partner didn't have other dance moves to offer me, that without my emotional distress, an uncomfortable silence fell between us.
When it comes to personal responsibility, when it comes to integrity, there is no arrival. It is an every day process, and everything I reveal to myself, everything I discover, plays out on more and more nuanced fractals such that I am always in an evolution.
It’s so interesting how it hits me like an asceticism at first. Like I’m only giving shit up. That part about what it’s blocking is hard for me to ground in when I’m not done grieving something about…something.