My therapist challenged me recently with the phrase, “it isn’t your job to figure out what’s going on with other people!”

This hit me with a wide range of emotions, and had both the effect of feeling like being covered with a ton of bricks, while each one lifted from me simultaneously.

How does such a phrase prompt both sides of a wide spectrum and ultimately feel so liberating?

I almost instantly knew the source of this propensity I have, to figure out other people, to an obnoxiously obsessive degree, and also that it is something I view as a “super power” and at the same time probably removes agency in other people and that I need to let it go for everyone’s sake. And probably most importantly for my own.

It results in this wide range of emotions because it contains them.

I only have this “super power” because I had to develop it to feel safe and secure. I have leaned in to it as a self-soothing, reassuring technique. If I can figure out other people, they can’t hurt me. They can’t disappoint me and I can’t disappoint them. I can get exactly what I need and want from them with ease and if I can’t, they aren’t someone I can feel safe or secure around and so I cut them out of my life.

It’s a survival mechanism.

It’s a survival mechanism that I no longer need and that no longer serves me in this way, because I already survived. I can look after myself and I don’t have to have a dependency on other people any more because I can depend on myself.

I want to have a dependency on other people and I want them to be reliable and show up for me and for me to feel seen. But if I exhaustively fill in the blanks for them to achieve this then I block them from showing up for me authentically. Because I have done all of the work for them!

And I’ll be damned if that isn’t something that has surfaced in just about every relationship I’ve had with other people since my folks left Michigan twenty seven years ago. I have made myself everybody’s therapist who has been receiving of my “super power”, and I have driven everybody away who either felt threatened by it or were uninterested in what I had to offer.

This is not a lament; I prefer to spend time with people who are of a growth mindset, so that “weeding out” was not a bad thing for me. People who are generally stuck in their own ways and are unwilling to grow or adapt or refuse to go with the flow and all of the inevitable ups and downs of life are energy vampires for me. But I can see that pretty plainly in other people and identify it quickly. Probably it’s my “super power” to spot that readily and confidently assess a situation like that.

But even if they are growth minded – it is still not my job to figure them out.