Reducing overwhelming sense of personal responsibility

Post date: 2020-07-01 04:10:38

I've realised recently that I feel a deep sense of personal responsibility for fixing problems that couldn't possibly be my sole responsibility to fix (e.g. problems at work or in society that go beyond the remit of any single individual). This often leads to intense feelings of guilt that I wasn't able (/wasn't responsible enough) to solve the problem. I suspect I would be happier and less stressed if I could let go of some of this sense of responsibility. But how?

This is something I've always struggled with. At school I would feel immensely personally guilty every time there was some kind of collective punishment/reprimand, even though I never had anything to do with whatever trouble we were all in. I struggle with the same thing as an adult (e.g. frequent feelings that I can't possibly be happy or live a good life when I know that so many of my fellow humans' lives are constrained and oppressed in various ways; feeling like I'm personally responsible for fixing diversity issues at my company of 300+ people when the company's actual leadership is disinterested in addressing these issues). I tend to feel pretty viscerally stressed when the things I feel this level of responsibility for aren't going well, even when it's not plausible that I should be personally responsible for outcomes in those areas.

As a lower-stakes example, I also feel personally responsible for everyone having a good time when I'm interacting with them in a social setting. This ramps up even harder when I'm hosting, but I get shades of it even when I'm just along for the ride as a participant in someone else's social event. I often fail to enjoy my own experiences because I'm so anxiously preoccupied with whether or not everyone else is having the best time they could be having.

I also ave a separate-but-related fear that this deeper-than-average sense of responsibility is what has driven all of my personal success, and if I take my hypervigilant foot off the hypervigilant gas even temporarily, my life is going to fall apart. I realise that this is unhelpful distorted thinking but haven't had a lot of luck in addressing it.

It's not all bad - gravitating towards responsibility has been good for my career, I'm generally very diligent and conscientious, I've had basically zero issues with failing to take sufficient responsibility for the things I actually am responsible for as an adult (everything always gets paid on time, I don't leave people hanging when I've committed to something etc.), but it just feels like my default internal responsibility bar is set way too high.

I'd like to spend more time relaxing and enjoying my life and less time constantly worrying about things that are not really my problem to worry about (driven at least partly out of fear that the people who should be worrying about these things aren't worrying about them diligently enough, e.g. the current COVID clusterfuck approach of the UK and US governments). I am very aware at a conscious level that worrying is not an insurance policy against things going wrong, nor is it the same as activism/doing something about the things I am worried about. The worrying is not helping this cycle as it takes away energy I could be putting towards activism.

I have a pretty good idea where this pattern comes from - my parents were emotionally/verbally/physically abusive and emotionally/socially/medically neglectful when I was growing up. They expected me to solve problems on my own that were totally developmentally inappropriate with zero support, and I would get shamed, blamed, made fun of or punished whenever I asked for reasonable, appropriate help with things I was struggling with. This parenting approach made me incredibly resourceful in some ways. I'm very (arguably too) independent and very good at problem-solving. But it's like my brain has no sense of the scope of what a reasonable problem for me to solve is, and then I beat myself up for not succeeding at the impossible. Unsurprisingly, I also have strong perfectionism and people-pleasing tendencies and a reasonable level of background anxiety; I suspect all of these issues reinforce one another on some level.

I'm specifically looking for anecdotes and resources (preferably books/blogs/articles as I'm more of a reader than a watcher/listener) on how ratchet down my internal sense of responsibility to a more manageable level. I'm specifically not looking for therapy as a recommendation. I've done a lot of therapy, particularly trauma-focused therapy around my early life experiences. It's accessible for me and always an option on the table, and I'm already aware that it's one thing that could help in this area; what I'm looking for from this question is what else beyond therapy might help me reframe my thinking or reset my early programming when it comes to disproportionate feelings of responsibility.

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