Who picks up the bill?

Russ Hudson, co-author of The Wisdom of the Enneagram and co-founder of the Enneagram Institute, has talked about the benefits of of developing presence and self-awareness with a phrase which I think sums it up beautifully. He says that one of the benefits of doing deep inner work on ourselves and developing awareness - with the Enneagram or other self-development work - is that we 'don't make others pick up the bill for our suffering'.

Let's think about that because we live in a world where making others pick up the bill for our own suffering has become endemic. Something goes wrong and we immediately - and are encouraged to - find someone to blame. Or we feel hurt from our childhood, we feel under-appreciated at work or angry about something that has happened to us and we don't want to feel it (which is quite understandable) so we offload our unhappiness, our discontentment and our frustration onto others. We don't do it consciously of course but many of us do it subconsciously. In effect we get someone else to pick up the bill for our misfortune or our suffering.

Work on ourselves, amongst many other benefits, helps us to recognise what is our own 'stuff' to deal with and what isn't. And when it is ours, it helps us to look into it, come to terms with it and deal with it instead of making others suffer and thereby expecting them to pay for it.