When the mature child, becomes the exhausted adult.

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The thought “If I don’t do it, nobody will” can sound like responsibility on the surface. Sometimes, though, it’s a clue that you’re carrying a disproportionate share of the emotional, practical, or relational labor around you.

The question isn’t whether you’re capable of handling it. The question is whether it all truly belongs to you.

Hyper-responsibility is the tendency to assume responsibility for problems, emotions, and situations that may not actually belong to you. At the heart of it, it’s a issue with discernment (knowing what belongs to whom) and trust (feeling confident in others ability to hold there own) –

How Hyper-Responsibility Develops

The hyper-responsible individual might have used problem solving and providing emotional care as a way to create stability in unpredictable environments. Providing advice to a parent struggling emotionally, helping with . Because the environment often revolved itself around other issues, no one really checked in on them. Pausing and recognizing what over-functioning looks like for you will be vital in your ability to slow down and reflect on what relationships you might be recreating in your life. 

Signs of Hyper-Responsibility

• If someone is upset, you wonder if you did something wrong. 
• If something goes wrong at work, you immediately start fixing it. 
• You feel uncomfortable asking for help.
• You find yourself offering solutions for others’ problems, even if no one asked you to step in.

How To Practice Discernment

Being able to discern what issues are yours to resolve and what issues are better suited for others is a gift. I say this is a gift because some of us were expected to resolve issues way above our pay-grade at an early age, making it difficult to know what actually belongs to us and what belongs to someone else.

A lil burnt out eh?

The More Capable You Appear, The Less Support You Receive

Over time, this hyper-responsibility creates an unspoken belief that if you are not the one to handle something, no one else will be capable. I need you to read this next line slowly. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the more capable you appear, the less support you receive. Imperfect support is better than no support at all. Transparently speaking, being able to identify the true injury of being left to figure life out alone will allow you to see how your frustrations with people getting it wrong are really about deeper feelings of being let down. But this cannot be resolved until you are able to properly acknowledge your feelings more directly.

Working through hyper-responsibility means reconnecting with our ability to admit that we need people to also do their part in relationships and doing so without collapsing into the belief that needing this makes us incapable or a burden.

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How to Stop Feeling Responsible for Everyone Else

Discerning What’s Actually Yours To Carry

Let’s go ahead and say the quiet part out loud: it does not feel good to be treated as a solution and not a person. If you’ve been wondering how to stop over-responding and allow some issues to exist without your involvement, you can start by identifying the kind of support that does feel good for you to provide along with noting what issues might fall out of your scope. Once you’ve identified this, it will be important to note what happens when you admit much like in childhood some jobs are out of your scope and when the job falls outside of that, pausing and reflecting on what it looks like to stay in your lane.

Nedra Glover Tawwab, author of Nedra Nuggets has a great quote that I often reflect on when I am investigating someone’s motivation to help. “Providing help to others when we are able is a gift, providing help when we aren’t is a burden.”