What’s Mine, What’s Yours: Redefining Accountability
Accountability for our part in things is an essential lesson. We have to take responsibility for our part.
Learning what our part actually is, though, is more confusing than most of us realize. What I see with families a lot of the time is that parents are taking responsibility for things that aren’t theirs to own.
On the surface, that doesn’t sound so bad. “What’s wrong with caring too much?” Right?
In reality, it causes a lot of damage for everyone involved.
You might be wondering, “How is that possible?” Honestly, I could write an entire book just on how these dynamics show up, but for this chapter, I’m going to keep it simple.
Two big things usually happen when you take responsibility for what isn’t yours:
1. You start overcompensating, trying to fix a problem that is not yours to fix.
2. You take away the other person’s accountability for the problems they’ve created for themselves.
My mom fell into this trap for a long time. She carried guilt about things that happened when I was younger, and as I got older, that guilt turned into her constantly trying to make up for it. In practice, that looked like her always trying to fix my problems for me.
And I figured out how to use that.
If I was in trouble, I would pull the “trauma card,” and she would back off and slide right into problem-solving mode. Suddenly it was her job to fix whatever mess I’d created.
Now, in my defense, I wasn’t fully aware I was doing this at the time. It wasn’t like I had some evil master plan. It wasn’t until I had some recovery under my belt and had done a lot of honest self-reflection that I could look back and see the pattern clearly.
I had learned that if I leaned on my trauma, I could get away with more. Again, that’s not to say the trauma wasn’t real—it absolutely was. But my coping skills around it were almost nonexistent, and instead of dealing with it, I learned how to weaponize it.
Does that make me a bad person? No. It makes me a person in survival mode, deeply wrapped up in addiction. Remember, we will do almost anything to protect our addiction. That’s what this was: protection. A survival strategy that worked—until it didn’t.
This is where the mindset shift comes in.
Moving from blame and guilt into compassion and accountability is hard. It’s not a light-switch moment. It doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s not a straight line. You will probably swing too far in both directions for a while—over-owning everything, then trying to detach from everything. That’s normal.
But this shift is absolutely worth it.
Because here’s what starts to happen when you get it:
You begin to clearly see what is actually yours to carry and what isn’t.
You start taking responsibility for your behavior, your reactions, your choices—without drowning in shame.
You stop trying to manage, control, or fix other people’s lives for them.
You allow them to feel the weight of their own choices, which is the only way they can grow.
And here’s the part most people don’t realize:
Letting go of what isn’t yours doesn’t make you cold, selfish, or uncaring. It actually makes you more loving and more effective. You’re no longer relating from guilt and fear; you’re relating from clarity and compassion.
It also relieves a huge amount of guilt, because you finally see that so many of these problems were never yours to own in the first place. You can grieve, you can care, you can support—but you stop pretending you’re the one holding everything together.
And the more you keep trying to own what isn’t yours, the more you unintentionally get in the way of their growth. You shield them from consequences, you soften the impact of their choices, and you rob them of the chance to develop their own accountability.
So the work here is learning to say, sometimes quietly and sometimes out loud:
“This is mine. I’ll own it.”
and
“This is yours. I’m not going to carry it for you.”
That’s what healthy accountability looks like—for you and for them.
