The End Of Over-Responsibility

Welcome to Shrink for the Shy Guy. This is the show for you. If you are sick and tired of being held back by fear, self doubt, social anxiety, shyness, anything that's stopping you from you being you. I'm going to share the most powerful tools and resources that I've been discovering over the last 15 years on my journey to eradicate social anxiety and instill confidence first in myself and then in every single person that I meet on my journey. You're going to learn these tools and how to apply them in your life now so that you can become the most free, powerful, bold, authentic version of you. Hey, welcome to today's episode of Shrink for the Shy Guy. Today we're going to be talking about the end over responsibility. And if you don't know what over responsibility is, you're gonna find out in this episode you already know what it is. You might just not know that term. So that term I use in my books about niceness, including not nice and the newer one, less nice, more you, if you haven't checked that one out, I highly recommend that and I mentioned it a few weeks ago, but we're actually about two weeks out, depending when you're listening to this from my virtual event, Not Nice Live, where you're gonna be getting a deep dive in letting go of over responsibility. And so if you like this episode and you want to take things further and it works on your schedule, it's March 1st through 3rd, which is a Friday through a Sunday. And all I gotta say it's, it's worth it for your growth, for your freedom. Because this one experience of over responsibility can just demolish your sense of confidence, ease, joy, happiness. It can really derail your life. And as you'll hear in this episode, why that's not a dramatic statement, that is very literal in terms of steering you down a path of your life that's not really what you want. So let's talk about how you can shift this. This is of the utmost importance for you. So what is over responsibility? Let's start with defining those terms. Oh, by the way, if you want to check out the event, the three day virtual workshop, go to draziz.coM-R-A z I z.com and just click on the events tab. You'll see an opportunity there to get your ticket. But over responsibility is when you take responsibility, you, it's on you to address, fix, resolve, change other people's feelings, you take responsibility for everyone else's or maybe certain key people in your life, their feelings. This is most Common in family members, romantic partners, but it can also extend to friends, colleagues, clients, employees. I mean, it could extend to strangers ultimately, but people feel most strongly in their closest relationships and then also potentially in further out relationships and also potentially with strangers. And this is different than emotional awareness or being an empath. So someone who is empathic or an empath is a more recent term in various self development. Language is someone who has a heightened sense of other people's feelings. Think of it as, you know, someone has a better sense of taste than others. They have a heightened sense of taste. Or some people have a heightened sense of hearing or vision. Someone who's an empathic or an empath has a heightened sense of feelings, so they feel their own feelings more and they also feel other people's feelings. It's like a data stream of information that's coming to them. They can feel other people's emotions. That's not inherently wrong or bad. I do think that people that take over responsibility, which is nice people, tend to also be empaths or very empathic. That's certainly the case for me and pretty much everybody I worked with. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean over responsibility though. It's. It's like, here's the difference. Let's say you have a really good sense of hearing and so you can hear further or more subtle sounds than people around you. That's just information coming to your nervous system, to your brain, right? And so you hear a sound of a bird calling or a dog barking, and you're friend doesn't hear it at all. No big deal. You just received more information than your friend. It's the same thing if you're empathic. So you enter into a room and you can feel the energy in the room. You might feel what other people are feeling. You might feel if someone's upset or sad. Again, that's just information coming to you. The problem is the over responsibility part. Now if you're very empathic and you have a lot of over responsibility, then look out, bad times ensue, which is why I'm so glad you're listening to this episode, because we gotta separate that you can still keep your empath superpowers, but when you start to let go of that over responsibility, it's just information, just data. So the problem is not the feeling of other people's feelings or the awareness of other people's feelings. The problem is that you have it linked up in your mind that I am responsible for, for someone else's feelings. And the this can get this can go down a rabbit hole where people want to have debates with me, but what am I responsible for? And you know, if you're saying I could just slap someone in the face and that's not my problem, like, you know, well, hold on a second. Why do we go to such an extreme counter? Let's just the issue, we'll discuss what you're technically responsible for or not in a minute. But the real problem is actually not even the over responsibility. The real problem is that you don't feel emotionally okay. You feel unsafe and maybe even panicky or freaked out by someone else's feelings. And then to get away from that discomfort inside of you, you have a strong pressure to make better or fix or make amends or apologize or otherwise smooth things or ameliorate the situation. So that's the key problem here. But the source of it is you're not able to let someone else have feelings and let someone else having feelings be okay. And I don't mean that they're having feelings. And you tell yourself in your head it's okay for them to have feelings. And then inside your nervous system is on hyperdrive, jump out the window, panic attack, levels of freak out. That's maybe the first step is to intellectually say, hey, I read it in Dr. Azusa's book, not nice. So that's okay for other people to have their feelings. And that's not my responsibility. That's a great starting point. But if your nervous system is like in revolt, then we don't really know anything. We just got some information that we could pass on a multiple choice test. But life isn't a multiple choice test. And you don't get freedom, you don't get liberation for knowing the right answer. Intellectually we have to get this, we have to know this viscerally in your, in your body, in your nervous system, where it truly is okay for someone to have feelings. So how do we get there? How do we really create that? Well, the way that you do that is by resolving any sort of phobia that we have in life really is through exposure and retraining of your nervous system to discover that the stimulus is actually safe. Right. So if you freak out about dogs, we have two dogs and we've. Well now we live out in the country and I never leave the compound. My beard is six inches long. No, but you know, I, I go hiking in the woods with my dogs and stuff. I leave the compound to go to other compounds and so forth, other militia groups. But you know, we're not walking around downtown Portland at the same frequency that I was when I lived in Portland. But, you know, we take our dogs places and they'll interact with people and, and especially when they're younger and they're puppies and I lived in the city, I would take them places. And you get to see quite a range of reactions, right? Some people are like, oh my gosh, I love dogs. And some people don't care. And some people are freaked out. I remember one time we were down by this river and this couple came out of the woods. They hiked down to the river and got to where we were. And at the time we had our first dog. His name Shadow. He's a mini Australian shepherd, which if you're not aware of that, his full size is about 30 pounds. He was a puppy at the time, probably weighed like, you know, 18, 20 pounds, this tiny little fluffy fur ball. And we're sitting on this little sandy river beach and this couple comes out, dog runs over to them, is panting and wagging his tail, and goes over to the woman and she pets his head and he's all happy. And he runs over to the eye, wiggling his little body. He actually doesn't even have a tail. The Australian shepherds, they cut their tail off at I think, day three of their life, which I'm not gonna get into that. It's a long story. But in any case, he doesn't really. He has like a nub of a tail and so he wiggles. When he wiggles, he's wiggling his whole butt. It's very cute. Most people find it very adorable. And this guy recoiled like there was a cobra at his feet. He's like. And I saw it, I was like, whoa, whoa, Shadow, come on back. And I called him back because the guy was freaking out. So what's happening there? I don't know. Maybe got bit by a dog. Maybe he has some history with dogs. But in that moment, he is perceiving a non threatening stimulus as threatening. And so if he wants to overcome his fear of dogs, which he may or may not, I don't know, but if he did, then the pathway to do that is going to be to expose him to dogs and to train his nervous system to re encode that stimulus as non threatening or potentially threatening. But in the right circumstances, right? So if there's like a foaming at the mouth dog let off Brooklyn off a leash, charging at him, then you want to have like, hey, I'm going to discern here this stimulus is dangerous. Just like, you know, if someone's got a phobia of bridges and they'll never drive across a bridge that's detrimental to their life, but you want to be able to discern, let's say it's icy conditions and it's a janky bridge out in the middle of nowhere, maybe you don't do it. So we want to be able to discern now to bring it over to this realm of niceness and over responsibility. You might be in a situation where someone is physically threatening you or doing something that there is a cause for alarm and caution. There is a threat there and you want to discern that. But what I see when working with clients is that 99 times out of 100, they're in situations where it's their colleague might be upset with them or the person they're dating is upset because they don't want to spend as much time on the weekend with them. And we want to be able to discern. These are the puppies on the beach. This is not the raging dog, you know, that's been trained to kill. But our nervous system is responding like it is. So what is the threat, though? What is the kill command? What's coming at you? Let's take a moment. Think of someone in your life where them having feelings makes you very uncomfortable. Maybe it comes across as guilt for you. A lot of guilt, a lot of anxiety. Maybe you do this kind of spin cycle. I know this one well, where they have feelings. And it's even worse if the feelings are quote about you, right? I'm mad because you didn't call me back. I'm sad because you don't want to spend time with me. I'm hurt because you didn't remember this. And now that's the stimulus. And then we feel these very uncomfortable feelings inside. And then the mind will go into hyper drive. It's like a crank that's just spitting out. Normally your mind goes like this. Spits out a thought like this. Imagine someone cranking a little wheel. It goes. And it spits out a thought, thought, thought. When this person's like, you didn't this. And I'm upset, all of a sudden your mind's like. It's like thought. And it's. First it's a fear thought. Oh, no, oh no, oh no, they're upset with me. Maybe it's like a guilt thought. Oh, I shoulda. I can't believe it. Oh, why did I. I just went to. Then we could be guilty about what we didn't do. I should have done the thing they want. We could be guilty just about the fact that they're upset even if we didn't do anything that we think we shouldn't have done. Or maybe it's, I should want to do the thing that they want me to do, even though I don't want the thing that I want to do. And then we have another part of us inside that gets defensive and reactionary. Like, although we never say that to them, right? Where it's like, oh, man, I. Wow. Why are they so. They should look at man as their own feelings either. Why are they going. They're so on. They're so selfish. They're so this, they're so that. What's wrong with them? They're so weak. They should go do. Lecturing them in your head about how they should go live their life. And you can bounce around in that spin cycle for forever, really. And what you need to do is realize that that cycle is coming. That's a bunch of thoughts coming from feelings inside of you. And the feelings are. It's anxiety, it's fear. And the fear is coming from what we got to slow down and examine it. What is the threat here? And I'll do this with people, and sometimes I'll say, my fear is of abandonment. Oh, I was abandoned when I was nine years old. I was abandoned as a baby. I was this. I was given up for adoption, or I was left, or my last partner abandoned me, or my parents divorced and I was abandoned, or my mom wasn't there for me, and my dad was emotionally unavailable, and I felt abandoned. And I'm not saying any of those things didn't happen and you didn't feel that way. What I'm noticing, though, in the moment is it's very conceptual. And what's really happening is they're experiencing emotions that are very uncomfortable now. And yes, there may be some memories of what happened when you were nine or five or three, but those. Those are not. You're not nine or five or three. I'm guessing as you're listening to this episode, that's months, years, decades in the past. And right now, you're feeling an emotion, and it might be a familiar emotion to what you felt when you were 9 and again at 12 and again. And maybe you feel it every week. But really what you're afraid of is a feeling. That's it. You're afraid of a feeling. And maybe it's the same feeling that you felt when you were a kid, when you felt like there was no one there. For you, AKA abandoned. Maybe it was the same feeling you felt when your dad would fly off the handle and get really scared and yell or hit or scream. Maybe it was the way that your mom would withdraw and go silent and kind of, you'd be dead to her for days on end. And it was so painful as a kid, you felt scared and alone or bad, whatever it might be. There is a feeling or set of feelings and it might be familiar to something in the past, but you can't heal the past. I think that really trips people up and they go into therapy and they want to heal the past. You can only heal right now. The past is gone. The past doesn't exist. Now you have a feeling. Maybe you think of something from the past and you feel pain right now. And so, yes, healing now, healing now. But we don't fix the past. We don't heal the past. There's nothing to heal in the past. It's right now. There's a pain. And so right now, when you imagine saying no to somebody, or someone is upset with you, or someone is disappointed with you, the way that we free you from over responsibility, which, remember, over responsibility, which means I gotta fix everyone's feelings, is coming from this feeling of fear or pain inside of you. What we need to do is expose you to the stimulus and retrain you to where it's no longer a threat. So what's the stimulus? Someone being upset with you. I do this all the time with clients. We'll pick someone in their life that's upset with them or could be upset with them, or they're afraid if I do X, they're gonna be upset with me. And the way that you do exposure work, you don't just take someone who's afraid of a dog and say, let's go to the pound today, right? No, you start with the safety of where they're at, Just no dog in sight. And you have them close their eyes and imagine interacting with a dog and boom, their heart rate is going to go up. And so I do this with people all the time. Let's. Oh, if I say that, then so and so at work is going to be upset with me or they're going to look down on me or they're going to. I'm going to let them down. Okay, great. It's my favorite line with that. Okay, great. Let's look at that. So imagine you said what you really thought with your partner, with this meeting, in this situation, and now what? And we're doing this in their imagination, right Now. And they'll start to tell me, well, this is gonna happen. That's gonna happen. I was like, great. That's a lot of the predictions of the mind. What are you feeling right now? And I'll guide them right to the core of the core, the feeling in their body. And it's a squeezing, tight, uncomfortable, painful, scary, unpleasant brew stew of suffering. And they're like, okay, what do I do? What do I do with this now? And there's really nothing to do with it. It's about how do you be with it. And I want to guide you on how to be with it. But instead of just doing, I don't want to just tell you about it, I actually want to guide you through it. And I recently I've recorded various versions of this. If you go to notnicebook.com and enter your email, you can get a recording of what I call the peace process that guides you through this. I actually just recorded a new one that I think is. Well, they're both good. I like this one better. It's newer. Got some years of experience under my belt in my own life using this and finding some tools and interesting new ways of using the peace process that I think are more valuable, more effective for me. And so if this one I released with my new book called Less Nice, More you. So if you go to lessnicebook.com and just enter your email there, that's how you get access to all the bonus materials of the book. And that audio is there. And you don't have to have purchased the book to get this, although I would recommend getting the book too. I think you'll. You'll love it, but just go to lessnicebook.com I'll also be giving this out. We'll be practicing this. I'll be practicing this with people at the virtual event Not Nice Live, which is March 1through3 of this year. But also I'm going to be giving this recording to everyone there as well so they can practice on their own, because this is how we set ourselves free, is not just by knowing this, but by practicing this again and again and again. So I'm going to summarize how to do this in your action step. Time for action. Action, Action. Your action step is going to be to practice going through the peace process with focusing on someone who's upset with you or has feelings. They might not even be upset with you. I mean, you might have so much over responsibility that it's not about you. They're sad and you feel like, you got to fix it. Even though they're not telling you, I'm sad because of you, that's even more the reason to learn and practice this stuff. And if you're like, I don't know, I don't have anyone in my life that's upset with me, I'm doing a pretty good job of being supremely nice. Well, think about if you were to be more bold. If you were to say what you really thought or felt in a situation in your life, at work, personally, with friends, with family, well, then what would happen? Well, then they'd be upset with me. Okay, great. Imagine saying one of those things and imagining someone being upset with you then. And then you go through the process and I gave you the directions on how to find that. It's a full one's 22 minutes and one's about 18 minutes. So you can go to different. Those different two book sites to get those and practice. And then when you've done that, practice again. And once you've gone through the audio, the guided audio, a few times, you'll kind of get how to do it. And then you can practice that on your own. You can practice it for two minutes here and five minutes there and as much as needed. All right, I hope this serves you. Thanks for being with me today. Until we speak again. May have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome. Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Aziz. If you know anyone who can benefit from what you've just heard, please let them know and send them a link to shrinkforthshyguy.com for free blogs, ebooks, and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to social media confidencecenter.com.