Inside common therapy, there is a mindset of sharing all your problems and burdens with another person. There might be times and occasions where this could be beneficial. But the process of continually rehashing old wounds doesn’t bring the healing that we are looking for. It only brings the pain to the surface to be re-lived. As a coach, we take careful steps to remain inside a solution-based approach.

If you become a dump site for people, you begin to carry all the weight and pressure. Boundaries get skewed, and their issues become your issues. This will always happen if we allow ourselves to be a dump site for other people’s garbage.

Signs of over burden bearing…

● Enjoy hearing about the problem.

● Get excited when you start hearing all the juicy details.

● Experience stress and anxiety from carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders.

● Other people's problems become theirs.

● Becoming frustrated with your life when you have no reason to do so. 

● Consistently think you need to do more to help.

● Begin to take responsibility for others' actions.

● Begin to have excessive anxiety about what could take place in someone else's life.

4.) Being a validator of victimhood

We’re not there to nurse or rehearse the pain. Nursing the pain is providing the source for the pain to grow. Rehearsing the pain is being a sounding board for them to constantly rehearse the pain over and over again without being challenged.

We never remember events as they were, we only remember how they made us feel. As we experience the pain over and over, we attach more significance and feeling to the situation. This is how pain grows. Whatever we magnify gets bigger.

Victimhood looks like…

● Pointing the finger at someone else to evade responsibility.

● Failing to correlate decisions to consequences.

● Feeling like the world is out to get you.

● Don't feel like you have the power to change your problems.

● Feeling like your issues are unique and special in some way.

● Use substances to cope and withdraw from life issues.

● Make concerns much bigger than they are.

● Believe that you are always being targeted by someone.