I used to say yes before I had even finished hearing the question.
Not because I didn’t care about the answer. Because somewhere along the way I had learned that yes was safer than no. That “yes” kept people close, and “no” created distance. That my value was located somewhere in my willingness to give and that if I stopped giving, I would have to find out what was left.
So I gave. Nine sessions a day. Three pro bono cases. A fee that told the world what I quietly believed about myself. A house I felt guilty about when I couldn’t clean it because I was working twelve hours. A schedule so full there was nowhere in it for me to simply be.
I was not responding to life. I was surviving it.
And I thought I was being responsible.
Dr B’shree Jagdale – Pexels
I encountered Gabor Maté’s definition of responsibility during my Compassionate Inquiry® training, and something in me went very still when I heard it.
Responsibility, he said, is the ability to respond.
Not the obligation to say yes. Not the duty to show up regardless of what it costs. Not the moral imperative to give until there is nothing left and then apologize for the emptiness.
The ability to respond.
Two words that changed everything: able. To respond.
Not whether I should. Whether I can. Whether the capacity is actually there: in my body, in my nervous system, in the particular version of myself that is present in this moment, to meet what is being asked of me with something real.
I sat with that for a long time, because if responsibility is the ability to respond, then saying yes when the ability is not there is not responsibility at all.
It is performance. It is people-pleasing dressed up as virtue. It is the old wound running the room and calling itself generosity.
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I want to be honest about what the old pattern actually looked like, because I think many people who do the kind of work I do will recognize themselves in it.
Nine sessions a day. I told myself it was dedication, that it was service. It was what a good therapist does when people need help and she has the skills to provide it.
What it actually was: I had not yet learned to assess what was available in me before I said yes. I was not responding. I was reacting to need, to expectation, to my own discomfort with disappointing people who were suffering.
Three pro bono cases. Again, I told myself a story about generosity. And generosity was part of it. But so was the belief, running quietly underneath, that my time and skill and presence were not quite worth what other practitioners charged for theirs. That I needed to earn my place at the table by giving a portion of it away.
The fee I charged for years was a number that made sense to the woman who had not yet fully claimed her value. The work was the same. The knowledge was the same. The outcomes were the same. But the number told a story about what I believed I deserved.
And the housework. I would come home after nine sessions, depleted in the particular way that deep relational work depletes you, and feel guilty about the dishes. As though my body’s exhaustion was a moral failing. As though being too tired to clean the kitchen was evidence of some inadequacy I needed to correct.
That guilt was not about the dishes. It was about the fact that I had given so much of myself away during the day that there was nothing left, and I did not yet have language for that as a boundary violation. I only had language for it as failure.
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Learning to pause changed all of this. Slowly. Not linearly. With significant backsliding and the occasional return to the old automatic yes.
But the pause became a practice.
Before I respond to a request, any request, whether it is a new client inquiry or someone asking for my time or a commitment that sounds reasonable on the surface, I stop. And I ask myself something that used to feel radical and now feels like basic self-knowledge:
What do I have available right now?
Not what I should have. Not what I had yesterday or what I will have next week. What is actually here, in this body, in this moment, as I consider this thing that is being asked of me?
Sometimes the answer is a great deal. I am resourced and present and genuinely want to give what is being asked.
Sometimes the answer is very little. I am depleted or distracted or carrying something heavy, and what I have to offer right now would not serve either of us well.
And sometimes, more often than I expected, the answer is some, but not all. I have something to give here, but not everything being asked. And I am learning, still learning, to give what I have and name what I don’t.
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The changes that came from this practice were practical and specific.
I moved from three pro bono cases to one. Not because I stopped believing in accessible care. Because I recognized that giving away my work at a rate that was depleting me was not an act of generosity; it was an act of self-abandonment dressed as service. Real generosity requires a self that is not disappearing in the giving.
I raised my private pay fee. This was harder than it sounds. Every time I considered the new number, something in me braced. The old belief system had a lot to say about what I was worth and how much was appropriate to charge for it. I did it anyway. And what happened on the other side of that decision confirmed what I had not yet been able to trust: the work is worth it. I am worth it.
I went from nine sessions a day to five. This was not a small thing. It required me to stop using busyness as a measure of value. To trust that a therapist who is genuinely present for five hours is doing more than a therapist who is technically available for nine. To let myself rest without immediately filling the rest with something productive.
I hired an assistant: I noticed my decision fatigue, the particular exhaustion of making hundreds of small choices in a day, on top of the emotional labour of the work itself, and I recognized it not as weakness but as information. My nervous system was telling me something. Responsibility, real responsibility, meant listening.
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None of this has made me less devoted to the work. If anything, it has made me more genuinely present for it.
When I sit with a client now, I am actually there. Not performing presence from behind a wall of depletion. Not giving from a place of deficit and calling it generosity.
I am there because I have assessed what is available in me before I arrived, and I have given myself what I needed to show up fully. The pause made space for that. My honest accounting made it possible.
Responsibility, I have learned, is not about how much you give. It is about whether you are actually able to give what you are giving. Whether the yes is coming from genuine capacity or from the wound’s old habit of contorting to keep everyone comfortable.
The pause is how I know the difference now.
And it has changed everything, not just in my practice, but in my body, my marriage, my relationship with my own time and energy and life.
The ability to respond is a gift. To myself first. And then, from that fullness, to everyone else.
