Tag Archives: responsbility

When Anxiety Starts Growing

I tend to get overwhelmed easily. My brain will focus on a conversation and I will replay the conversation in my head over and over. Pretty soon my worries have evolved like a Pokemon evolution into a whole new problem that is always bigger and scarier than the original problem.

When I find myself in that place, I try to center my thoughts on three areas:

  • What is my responsibility.
  • What isn’t my responsibility.
  • How to move forward.

Then, I make a list of what is my responsibility. I can take a shower. I can get dressed. I can spend time in God’s Word and prayer. This initial movement alone gets my brain out of the “ideating” stage where I loop stress and anxiety and helps me start taking steps forward.

What Is My Responsibility

When I start to think about the specific conversation or event that is causing me stress I try to write down the details of those events. Who is involved? What happened? What was said? Again, these steps help me identify the nuts and bolts instead of getting swept up in emotion. I call it, “Taking Inventory.”

As long as the stress stays in my head the stress is always a blob of emotion swirling around, but simply writing down the nuts and bolts of the stress help me find this stage to be more manageable. I start to catch my breath. I start to see a path forward. I start to feel a little bit of hope in an area that felt hopeless.

What Isn’t My Responsibility

At this stage it helps me to clarify what I can’t change. I can’t change how someone responds. I can’t change how they are responding to the event / conversation. But I can show up prepared. I can listen well. I can reconsider based on what I learn from this interaction.

This little exercise takes only a few minutes. I typically write it into my phone in a text or Notes App. But I can feel my physical body start to relax as I go through this process. Most of my anxiety and stress comes from different scenarios in my head that might or might not happen. Most of the time, my anxiety isn’t coming from the stress of the event, but stress from something that is only happening in my head.

How to Move Forward

Now, I can focus on doing the best work I can bring to the table. If I don’t go through this process I can get stuck. But going through this process gives me a roadmap. I might get overwhelmed again, but now I have a reference point for me to come back to and re-evaluate.

The interesting thing about anxiety is that it usually wants to pull me away from the present moment. My mind starts racing toward outcomes, assumptions, worst case scenarios, and conversations that haven’t even happened yet.

But this process helps bring me back to reality: what is actually happening? What is my responsibility? What steps can I take forward? Sometimes the situation still feels hard. Sometimes the conversation still doesn’t go the way I hoped. Sometimes I still feel overwhelmed later in the day.

But now, instead of spiraling in every direction, I can focus on the next faithful step in front of me.

CHAPTER 1:  When Parenting Becomes Load-Bearing

Introduction: The Weight You Didn’t Know You Were Carrying

Chapter 1: When Parenting Becomes a Load

Chapter 2:  Anxiety Is a Yoke Too

There is a quiet shift that happens in many families, and most parents don’t notice it until it’s already taken hold. Parenting moves from guiding to carrying. At first, that makes sense. Children need parents to carry most of the weight. Children can’t regulate emotions, make wise decisions, or anticipate consequences. That’s not failure, that’s development. But somewhere along the way, many parents cross an invisible line. 

Without meaning to, parents stop helping their children prepare to carry weight, and start carrying the weight of adulthood for them. Parents become load-bearing with thoughts like:

  • “If they’re anxious, I must fix it.”
  • “If they’re unhappy, I’ve failed.”
  • “If they struggle, something went wrong.”
  • “If they drift spiritually, I didn’t do enough.”

This isn’t self-pity. It’s fear, wrapped in love. Most parents didn’t choose this consciously. Cultural pressure nudged them there. So, did good intentions. So, did the fear of being blamed for trauma, anxiety, failure and distance.

The message parents absorbed was subtle but powerful: If your child hurts, you’re responsible. But here’s the problem: No human being was meant to carry another adult’s yoke. Read that again and say it out loud, “No human being was meant to carry another adult’s yoke.”

When parents try the yoke of their children, two things happen at once. First, parents become exhausted, resentful, or quietly panicked. They feel responsible for outcomes they can’t control and place that weight on their shoulders. Second, children never learn how to bear weight themselves. They learn how to offload it.

This is why anxiety and fragility can coexist with independence with many young adults today. A child may resist guidance fiercely while still needing someone else to stabilize them emotionally, so that on the outside it looks like a longing for autonomy, but on the inside they are struggling with anxiety.

That’s not hypocrisy. That’s confusion about where weight belongs. Adulthood requires weight. Decisions. Consequences. Delayed gratification. Emotional regulation. Responsibility for one’s body, time, money, relationships, and beliefs. Weight is unavoidable as an adult!

But sometimes in parenting there is a tug-a-war taking place between the child and the parent where the “weight of life” can be delayed too long.  When this happen adulthood won’t feel inviting but threatening for the child. 

Parents often sense this intuitively. They worry their child isn’t ready. Parents might even encourage some steps of adulting, but instead of helping their children prepare to carry weight, the parent will lessen the weight or remove the weight, hoping readiness will magically appear later.

It doesn’t. Weight trains capacity over time for the child becoming an adult. Struggle develops strength. Responsibility clarifies identity. This doesn’t mean parents should be cold, distant, or indifferent. It means the love of a parent must evolve for the child to learn to carry this weight into adulthood.

That transition is one of the hardest shifts a parent will ever make. Because it feels like loss. It feels like stepping back when everything in you wants to step in. It feels like trust when certainty is gone. It feels like faith, because it is.

Jesus never promised to remove the yoke of adulthood. He promised to be present within it. That distinction changes everything. If parents believe the goal is to eliminate struggle, they will panic when struggle appears. If parents believe the goal is formation over time, they will stay steady when struggle comes. The weight your child is carrying may not be evidence of failure. It may be evidence that adulthood has begun.

The question is not whether the child will carry the weight. The question is whether the child will learn to carry it alone, under anxiety, under pressure, under false expectations as the enter into adulthood.

Chapter 1 Action Step:  Identify the Weight You’re Carrying

This chapter isn’t asking you to change your parenting style. It’s asking you to notice what you’ve been carrying without realizing it. Set aside ten quiet minutes. No phone. No problem-solving.

On a piece of paper, complete this sentence as honestly as you can: “If my child struggles with _____________________________________, I feel personally responsible.”

Don’t explain your answers. Don’t defend them. Just list them.

Common answers include:

  • anxiety
  • faith
  • finances
  • relationships
  • emotional stability
  • motivation
  • happiness
  • direction

Now circle anything on your list that involves another adult’s internal life.  It can be their emotions, beliefs, or identity. Those are likely weights you were never meant to carry.

Finally, answer one last question in a single sentence: “What am I afraid would happen if I stopped carrying this?” 

You don’t need to resolve that fear yet. You just need to name it. Because before weight can be transferred, it has to be recognized.