Taking Ownership - You Can’t Change What Happened, But You Can Change What Happens Next

One of the things I talk about quite a lot with clients is ownership. Not blame, not guilt, and not pretending that everything that happens to us is somehow our responsibility. In fact, very often the opposite is true. Something has happened because of somebody else, because of a situation we did not create, because somebody treated us badly, let us down, crossed a boundary, made a poor decision or put us in a position we did not ask to be in. It is important to be really clear about that because taking ownership does not mean saying, “This was my fault.” Sometimes it absolutely was not. What it does mean is recognising that however unfair the original situation was, we are the person now left carrying the impact of it, and because we are carrying it, we are also the only person who can really decide what happens next.

Someone else may be responsible for what happened, but we still have to take responsibility for what we do with it. That distinction is important because if we stay completely focused on the person who caused the problem, our recovery can become dependent on them changing. We might think, “If they had not done that, I would not feel like this,” and that may be completely true. We might think they should apologise, they should understand, they should behave differently, they should recognise the impact they have had. Again, all of that may be true. The difficulty is that our wellbeing then starts to depend on somebody else doing something. If they never apologise, never understand or never change, we can end up emotionally waiting for them before we allow ourselves to move on.

This is where ownership becomes so important for me because it is really about taking back control. If somebody has treated us badly, taking ownership does not excuse them. It does not make what they did acceptable and it does not mean we minimise it. It means we decide they are not also going to control what happens to us afterwards. We can acknowledge that something should not have happened and still ask ourselves what we need now. We can recognise that somebody else was wrong and still decide what we are going to do differently so that the situation has less power over us. I think people sometimes hear the phrase “taking ownership” and assume it means accepting responsibility for the original problem, but that is not what I mean at all. I mean taking ownership of the next bit. What do we do now? What needs to change? What do we need to stop carrying? What do we need to put in place so that either the same thing is less likely to happen again, or if it does happen, we are better able to deal with it? That is a very different thing from blame. Blame looks backwards. Ownership is much more about what we do from here.

It is very easy to remain focused on the unfairness of what happened. In fact, sometimes that feels safer because if somebody else caused the problem, then the problem sits outside us and we do not have to look at what we might need to change. We can say, quite reasonably, “This was done to me.” And sometimes that is exactly true. The difficulty comes when that becomes the place we stay. People sometimes talk about “playing the victim”, and I think that phrase can be unhelpful if it is used carelessly because somebody may genuinely have been the victim of another person’s behaviour. The more useful question is whether they remain stuck in a position where their future wellbeing is still dependent on the person who hurt them. We can have been wronged and still choose not to remain psychologically tied to the person who did it. We can say, “This happened to me. I did not ask for it. I did not cause it. But I do not want it to keep deciding how I feel tomorrow.” That, to me, is ownership.

Sometimes taking ownership means changing practical things. We might need better boundaries. We might need to stop giving somebody so many opportunities to disappoint us. We might need to say no more often, reduce contact, ask for help sooner, raise a concern, leave a situation, or simply become clearer about what we will and will not accept. We may need to notice warning signs earlier rather than telling ourselves things will probably improve. None of that means saying, “I should have known better.” It means saying, “I know more now than I did then, so I can use that information.” That is an important difference because the first version creates guilt and the second creates agency. If somebody has behaved badly towards us, we do not need to take responsibility for their behaviour, but we can take responsibility for the access we continue to give them to us. Sometimes the biggest change is not getting another person to behave differently. It is changing what we are prepared to tolerate, what we engage with and how much emotional space we allow them to occupy.

There are also plenty of situations where we cannot actually change what is happening around us. Somebody may still work with us. A family member may still be difficult. A neighbour may still behave in the same way. An organisation may still frustrate us. A past event cannot be undone. In those circumstances, ownership becomes less about changing the situation and more about changing how we deal with it. I think that is one of the most important things to understand. We spend enormous amounts of energy trying to change people and circumstances we do not control. We want somebody to think differently, communicate better, recognise their behaviour, become more reasonable or finally see things from our point of view. Sometimes they will. Quite often they will not. If our calm depends on them becoming different, then we are still giving them control. The shift comes when we start asking, “What can I change about my own response?” That might mean not engaging in the same argument. It might mean ending a conversation when it is going nowhere. It might mean no longer looking for validation from someone who repeatedly refuses to give it. It might mean changing our expectations and accepting that another person is who they are, even if we do not particularly like it. The situation may remain broadly the same, but our experience of it can become very different.

I think one of the hardest parts of moving on is that we often want things to be put right in a very particular way. We want fairness. We want acknowledgement. We want somebody to admit what they did. We want the apology. We want them to understand how much they hurt us. That is completely human, but sometimes waiting for those things keeps us connected to the very situation we are trying to leave behind. We can be completely right about what happened and still be stuck. We can deserve an apology and still decide to move on without one. We can wish somebody had behaved differently and still accept that they did not. Acceptance is important here, but acceptance is not approval. Accepting that something happened does not mean saying it was okay. It simply means we stop arguing with the fact that it happened. We stop mentally trying to rewrite the past. We stop putting so much energy into “This should not have happened,” because however true that statement is, saying it again and again cannot make the event unhappen. At some point, the more useful questions become, “What does this mean for me now? What have I learned? What do I need to change? What boundary needs to be stronger? What can I stop carrying?” Those questions give us somewhere to go.

This becomes particularly important with things that happened a long time ago. Sometimes there is nothing left to change externally. The event is over. The person may no longer be in our life. There may be no conversation left to have and no practical action left to take, yet we can still be carrying the emotional impact as though it happened yesterday. This is where ownership can feel difficult because there is nobody left to confront and nothing left to fix. The only thing we can change is what we continue to do with the memory. That does not mean pretending it did not matter. It means recognising the difference between remembering something and rehearsing it. The brain learns through repetition, so if we repeatedly revisit the same event, replay the same conversation and generate the same anger, sadness or hurt, we keep that pathway active. The event may be years old, but the emotional response can remain very current because we keep practising it. At some stage, moving on means reducing that practice. We can still remember what happened, but we do not need to give it a daily role in our life.

I am also interested in what we can learn from our own patterns, and again this has nothing to do with blaming ourselves for what somebody else did. It is about protecting ourselves better in the future. Perhaps we avoid difficult conversations until things become unbearable. Perhaps we agree to things we do not want to do because saying no feels uncomfortable. Perhaps we ignore our instincts because we do not want to upset somebody. Perhaps we keep giving another chance because we hope things will be different this time. Perhaps we tolerate behaviour for much longer than we should because we have become used to it. Looking at those patterns can be uncomfortable, but it is also where some of the biggest change can happen. There is a huge difference between saying, “It was my fault they treated me badly,” and saying, “Next time I notice those signs, I am going to respond sooner.” One keeps us in guilt. The other gives us something useful to work with.

For me, taking ownership is also about reducing the size of the problem in our own mind. When something difficult happens, especially something involving another person, it can expand very quickly. It becomes the first thing we think about in the morning, the thing we talk about repeatedly, the thing we revisit in the car, in the shower, when we are trying to sleep. One issue starts to colour everything else. We may not be able to change the original event, but we can stop feeding it until it takes up less space. We can choose when we engage with it. We can decide how much time we give it. We can put other things back into our life. We can stop allowing one person or one experience to become the lens through which we see everything else. Eventually, something that once felt enormous can become something that happened. It becomes part of our story rather than the whole story.

That is really what I mean when I talk about ownership. It is not about changing the past and it is not about taking responsibility for somebody else’s behaviour. It is about recognising that if something has happened to us, however unfairly, we are the person who has to decide what happens next. We can change the boundaries. We can change the access. We can change the way we respond. We can change the meaning we continue to attach to it. We can stop waiting for somebody else to make it right before we allow ourselves to feel better. Sometimes we cannot change the situation at all, but we can still change how we deal with the situation, and that can completely alter its impact on us.

There is a lot of power in being able to say, “That happened to me. I did not choose it. I may not have caused it. I cannot change what they did. But I can decide what I do now.” Once we get to that point, we are no longer waiting for somebody else to give us permission to move on. We start making changes that protect us, we recognise patterns earlier, we deal with things more effectively and we stop handing another person responsibility for our future. We may never be able to right the original wrong, but we can right things for ourselves. And sometimes that is the most important part of moving forward.