Unlearning Hyper-Responsibility
The dream that set me free
My eyes trace the graphite scribbling in my leather-bound journal as the soft light of morning fills the room.
I’m the first one up and the house is quiet, so I pour the coffee and get back in bed to mentally sort through the dreamscape.
This was a big one. The kind you remember right away—vivid, and potent. The kind you think about for days. The kind that must be told. A restless dream with a message.
I close my eyes.
My neighbor drops his horse off on his way out of town. Grey, dappled, and strong-breasted, the horse is roaming restlessly around my living room. I open the back doors and he wanders in and out, looping, confused. I start hiking in the foothills behind the house. I look down and see that the horse has escaped into the wilderness behind my property and is wandering freely among the creek-carved canyons.
A jolt of worry surges in my chest: He may get lost; He’s my responsibility; I need to urge him home. I start to shout, but I stop myself mid-breath before the words come out and suddenly it’s clear: This is exactly where he belongs, in the wild, his black mane flowing as he gallops along the manzanita-studded trails of the backcountry. I close my mouth and exhale. My whole body relaxes as I watch him and his astonishing beauty.
In the dream, I have taken responsibility for this majestic creature and I’m panicked about the fact that he’s escaped.
But wait a second: this isn’t even my horse.
Here in my 40s, I am unlearning a lifetime of hyper-responsibility. After the chaos of a childhood marked by my parents’ divorce and my mother’s mental illness, a rebellious adolescence followed. No surprise there. The big surprise—dare I say miracle?— happened when I stepped into my grounded, successful, responsible adulthood.
But underneath, something was off. This sense of responsibility had gotten over-developed, and it carried over into everything.
I took care of people in my personal life, and in my professional life. I made money, fastidiously paid the bills, organized the paperwork, answered texts and emails promptly. I took on other people’s problems and felt responsible for other people’s feelings. If someone walked in the room in a bad mood, I wondered if it was my fault. I worried about my mom constantly.
Those of us who love someone with borderline personality disorder know about the ups and downs, the late-night tirades, the crippling guilt laid at your feet. We know about striving to fix, manage, solve. We know about codependency.
My mother’s mental illness was not her fault and I don’t blame her. Just like you can’t blame someone with whooping-cough for coughing.
It’s the same with borderline. You can’t really blame them for falling apart because it’s a symptom of their disorder.
I loved my mom, but I couldn’t save her. And what I have learned is that, contrary to what I thought, it wasn’t my job to save her.
Back to the dream:
I feel responsible for this horse, even though I never agreed to take care of him. He was just dropped off for me to deal with. I initially panic with self-blame when he escapes captivity, but something about his majestic, untamable beauty compels me to pause. To just pause.
Maybe his escape from captivity is not a problem that needs to be solved. Maybe, just maybe, it’s not my responsibility.
My whole body exhales.
This mystical dream-horse has come with a message for me:
You don’t need to take responsibility for something that isn’t yours.
Folks, this dream was worth about a year and a half of therapy.
Recovering from codependency means re-learning to trust your instincts. It means not taking on other people’s work. Sometimes it means leaving the relationship. It means prioritizing your relationship with yourself and allowing others to take care of themselves.
Of course, you can still help people and solve problems. But it comes from a grounded, boundaried place that knows the difference between what’s yours and what’s not.
Some dreams carry a big message and take root, growing like an old oak in the wilderness of the psyche. I pause on a hilltop therein, witnessing the astonishing beauty, feeling freer than ever before.
