I'm Natalie Lou and you're listening to a summer replay episode of the Baggage

Reclaim sessions.

Hello hello hello how are you doing?

Something I've thought about a lot is a conversation I had with my brother who lives in

Amsterdam. He's 18 months younger than me.

And it was during the pandemic.

And we talked about how a lot of the things

that we had, I guess, just took for being the way we are the way of life a measure of our

character you know attention to detail our willingness to help our willingness to step

up various things.

That actually these were all forms of anxiety and that they actually came from the over-responsibility that we had learned in childhood, which had then

just manifested itself in a variety of habits, including people-pleasing, perfectionism, overgiving, overthinking, and the subject of today's

replay episode over responsibility.

I think something that the pandemic did as well is that it revealed where we had some relief from being free of responsibilities that we felt were hours prior to the pandemic.

There are a lot of us who gave a big sigh of relief that we were out of

the routine that meant that people expected certain things for us. It meant that we couldn't be there in certain ways.

We're not bad people for having thought that way. It was this recognition that, geez, it's like I feel like I'm responsible for the feelings and behavior of others. I feel like

it's my duty to be and do certain things for certain people and that I have to do it this way and I can't be

this because they expect me to be that. This episode puts a name to a cluster of

habits of thinking and behavior, that we often take a shorthand for what a good kind and

conscientious person that we are, but that are actually clues to where we are hurting and even breaking ourselves.

I hope that you get a lot out of the episode.

...