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Self Help Culture Says We’re All Responsible for our Own Shit. Here’s why I disagree:




The other day, I wrote an Instagram post about unsolicited advice and its effect on the nervous system (spoiler - it puts us into fight or flight), and someone left a comment that really irritated me. She said this:


“To clarify, we don’t trigger people. People have feelings that are related to expectations, which are grounded in projections they have about who we should be to them. We’re all responsible for our own stuff.”

Ugh. This comment really bothered me. She was responding to the part of my post where I said that projectors in particular need to wait for the invitation so we can stop triggering people with unsolicited advice. I assume she took umbrage with that because she’s a projector, but I don’t know for sure. But she got it so wrong. We do, in fact, trigger people. That was the whole point of my post - to illustrate how our nervous systems get activated when we feel judged or criticized, and how we can’t help but react with fight or flight because it’s hard-wired into our bodies. 


The commenter’s version of “everyone’s responsible for their own stuff” is just the self-help version of “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps.” It sounds like a rallying cry for self-empowerment and personal responsibility, but at its core it’s just a racist trope, rooted in whiteness and toxic individualism. It’s actually a massive bypass - a way of dodging responsibility for triggering someone else. And I’ve got beef with that.


To be fair, there’s a lot of nuance here. A lot of us struggle with people-pleasing, and part of that healing journey IS about not taking responsibility for other people’s emotional states. People-pleasers believe that it’s their fault when someone else gets upset, and that leads to unhealthy coping strategies, like trying to maintain closeness through self sacrifice, or saying yes to things when they want to say no. 


So yeah, when I say we do trigger people, that might be hard for a recovering people-pleaser to accept; it gets confusing because the recovering people pleaser’s journey is all about untangling what’s “mine” and what’s not, and NOT taking on responsibility for how other people feel.




But I’m not talking about taking ownership for other people’s feelings all the time. I’m talking about making educated decisions around offering unsolicited advice. It’s different. And I actually find it empowering to be in a place where I can own my impact on other people’s nervous systems. I know that I might trigger someone by just blurting out something like, “hey, you need to do X differently.” That’s why I don’t do that anymore - not just because of strategy & authority, but because I know how it feels to receive unsolicited advice, and because I took the time to learn about what that does to our brains and bodies.


When our nervous systems detect that we’re being assessed - scrutinized, judged, criticized, corrected - that activates the sympathetic nervous system. Our brains interpret that as “not safe” and send instructions to our adrenal glands and BOOM - activated. Most of this happens at the subconscious level. We can’t control it. So it can go like this:


Person A: exists

Person B: looks at them with slight judgment

Person A: body moves into a state of vigilance & defensiveness (fight or flight)


The fight or flight response is in the body - our conscious mind doesn’t make a decision about that. We can’t help what our nervous systems think is “dangerous” in the moment. It happens too fast. We can train our nervous systems to be less reactive, but when we’re already triggered by feeling judged, we can’t do anything about it until the adrenaline gets metabolized and we come back into a regulated state.


If person B gives person A unsolicited advice, which then triggers person A’s nervous system, person B is responsible for the part where they decided to give the unsolicited advice. Full stop. I’m not saying that we’re responsible for how the other person’s nervous system responds, I’m saying we’re responsible for the part where we decide that our guidance is required even though the other person hasn’t asked for it. When we activate someone’s nervous system by giving unsolicited advice, and then tell the other person to own their own stuff, we’re conveniently forgetting the part where person A didn’t get to give consent. And isn’t asking for consent the least we can do? Isn’t that part super important?


Western culture is steeped in the myth of individualism. Part of that mythology is the notion that we can all be successful if we just work hard enough. When I was in college, we talked about it in terms of the Horatio Alger myth: you can transcend poverty through hard work and honesty alone. But that mythology doesn’t take into account the systemic structures that disempower everyone who isn’t a white male. It’s part of how white people ignore all the ways that black and brown people are systematically denied access to resources, and then blame them for not taking personal responsibility. Martin Luther King said it best: “It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”


I think it’s the exact same dynamic when we put the onus of responsibility on the person being triggered. We tell them they need to heal; that might be true, but we don’t heal in isolation. And dodging responsibility for hurting others isn’t very 9-centered, in my view. It looks a lot like white privilege, packaged as “speaking my truth” or “living my design.” 


Yes, we need to take ownership of our own “stuff”. Yes, we can do the work to heal our trauma and become less reactive. And, when we’ve done that work, we can also level up and move out of the “healing” phase into growth, where we can lean into our new capacity and start co-regulating with others. We can be the change we want to see in the world.


Imagine being able to hear your partner bring up a concern about the relationship without taking it personally. Imagine being able to check yourself in real time and ask “do you want comfort or solutions?” instead of jumping into fix it mode.  Don’t we all want partners and friends who can do that? Wouldn’t it be cool to be that partner and friend?


Isn’t that the point of all this healing work - so that we can have better relationships? 



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