I’ve been thinking lately about personal responsibility in relationships. Briefly, this is the idea that whatever emotions a person experiences, they are ultimately that person’s responsibility, and no one else’s. So that if I am angry about something, in order to be healthy rather than codependent, I must acknowledge that I am the ultimate source of my anger. This awareness gives me the power to control my own feelings, and lifts that burden from the other person, who is then freed to respond in a way that’s more closely aligned with their true self. It’s a situation of optimal freedom for both people.

In a recent conflict with a friend, he angrily accused me of not taking responsibility for my feelings, for blaming him. That is an argument that I’ve used on others before, and so I gave it a lot of thought. What, I wonder, does it mean to be responsible? If I say, “You hurt me,” does that mean that I’m not being responsible? Does it mean that I’m blaming you for hurting me, rather than accepting that I’m the one responsible for the pain?

It used to seem so black-and-white to me; I thought that my feelings were ultimately my business and no one else’s, and other people’s feelings were their business and I had nothing to do with them. Therefore if someone else became hurt as the result of something I said, well, that was their problem, not mine. Being responsible meant that I dealt with my own feelings and to hell with other people’s. I wasn’t responsible for triggering an ancient anger that they’d held since childhood or bringing up a fresh hurt from their recent breakup.

The problem in applying this in practice is that it’s not so clear-cut. It can be black and white if something happens when I’m alone: An acorn might fall on my head, and I will get momentarily angry at the shock of it. With that kind of thing it’s easy to say, “Well, of course the acorn didn’t mean that personally, so it’s my issue one hundred percent.” Speaking to another person is different. If we’re healthy, we’re not rigid in our boundaries; we’re fluid. Things go back and forth, and we affect each other in both positive and negative ways. We can make each other laugh, shout, and cry. I think it’s very inaccurate to say that I’m the one responsible for my laughter when I listen to a comedian’s monologue or to a moving piece of music. This is the nature of relating to the world; you affect and are affected by others.

And more: You have to reach into the invisible world in order to communicate. You have to guess and sketch abstractions. You have to get into the other person’s head to understand what they mean. You have to project, assume, interpret. Projection is a dirty word these days, but it happens all the time, and I think it’s ineffective only when the lenses are smudged, when the image is distorted. But it can be a powerful tool as well — sometimes you have nothing else to go on but your own intuition, your “projection” telling you something’s not quite right with what that guy said. At any rate, intent is difficult to convey when you lack the power of telepathy and when you can’t depend on that intuition all the time; so we rely on words, clumsy as they are, to absorb the flavor of our intent and to transmit it imperfectly into the mind of another person. Those words are symbols designed to approximate our intended meaning, but they only work if the other person decodes them the right way. And of course there are always complications. Someone says, “Go to hell,” and what does he mean? Does he say it with a smile or a frown? A laughing tone or a harsh one? Is it sarcastic? What is it in reference to? And also, what personal history do I have with that phrase? If I were abused as a child by someone who said that phrase, it might send me into fight-or-flight. Or if I were raised fundamentalist Christian, that phrase could carry a lot more meaning than for someone raised atheist. We add our own unconscious shadings and colorings onto everything we receive. It can get pretty complicated pretty quickly.

Being responsible, then, is a broad, long-term issue. It is the discipline of striving continuously to clarify one’s perception of both oneself and the other person. It means understanding that I hypothetically react to “Go to hell” because I was abused as a child, not because the person who said it just now is about to abuse me. Or it means perceiving that something that I did made the other person angry, and he’s communicating that. It means perceiving myself clearly and having compassion for myself, and perceiving the other person clearly and understanding their true meaning.

If someone says to me, “You hurt me,” my task then is to question what’s happening on both sides. Did I really hurt him? Was that part of my unconscious purpose, even if I didn’t consciously intend to? Or, what’s going on with him? Why would he react that way if I didn’t mean it that way? Is it him, or is it me? Or is it both?

Inseparable from responsibility is integrity. In order to truly be responsible, to be conscious of both self and other, it’s crucial to have healthy boundaries, a strong sense of self, and the courage to observe the shadow in both self and other. The tendency for me in situations like when someone says “You hurt me,” is either to try to make it better somehow — to apologize — or to push it away — to withdraw, to get angry. Neither is particularly useful, since in either case I take that statement personally. If it’s said in the context of a true friendship, then I think the more effective response is to receive it and engage it, without trying to shape or change it — neither by removing it via apology or by controlling it via blame. That respects the shape of the feeling, and it keeps me from bending myself out of shape. It preserves integrity.

Responsibility is not about building walls, refusing to admit what’s present, judging what will or won’t be allowed in the relationship. And it’s not a weapon to be used against others, as I once did by telling a friend that I wouldn’t be blamed for his hurt feelings. It’s about flowing with what is while maintaining a sense of centeredness and groundedness. Like a tai chi master, the greater one’s ability to be responsible and maintaining one’s own integrity, the easier it is to handle difficult emotional situations without withdrawing or attacking.

It’s also, finally, about compassion. “You hurt me” means “I hurt and you are the most apparent source of it.” Practically speaking, it calls for healing. How does one heal an emotional hurt? By paying attention to it in an open and loving way. This, too, is part of responsibility: “Owning” your feelings doesn’t mean manhandling them into a predetermined shape, it means perceiving them as they are, respecting them, allowing them to be rather than attempting to control or change them. And encouraging healing in others means approaching their pain and even their hard accusations with openness, neither compromising your own integrity nor trying to destroy theirs, but simply applying the same principle of loving compassion.