Being With: The Sacred Space Between Self-Responsibility and Relational Witness
An Educational Exploration of Attachment, Boundaries, and Relational Capacity
Note: This is an educational blog post exploring psychological concepts related to relationships, boundaries, and healing. It is not intended as therapy, medical advice, or professional services advertising. If you need mental health support, please contact a licensed mental health professional.
There's a particular kind of loneliness that comes from being told you're "too much." Not in those exact words, perhaps. But in the pulling away when distress shows up. In the suggestions to "work on yourself" when what you're actually asking for is someone to simply be there. In the subtle, or not so subtle, message that your pain is your problem to solve, and that needing another person somehow makes you less sovereign, less self-responsible, less whole.
We've developed a cultural narrative around self-responsibility that, while well-intentioned, has created a troubling side effect: we've forgotten how to be with one another in distress without making the distress itself a moral failing.
The False Binary of Self and Other
The conversation around boundaries has become oversimplified into a false binary: either you're responsible for managing your own emotional experiences, or you're demanding too much from others. Either you're sovereign and self-sufficient, or you're codependent and enmeshed. This binary misses the fundamental truth about human beings, we are relational creatures whose nervous systems are designed to co-regulate with others.
Attachment theory, first developed by John Bowlby and expanded through decades of research, reveals that the attachment system functions as a homeostatic mechanism that modulates distress in adulthood and childhood. The very foundation of our capacity to regulate ourselves was built through experiences of being regulated by others. When caregivers provide "good-enough" regulation, soothing distress, offering safety and joy, the child's developing nervous system learns to manage arousal and affect efficiently.
This isn't a childhood phase we're meant to outgrow. Throughout our lives, proximity to attachment figures reduces fear, anxiety, and related forms of distress, allowing individuals to engage in other life tasks. We remain fundamentally interdependent beings, and this is not a weakness, it's our design.
The Neurobiology of Connection
Stephen Porges's Polyvagal Theory offers us crucial insight into why simply telling someone to "manage their triggers" misses the mark physiologically. Polyvagal theory in psychotherapy offers emotional co-regulation as an interactive process between therapist and client which engages the social engagement system of both therapist and client. When we're in distress, our nervous system doesn't respond to logic or willpower alone—it responds to cues of safety or danger, and if the therapist is reciprocal and responds with engagement behaviors characterized by prosodic voice and positive facial affect, the client's social engagement system will be stimulated.
This applies far beyond the therapy room. When someone we care about is struggling, our presence—not our solutions, not our advice, but our grounded, regulated presence—can help their nervous system shift out of a defensive state and back toward connection and safety. This is not caretaking or fixing. This is the biological reality of how human beings help each other heal.
I-Thou: The Practice of True Presence
Philosopher Martin Buber gave us language for a way of being with another person that transcends objectification. In his I-Thou framework, the I-Thou relationship is characterized by mutuality, directness, presentness, intensity and ineffability. When we meet someone in this way, we're not relating to them as a problem to be solved or a project to be managed—we're encountering them as a whole being.
Buber called this deep participation with, and acceptance of, another's essential being "confirmation." He believed that one's innate capacity to confirm others, and to be confirmed in one's own uniqueness by others, is the source of our humanity.
This is what it means to truly witness someone's distress without making it mean something problematic about them. It's the difference between saying "you're being too much" and "I see you're in pain right now, and I'm here." One judges and distances. The other confirms and connects.
In inclusion, one imagines what another person is feeling, thinking and experiencing while standing in relation to them as a Thou. The clinician must be aware of the effects of relational events on her as a person, while at the same time using all the clues available to her to experience the effect of the same relational events from the standpoint of the patient. This practice—holding both your own experience and the other's experience simultaneously—is the heart of relational capacity.
Boundaries Without Judgment
Here's where the nuance lives: we can absolutely have limits about what we're able to hold, and we can communicate those limits clearly without making those limits mean something about the other person.
Setting a boundary isn't about judging someone as "too much" or "irresponsible" or "needy." A boundary is simply information about what you can or cannot do in a given moment. Boundaries are limits we set for ourselves based on what is acceptable and unacceptable to us. Boundaries don't require anyone else to do anything.
The difference is profound:
Judgment-laden boundary: "You need to work on yourself. I can't be around you when you're like this. You're being too emotional."
Clean boundary: "I'm noticing I'm feeling overwhelmed right now and need to step away for a bit. I care about you, and I'm not equipped to be present with this intensity today. Can I help you call someone and check back in tomorrow?"
The first makes the person's distress a moral failing. The second acknowledges your own limit while maintaining connection and respect for the other person's experience.
When communicating, remember to take responsibility for your own emotions (leave out blaming and judgmental language). Let the other person know how you're feeling and what you need. This is what authentic self-responsibility looks like—knowing yourself well enough to recognize your limits and communicate them clearly, without projecting meaning onto the other person.
Right Relationship and Reciprocity
Relationships thrive when there's a natural give-and-take, a reciprocity that flows without rigid scorekeeping. This doesn't mean perfect balance in every moment, sometimes one person needs more, sometimes the other does. What matters is the overall pattern of mutual care and responsiveness over time.
In attachment research, secure attachment is characterized by representations of attachment security and consolidation of security-based strategies of affect regulation. These strategies are aimed at alleviating distress, forming comfortable, supportive intimate relationships, and increasing personal adjustment.
When someone is securely attached, they can both offer support and receive it. They can be vulnerable when needed and can hold space for another's vulnerability. They don't need to be perpetually strong or perpetually needy—they can flow between states as life requires.
Sue Johnson, founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy, spent her career demonstrating that secure connection is shaped by mutual emotional accessibility and responsiveness. This is the heart of the drama that plays out in the couple therapist's office. The fundamental question in any close relationship isn't "am I being too needy?" but rather "can I count on you to be there when I need you? Will you respond to me?"
Healing Happens in Relationship
This is perhaps the most important truth we need to reclaim: healing does not happen in isolation. We are wounded in relationships, and we heal in relationships.
Repeated experiences of a regulating other (even later in life) can potentially rewire right-brain networks for attachment, improving emotion regulation and lowering defensive alarm responses. This isn't about dependency, it's about the neuroplasticity of our attachment systems and the proven reality that connection changes our brains.
When we can show up for someone in distress, not to fix them, not to take on their problems as our own, but to be with them, we offer something medicine cannot provide. We offer regulated nervous system presence. We offer confirmation of their humanity. We offer the lived experience that they are not alone, and that their distress does not make them unlovable or too much.
Equally important: we need to learn how to receive this presence. To ask clearly for what we need. To recognize when we need support and to reach out without shame. To understand that asking for help isn't a sign of failure but rather evidence of self-awareness and trust in our relationships.
Walking Alongside Without Carrying
There's a meaningful distinction between walking alongside someone in their pain and trying to carry it for them. The first requires presence, groundedness in your own body, and the capacity to witness without needing to rescue. The second leads to resentment, burnout, and the collapse of the relationship.
Bowlby viewed attachment as a balancing act, children must be able to depend on their caregiver for emotional security but also develop the autonomy necessary to navigate the world and learn through exploration. This same balance applies in adult relationships. We need both secure connection and individual autonomy. Neither exists healthily without the other.
When we pathologize someone's need for support, we're essentially saying their attachment system, their biological wiring for connection, is wrong. When we refuse to acknowledge our own limits and try to be everything for someone, we're denying our own needs and setting up an unsustainable dynamic.
The middle path asks something difficult of us: it asks us to stay connected to ourselves while staying connected to another. To feel our own feelings while also being present to theirs. To know when we have capacity and when we don't, and to communicate this clearly and kindly.
The Practice of Being With
So what does this actually look like in practice?
It means when a friend is going through something hard, instead of immediately offering solutions or telling them to "just think positive," we might say: "That sounds really difficult. I'm here. What do you need right now?"
It means listening to the answer without making it a referendum on whether they're doing enough self-work.
It means recognizing when you don't have capacity and saying so clearly: "I can see you're struggling, and I want you to know I care. Right now I'm not in a place where I can hold this with you, but I'll check in tomorrow. Do you have someone else you can call tonight if you need to?"
It means not taking it personally when someone doesn't have capacity for us, their limits are information about them, not judgment about us.
It means examining the stories we tell ourselves about what someone else's distress means. When we find ourselves thinking "they're so needy" or "they never work on themselves," we can pause and ask: Is this actually true? Or am I uncomfortable with vulnerability, theirs or my own?
Community and the Collective Capacity to Hold
We need to expand our understanding of support beyond individual relationships. In many cultures and throughout most of human history, the burden of holding someone in distress was shared across an entire community. No single person was expected to be everything to another.
When we isolate our struggles to one or two relationships, we risk overwhelming those relationships. But when we cultivate a network of support—friends, family, community, therapy, spiritual practices—we create a web that can hold us without any single strand breaking.
This means normalizing reaching out. Asking for help from multiple sources. Building relationships in good times so there's a foundation when hard times come. It means being the kind of person others can come to, knowing that sometimes you'll be the one who needs holding.
The Invitation
What if, instead of asking people to manage their distress alone in the name of "self-responsibility," we learned to be with each other in distress with more skill, more presence, more groundedness?
What if we could hold both truths: that each person is responsible for their own healing journey and that healing happens in connection with others?
What if our boundaries could be information about our capacity rather than judgment about someone else's worth?
What if we remembered that needing others is not a failure but rather the fundamental design of human beings?
This is the invitation: to show up for each other with more nuance, more compassion, and more willingness to be with what is difficult without making it mean something wrong about anyone.
To hold our limits kindly. To ask for help bravely. To offer presence generously. To remember that we are all, always, works in progress—and that the work of being human is done together, not alone.
About the Author
Megan Colleen Johnson, MA, Associate Marriage and Family Therapist, AMFT #155314
Supervised by Jennifer Schilling, LPCC #1544
Employed by Walk Intuit Inc., San Juan Capistrano, CA
Important Disclaimers:
Educational Content Notice: This blog post is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute professional advice, psychotherapy services, or establish a therapeutic relationship. The content reflects general psychological concepts and is not tailored to any individual's specific circumstances.
Not a Substitute for Professional Care: If you are experiencing mental health concerns, please consult with a qualified licensed mental health professional. This content should not be used as a substitute for professional mental health treatment.
Dual Relationships Policy: To maintain appropriate therapeutic boundaries per California ethical codes, the author does not accept therapy clients as creative clients, or creative clients as therapy clients.
Professional Practice Boundaries: Megan Colleen Johnson is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist (AMFT #155314) under the supervision of Jennifer Schilling, LPCC #1544, and employed by Walk Intuit Inc. in San Juan Capistrano, CA. All therapy services are provided through Walk Intuit Inc. This blog content is personal educational writing and does not represent advertising or solicitation of therapy services.
Credential Verification: Credential information can be verified through the California Board of Behavioral Sciences at www.bbs.ca.gov.
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