How to Separate Responsibilities

I. Respect Your Own Boundaries
Recognize the limits of your abilities, energy, and life. Do not pursue omniscience, omnipotence, or total control. Do not try to control fate, let alone other people’s fates.
Omniscience, omnipotence, control, and the greed, aversion, and delusion of seeking externally—these are common karmic obstructions. See the earlier article, “How to Address Excessive Anxiety.”
Zhuangzi: “Human life has its limits.”
Marxism: historical materialism and dialectical materialism.
Being yourself, loving yourself, having agency, and following your own life narrative and pace are another important part of developing a sense of boundaries.
Recommended reading on Adlerian psychology: *The Courage to Be Disliked*.

II. Respect Other People’s Boundaries
Trying to save one’s parents is one root of children’s psychological problems. But parents are, after all, adults in middle age, twenty or thirty years older than their children.
Do not take on other people’s lives; ultimately, they must face their own icebergs.
Do not provide psychological sustenance to anyone: doing so often only breeds harmful impulses and NPD.
Do not try to heal anyone. Even psychotherapists are wary of this delusion, let alone ordinary people.
Do not always try to instruct others. That is the arrogance of the ego, which loves to play the teacher, at work.
Do not try to manage every aspect of someone else’s fate. That is elitism and looking down on others.
Do not interfere with others. This means respecting their boundaries, respecting their potential to undertake a hero’s journey within their own life story, and respecting their innate wholeness.
From the earlier article, “You Have to Make Many of Life’s Complex, Difficult Decisions Yourself, So You Need to Separate Responsibilities”: For people in their thirties and forties, common difficult decisions include whether to divorce / quit a job without another lined up / change careers / emigrate / return to their home country / remain child-free / cut ties with their family of origin. Nothing anyone else says about these questions will help. Even if you say, “Look, it’s been 10 years since I divorced / quit without another job lined up / changed careers / emigrated / returned to my home country / chose to remain child-free / cut ties with my family of origin, and I’m very happy,” the other person will still say, “That’s now. Perhaps you’ll regret it twenty years from now.” And that is only when we are in our thirties and forties. When we reach our seventies and eighties, the question our generation will face is whether to choose euthanasia. Then words will be even less useful. You cannot exactly say, “Look, it’s been 10 years since I underwent euthanasia, and I’m very happy.”

III. Differentiate Yourself from Your Family of Origin
The ultimate task for parents and children is to let go and differentiate. This is a way of respecting one another and wishing one another well. The eagle must eventually let its young fly free.
A symbiotic relationship of adult infantilism obstructs both sides’ psychological growth and keeps deteriorating.
Zhuangzi: “Rather than keeping each other alive with moisture from their mouths, the fish would be better off forgetting one another in the rivers and lakes.” Many people do not understand this line, but when insight comes in middle age, they find it profound.

IV. Attachment Issues
Healthy attachment is secure, but anxious and avoidant attachment are also common.
There is no healthy pattern for relationships. There are problems with both the self and object relations.

V. Issues of the Self and Object Relations
A healthy, stable, mature core of the self. No longer seeking pathological selfobject experiences from the outside world: pathological idealization, pathological mirroring, and pathological twinship or alter-ego experiences.
No longer accommodating the outside world through a false self or a persona, or becoming socialized and alienated through instrumentalizing, objectifying, and diminishing oneself.