I have always carried with me the belief that I was somehow responsible for the sanity of the people I love. It was a secret belief–one I never felt the need to share with anyone, not even the people for whom I thought I was responsible.

The trauma that has taken place in my family runs deep.
And I have always been so afraid that that level of destructiveness would rear its ugly head again if I didn’t do something about it.

So I did.

I worked hard.
I kept people proud.
I tried to step in and fill roles I was never designed to fill and carry weights I was never designed to carry.

All in the name of keeping everyone okay.
Even if that meant I wasn’t okay.

And then recently I went through a situation where I felt deep empathy for someone. I wanted so badly for their situation to get better, and I prayed for them earnestly, but I realized

Their sanity, happiness, and wholeness, is not my responsibility.

It’s theirs.

This realization was so foreign to me, I had to take it to my therapist to make sure I wasn’t being a terrible person. She chuckled and told me that this is the healthy way to feel.

It actually took someone affirming my healthy thoughts for me to feel like it was okay to have them. So, I want to affirm your healthy thoughts too and share a few other healthy thoughts with you regarding people taking ownership for their own happiness and health.

Emotional strength isn’t a lack of empathy.

Being strong emotionally doesn’t mean you are a robot. It’s actually quite the opposite. Your heart hurts for people who are hurting and you know that there are things that live within your power to control and things that don’t. It means you can meet a physical need without enabling someone. That you know the difference between healthy and unhealthy ways to show your love for someone having a tough time. It means that you are not depleting all of your resources (spiritually, emotionally, financially) to give to a problem that isn’t yours to fix.

It is okay to hold hurting people accountable for their hurtful words and actions.

It’s easy to believe that you should just “let it go” when you know someone is being hurtful because they are in the midst of a struggle. “She’s just stressed.” “He didn’t mean it.” “They’re just going through a really hard time.” All of these things may be true but none of them give someone the right to hurt you. No one. Not your parents, not your spouse, not your friends. There is a difference between being as an ear and a punching bag.

It’s not about telling people off or cursing them out. It is about saying that your humanity alone makes you worthy of kindness.

There is freedom in understanding your locus of control.

I used to come out of conversations and interactions with certain people feeling so heavy. A heaviness that I sometimes picked up while listening to their struggles. And sometimes it was a heaviness that people placed on me because they were so used to me just figuring it out.

Once I realized that the hurt in the lives of others wasn’t my responsibility, guilt gave way to compassion. What initially was heaviness out of obligation became the freedom to actually hear who I was talking to. To listen without trying to fix things.

It was this shift in feelings that initially scared me so badly that I went speeding (literally) to my therapist. It lead us to talk about rock bottom and she said, “You know, it doesn’t feel good…but sometimes rock bottom really is the place where we can start to heal.”

And that’s when God spoke to me so clearly.

He said,

“My daughter, you keep stepping in right before the person you love hits rock bottom. You keep saving them right before they get to the place where healing can start. You are trying to save someone only I can save. Get out of my way and let me restore them. “

I was keeping someone I love so much from healing.
Keeping them from healing by my good intentions that had dire consequences.

And I was keeping myself from living freely and unapologetically.

Not anymore.

There’s magic in our musings (and our sanity),
Nicole