I make myself sad with the rain
The power of taking responsibility through language
The therapeutic use of responsibility language—sometimes called percept language or ownership language—represents one of the most elegant interventions in humanistic and experiential psychotherapy. Though deceptively simple, this linguistic reframing carries profound implications about human agency, awareness, and the nature of psychological change.
The essential practice involves encouraging clients to shift from passive, objectifying language to active, owned statements. A therapist might invite a client to replace "it makes me anxious" with "I make myself anxious," or transform "I can't" into "I won't" or "I choose not to." and . What emerges from such shifts is not mere semantic adjustment but a fundamental repositioning of the person in relation to their own experience.
Fritz Perls developed what he called the "Language of Responsibility" as central to Gestalt therapy practice. The basic therapeutic sentence "Now I am aware" uses "I" deliberately as an antidote to "it"—developing the client's sense of responsibility for their feelings, thoughts, and symptoms. The "am" serves as an existential symbol, bringing whatever the person experiences into their sense of being and becoming.
John Weir, a clinical psychologist and friend of Carl Rogers who was part of the first generation of pioneering humanistic psychologists, developed this linguistic approach into what he termed "percept language." Working with his wife Joyce from the 1960s onwards, Weir's linguistic model went through several evolutions—variously called "transference language," "ownership language," and "responsibility language" before settling on "percept language" as most definitive.
Philip Mix, writing in The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science in 2006, observed that "no human development theorist-practitioner from the 1960s to the present has created as radical and powerful an instrument of personal authenticity, accountability, and self-empowerment as the Weirs' percept language." This acknowledgement came despite Weir remaining relatively obscure compared to contemporaries like Abraham Maslow and Rogers.
Weir traced his theoretical foundations to Gestalt psychology—specifically Koffka, Kluver, and Koehler—and was influenced by physicist John Wheeler's famous observation that "there is no out there out there." What we perceive as reality is just information that we imbue with entirely subjective meaning. Weir's linguistic model made clear that we are talking only about our perceptions of reality, not reality itself.
One of the subtlest aspects of Weir's work was his discouragement of the impersonal pronoun "it," replacing it with personal pronouns. "It scares me" becomes "I scare myself." "I can't bear it" becomes "I can't bear myself." He also advocated turning nouns and adjectives into verbs: "I am scared" becomes "I scare myself"; "you frustrate me" becomes "I frustrate myself." This elegantly simple shift removes the static, permanent quality implied by statements like "I am disappointed," replacing it with something active and changeable—if I am doing something to myself, I can stop doing it or do something different. As Mix noted, no theorist-practitioner has placed personal responsibility for one's own development so firmly at the core of their personal growth work as did the Weirs.
Perhaps the most radical element of percept language is Weir's distinction between "you" and "you-in-me." This formulation makes explicit when we are talking about another person versus our projection of that person. The implications are profound: when I say "I love you," I am actually describing my experience of my own perception, not making a statement about the other person. In percept language, this becomes "I love the you-in-me"—acknowledging that what I love is my construction, my image, my felt sense of the other person as they exist within my experience. As Weir explained, no other person ever truly tells us about us; they are always telling us about themselves—about their way of making sense of whatever is going on for them.
This may initially seem to diminish love's power, but perhaps it helps to find the opposite. By owning that my experience of you is mine, I stop demanding that you match my projections. I take responsibility for my feelings rather than making you responsible for them. The relationship becomes cleaner, freer of the burden of living up to another's image.
Within Gestalt therapy, James Kepner observed that our normal linguistic habits refer to bodily experience in object terms—as "it" instead of "I." This reifies the split between mental and physical experience. He advocated rephrasing statements to make body process personally and emotionally meaningful, referring to the client's experience as their experience, not as something happening to "the body." Importantly, Kepner cautioned this should not become mechanical—a rule to follow rather than a living practice.
The therapeutic value of responsibility language operates on several levels. First, it heightens awareness—when a client says "I am tensing my shoulders" rather than "my shoulders are tense," they become more immediately present to their process as something they are actively doing. Second, it clarifies the contact boundary, helping clients distinguish between what belongs to them and what belongs to others. Third, it opens the possibility of choice. When "I can't" becomes "I won't," the hidden decision embedded in apparent helplessness becomes visible.
More recently, the influential Gestalt therapist Gaie Houston has hyphenated the term as "response-ability" to emphasise its broader meaning—not guilt or blame, but the fundamental human capacity to own and respond to our experience.
The enduring value of responsibility language lies not in its technical application but in its philosophical stance: that human beings are neither determined machines nor passive victims of circumstance, but active, creative organisms continuously shaping their experience through how they speak, move, and relate. By attending to language, we attend to the subtle ways we give away our power—and in that attention lies the possibility of reclaiming it.
References
Houston, G. (2017). Response-ability. British Gestalt Journal, 26(1), 38-39.
Kepner, J. (1987). Body Process: A Gestalt Approach to Working with the Body in Psychotherapy. Gestalt Institute of Cleveland Press.
Mix, P.J. (2006). A Monumental Legacy: The Unique and Unheralded Contributions of John and Joyce Weir to the Human Development Field. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 42(3), 276-299.
More on John and Joyce Weir from the Be Conscious Now website
