Personalisation

Everything is your fault.

That’s what you tell yourself. The argument with your partner, your fault. Your colleague’s bad mood, your fault. Your friend’s disappointment, your fault. The weather’s ruined the party, somehow, also your fault.

You go through life saying sorry for things you didn’t do, taking responsibility for events you couldn’t control, and carrying the emotional weight of other people’s problems on your shoulders.

That’s personalisation. And it’s destroying you.

There’s responsibility, and then there’s personalisation. One’s useful, whilst the other will eat you alive. Taking responsibility means owning your choices, your actions, your outcomes. That’s healthy, that’s necessary, and that’s how you grow.

Personalisation is different. Personalisation is when you blame yourself for absolutely everything that goes wrong, whether you had any control over it or not. It’s a cognitive distortion where you immediately take the blame for the misfortune of others, for external events, for circumstances completely outside your control.

You’ve heard yourself say ‘This is my fault’, or found yourself apologising for something you really shouldn’t be apologising for. Take a moment to question yourself: are you taking responsibility for an external event? For circumstances outside your control? For someone else’s choices? For things that would have happened regardless of what you did?

If you answered yes to any of those, you’re personalising, and you’re carrying blame that isn’t yours to carry.

When you suffer from personalisation, you get trapped in a distorted process. Just like some people always find something to worry about, you always find something to blame yourself for. It’s a mental habit, a distorted pattern, and it’s psychologically exhausting.

I see this in patients often, and also outside of work.

The mother who blames herself for her adult child’s depression, the partner who blames themselves for their spouse’s drinking. The employee who blames themselves for being made redundant during company-wide layoffs, or the friend who blames themselves when others are having a bad day.

They’re all carrying emotional burdens that aren’t theirs to carry, and just like any emotional burden, carrying too much of this baggage will make you sick.

Here’s what personalisation does to you.

You carry guilt that isn’t yours. Someone else makes a bad decision, faces a consequence, suffers a setback, and you feel responsible. You feel guilty, you take on their negative emotions as your own. Then you add your own guilt on top for good measure.

Now you’re feeling as bad as they are, possibly worse. But if you’re feeling as bad as they do, how are you going to help them? How are you going to handle your own life? How are you going to manage your own problems, never mind someone else’s?

You can’t, because you’re drowning in responsibility and blame for things that were never your responsibility in the first place.

Personalisation makes you say sorry constantly, sorry for things you didn’t do, even sorry for existing. Sorry for other people’s feelings, sorry for circumstances beyond your control, you apologise your way through life, taking the blame for everything, as if the entire universe’s problems are somehow your fault.

It makes you feel powerless. If everything bad that happens is your fault, then you must have the power to prevent it. But you don’t, so you feel like a failure every time something goes wrong, even when it was completely out of your control.

It prevents you from setting boundaries. If you’re responsible for everyone else’s feelings and problems, you can never say no. You can never put yourself first. You can never protect your own wellbeing because you’re too busy trying to fix everyone else’s, or over-checking that something else won’t go wrong to the extreme.

Getting Used

Over-personalisation attracts people who will use you. When you take responsibility for things that aren’t your responsibility, you attract people who are happy to let you. They learn quickly that they can make their problems your problems, that they can blame you and you’ll accept that blame, and fundamentally that they can avoid responsibility because you’ll carry it for them.

Here’s the truth you need to understand.

Other people make their own decisions. Those decisions have consequences, and those consequences are not your responsibility.

Helping Others

You can care about someone and not be responsible for their choices, you can support someone without taking on their emotional burden, you can empathise without personalising, and you can help without shouldering blame.

It’s good to care for others. It shows you’re human. Giving support, giving empathy, being there for people. That’s important, but there’s a limit to how much you can blame yourself for another person’s problems and decisions.

You may see someone suffer and want to take their pain away. Personalisation is how you try to do this psychologically. You take their negative feelings as your own, add guilt, and make yourself feel as bad as they do, as if feeling terrible yourself will somehow make them feel better.

It won’t. It never does.

By over-personalising you are also taking away someone else’s responsibility, and they won’t learn from their mistakes. They may feel better when things go wrong because you are sharing their pain, but they learn less from their failures and they may make the same mistakes in the future.

7 Ways to Sensibly Limit Responsibility

There’s a limit to how much responsibility you can take in life. There’s a limit to how much blame and emotion you should be carrying around that’s not even yours in the first place.

Here’s how to recognise when you’re personalising: you immediately assume blame when something goes wrong, even before you’ve assessed whether you had any control over it. You feel guilty about other people’s problems, you apologise for things you didn’t do, you feel responsible for other people’s feelings and reactions. You feel like if you’d just done something different, everything would be fine.

Here’s how to stop it and sensibly limit your responsibility.

First, distinguish between your responsibility and your concern. You can be concerned about someone without being responsible for them, and you can care about their problems without making their problems your fault.

Second, ask yourself this question every time you start to blame yourself: did I have control over this outcome? If the answer is no, it’s not your fault. Full stop.

Third, recognise that other people have agency. This means they make their own choices, and those choices have consequences. You are not responsible for other adults’ choices or their consequences. Remember, you can support them, but you can’t control them.

Fourth, understand that some things are just outside everyone’s control. Sometimes bad things happen and it’s nobody’s fault. Not yours. Not theirs. Just random chance, bad luck, circumstances beyond anyone’s control.

Fifth, set boundaries. You can care about someone and still say no. You can support someone without taking responsibility for fixing their life. You can be empathetic without drowning in their problems. They need to learn from their mistakes too.

Sixth, practise appropriate apologies. Try only apologising for things you actually did wrong. Stop apologising for existing, for other people’s feelings, for circumstances beyond your control. Remember, when you apologise for everything, your apologies mean nothing.

Seventh, redirect your energy. Instead of spending your energy feeling guilty about things you can’t control, spend it on things you can actually help with. Practical support is more valuable than drowning in shared misery when something goes wrong.

The Take Home Message

You’re not helping anyone by making yourself feel terrible about their problems. You’re just adding another person to the list of people who are struggling. Now instead of one person struggling, there are two, and your guilt doesn’t fix their problems. Your self-blame doesn’t make their situation better. Your emotional suffering doesn’t reduce theirs. It just means now there are two people suffering instead of one.

If you want to actually help, you need to separate what’s your responsibility from what isn’t. You need to maintain enough emotional stability to actually be useful. You need to stop drowning in personalisation so you can offer real practical support instead of just shared misery.

Personalisation was one of Beck’s — one of the fathers of CBT — original cognitive distortions. He recognised it as a trait in people with unhelpful thinking patterns that were holding them back. He was right. It holds you back from living your life because you’re too busy taking responsibility for everyone else’s.

This doesn’t stop you from caring. It doesn’t stop you from helping. It doesn’t make you selfish or cold. It just corrects the amount of responsibility you take and the emotional burden you carry.

You can be kind without being a doormat, you can be supportive without being a martyr, and you can care deeply without drowning in personalisation.

Stop blaming yourself for things you didn’t do, can’t control, and aren’t responsible for.

Start focusing on what you actually can influence, change, and improve in your life, and maybe theirs. That’s where your energy belongs, not in carrying guilt that was never yours to carry.

Further reading

• Beck, A. T. (1976). Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders. International Universities Press.
• Burns, D. D. (1980). Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. William Morrow.
• Cloud, H., & Townsend, J. (1992). Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life. Zondervan.
• Linehan, M. M. (2014). DBT Skills Training Manual (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
• Gilbert, P. (2009). The Compassionate Mind. Constable.