Feel Guilty All the Time? You're Taking Too Much Pie.

Do you have a chronic case of the guilts? You're probably carrying more than your share.

Most people assume responsibility is simple: either it's your fault or it isn't. But that binary rarely gets you to the truth. It distorts what actually happened and creates guilt that was never yours to carry.

This episode covers:

• Why feeling responsible isn't the same as being responsible
• How the Responsibility Pie works and how to use it
• Why chronic guilt is often a sign you're carrying slices that were never yours
• Why accurate responsibility matters — for your relationships and your self-respect

If guilt is your default setting, listen now.

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Follow Helen: @helenbillows | @thetraumanerd

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hello, I'm Helen Billows, and this is the Trauma Nerd Podcast. I'm a registered psychologist, EMDR therapist, and I work exclusively with trauma. This podcast is for people who want psychologically sound explanations without pop psych shortcuts, toxic positivity, or excuses dressed up as empathy. We'll talk about trauma, responsibility, relationships, and recovery. Backed by nuance, honesty, and of course, actual evidence. Let's get into it. Over the last couple of episodes, we've established two things. First, that understanding someone's pain doesn't excuse the harm they caused. Second, that your intentions, however good, don't get you off the hook if you cause a problem. I stand by both of those arguments. I think they're solid. However, after listening to the last podcast, again, around responsibility and intentions, it I notice that there are some situations where the intentions argument starts to feel a little shaky. And I want to address those directly because I think the answer within that might just fundamentally change how you think about responsibility. So, hello, I'm Helen Billows, and this is the Trauma Nerd Podcast. I'm a registered psychologist, EMDR therapist, and supervisor, and I run a trauma-focused private practice in Adelaide, South Australia. So this is the final episode in what has turned into my series on responsibility. I didn't actually intend it to be a series, uh, but it turns out responsibility is super complicated. Who'd have thunk it? So this is the last episode, right? And then we're moving on. We're moving different topics. So last episode I made the case that your intentions don't determine your level of responsibility for an outcome. If your behavior contributed to harm, you own that regardless of what you meant. Like I said, I stand by it. But I did anticipate that some of you might come away from that discussion with a few scenarios rattling around in your head that didn't quite fit. And I actually agree with you. So the first one sounds something like, okay, Helen, but what about when someone completely overreacts? Like my behavior was pretty minor, and they responded in a way that was way out of proportion. Am I really responsible for that? The second one is actually the flip side of that. What about when a small error leads to a really serious consequence? Like the nurse who makes a minor dosage mistake and a patient dies. Is she a hundred percent responsible for that outcome? You know, is that her fault? So she had good intentions, but it still happened, so it's on her, right? So these are really good questions. And I want to be clear, they're not, this is now actually not about intentions. These are about proportion. So this means that the previous two episodes don't actually address this problem, and we need a different framework, and that's what today's about. So the way that most people think about responsibility is very black and white. Either I caused this or I didn't, it's my fault or it's yours. The reality is though, most outcomes are not the product of one person's actions. They're the product of multiple people, multiple decisions, multiple circumstances, all interacting with each other over time. When you flatten all of that into a single question of whose fault it is, you're not actually getting to the truth of what happened. We're turning a 5D reality into a 2D conclusion. It's misleading and inaccurate and actually can cause us a lot of unnecessary distress. So the question I want to offer instead is not is not uh who is responsible, but what actually contributed to this outcome and what proportion of that genuinely belongs to me. So this brings me back to a favorite uh strategy, I suppose, of mine that comes from CBT and it's called the responsibility pie. I use this all the time in my work with clients. So the idea is that you imagine the entire situation or outcome as a lovely pie, a big tasty apple pie. The whole pie represents 100% of what contributed to the result. And in most situations, multiple people and factors will each get a slice proportionate to their actual contribution to what happened. So basically, we are slicing up this pie. So if I determine that uh I get I'm a quarter 25% is my responsibility, I'm I'm getting my knife out and I'm cutting out a quarter and I'm serving myself up that piece of pie. The rest, it's not mine. Other people can have the rest, it doesn't belong to me. This quarter's mine, the rest is not. So let me give you a concrete example to make this a little less abstract. Coming back to the nurse who makes a small dosage error and a catastrophic event occurs, like a patient dies as a result of the overdose. The question of whether she's responsible seems really straightforward on the surface. Like she made the error and the patient died. It's her fault. But when you actually map that outcome onto the pie, things look a lot more nuanced. So let's say I'm gonna make up a few scenarios here, but this is this is what happened with the nurse, right? So, first of all, the medication chart hadn't been updated properly by other staff. There's a slice of pie. The hospital is chronically understaffed and everyone is stretched beyond their limits of what and what's reasonable. There's another slice that belongs to the hospital's management. There maybe there were poor systems in place around double checking doses. Another slice. Maybe she was interrupted multiple times by colleagues while she was preparing the medication and got distracted and lost track of things a bit. Another slice. So by the time you've accounted for all of these contributing factors, her slice is getting. If we have initially said it's the whole pie, each of these additional factors that we are taking into consideration is shrinking how much of this pie she gets. So her error was the final link in the chain, but it wasn't the only link. And pretending otherwise is unhelpful to everybody. Everybody in the situation. Obviously her, but everybody. So the nurse still needs to own her slice fully and without making excuses. But her slice is not 100. She doesn't get the whole pie. It's not hers. And really, let's let's really like lean into that a little. How different does that feel? You get a slice, so let's say she's 35% responsible. She gets a slice of that pie proportionate to 35% of the responsibility of the outcome that belongs to her. Comparing that to it's all your fault, you get the whole pie. That's a really that feels really different, doesn't it? This is so important. So one thing worth flagging too, before you go applying this everywhere, is that before you start dividing the pie at all, it's worth asking whether your behavior is even in the pie to begin with. Right? So sometimes if you're being super honest with yourself, your slice is actually zero because your actions didn't cause or contribute to the outcome in any legitimate way. It is so easy and really common to feel guilty in a situation where your guilt is not warranted, doesn't fit. Usually that happens because somebody is either acting like things are your fault, actively blaming you, or you've been treated like that in the past and you're used to blaming yourself for things that aren't your fault. So what I actually, the responsibility issue is a very it's probably the most common thing that comes up in trauma therapy. So when I think about the people that come to see me for trauma therapy, the pattern I encounter most often is not people avoiding responsibility, it's the people who are drowning in it. So these people have been carrying slices of pie that were never theirs for so long that it's never even occurred to them that A, it doesn't belong to them, and B, that they can actually put it down. Because if you grew up in an environment where responsibility was placed on you repeatedly and unfairly in unwarranted and unreasonable ways, that becomes your template for how accountability works. You just someone hand someone handed you the whole pie when you were a child and you took it. Because that's what you learned to do. And if mum and dad are giving me this pie, it must be mine. What other what other s possibility could there be? Children don't think of this, right? Of course they don't, then so they shouldn't have to. So I spent the first two episodes of this series on the people who underclaim their slice, who use empathy and context and good intentions to sidestep accountability and why that's such a problem. And it is a problem, but I want to name the other side of it clearly because it's just as damaging and in my experience considerably more common, at least with the people I work with. When one person in a relationship consistently refuses their slice, even though so the slice belongs to them, but they're not eating it, okay, someone else ends up absorbing it. It has to go somewhere, right? So if you if you're a in a with a in a friendship or in a relationship or have a parent or whatever, a family member who never takes their pie splice, if you don't have context around that and you don't understand this concept yet, and why would you if nobody's taught you, um, you're gonna probably assume that that slice actually belongs to you. And over time, this becomes internalized. It becomes part of our the just a core belief and the way we think about things. Maybe it really is all my fault. Maybe I really am the problem. So that's not a reflection of reality. That's what happens when the pie gets when the pie slices are uh served out of proportion to you over a really long period of time. You are getting way too much pie. It's not yours. Accurate responsibility is genuinely an act of care in both directions. Like I talked about in the previous episodes. Responsibility is empowering and it's really good for us. It's it's an act, it's an act of self-care to take responsibility because it benefits our relationships and it enables us to repair the problems that we've contributed to. If it's not your res if it's not on you, there's nothing you can do about it. That's a very powerless position to be in. So accurate responsibility not only helps us, but it helps other people too. Because they need to take theirs and I don't want all of it. I don't want the whole pie. Okay. So how do we actually use this? When you find yourself in a situation where responsibility is feeling murky, so that could be maybe you're feeling really guilty over something and struggling with feelings of guilt. Maybe you feel guilty all the time. That's often an indicator that we've we're taking too much pie, we've learned to take too much pie. Um, so some signs that where the responsibility is getting murky, maybe somebody's insisting that something is entirely your fault. Now remember, that is very rare. To have a hundred percent responsibility is a very rare situation. Usually there is at least 50-50. There is more um to the situation than that. Like, I actually think just off the top of my head, the kind of situation that would warrant 100% responsibility is if like if I was walking down the street and somebody looked at me and just went, I'm gonna whack her on the head with a brick. That's on them. That's on them. I don't get any, I don't get any pie. I was just walking down the street. That's that's not on me. Um, that would be 100% that person's responsibility because they made the decision to smack me in the head with a brick. So that's a very extreme outlandish situation. Um, I'm sure it does happen, but it is extreme and outlandish. So if somebody is insisting that something is entirely your fault or that's how you're feeling, probably there's something wrong there. Map it out on the pie. Um other indicator might be that you're just not sure how much responsibility belongs to you in a situation, but basically that uncertainty, that feeling to blame, the chronic feelings of guilt, these are invitations. Map the pie, map the outcome out on the pie. Have a look at it and ask yourself, what actually contributed to this result? And I'm talking real causal factors, not emotional ones, facts. Only facts. Would it think to yourself, would a judge consider that a contributing factor or not? Okay. If it helps, probably like write them down, I think. That's a helpful thing to do. Write each factor down and give each a percentage. Okay, like we went through with the nurse example. Um, give each of those factors a percentage for how much how big a pie slice they get. And then you get to look at the whole picture from an honest account of reality rather than just believing your guilt or someone else's version of the events. Okay, it's a really beautiful quick reframe to help you um navigate feelings of inappropriate guilt. And remember, if you do have a slice, own it. Taking responsibility is so cool. You like that's such a cool thing to do, and it's so good for you, remember? So acknowledge it, apologize where that's called for, and do what you can to repair it. Having a smaller slice doesn't mean you skip it. You know, genuine response is still required, but once you've owned your actual slice, the rest of the pie is not yours to carry, you're allowed to put it down, don't be greedy, don't take pie that's not yours. Okay. So that is the series. We've covered why empathy without accountability doesn't hold up, why intentions don't just um don't determine responsibility, and now why taking the correct amount, you know, not being greedy with your responsibility. It's a bit of we want like a Goldilocks situation here. Not too much, not too little, just right. We want the just right piece of slice of pie. Okay. So remembering, taking on more than your share isn't noble, and you're actually preventing other people from owning what's theirs. You're not responsible for everything that's ever gone wrong around you. Some of you really need to hear that, and you need to hear it more than once. Remember the pie, map it out. So, thank you so much for listening. If this resonated, share it with somebody. If you uh found it helpful, I have other very helpful things. So, subscribe, sign up to my mailing list, you'll get to hear about everything, all the cool stuff I'm doing. Uh, and as always, send your questions and ideas for future topics through my website. Give me info on what you might like me to explore next. Take care, and I'll see you next time. That's it for today's episode of the Trauma Nerd Podcast. If you felt validated, yay! If you felt challenged, double yay! If you found this useful, you can follow or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. If you're interested in trauma focused therapy or resources, you can find more information at my website. Thanks for listening and bye for now.