The Pie Chart - Responsibility exercise is designed to guide clients through the process of clarifying and re-evaluating their responsibility for negative events.
Offers theory, guidance, and prompts for mental health professionals. Downloads are in Fillable PDF format where appropriate.
Includes client-friendly guidance. Downloads are in Fillable PDF format where appropriate.
Responsibility pie charts have been used in various clinical contexts. The Pie Chart – Responsibility exercise is designed to help clients clarify and reassess their responsibility for negative events. The goal is not to absolve clients of responsibility or diminish accountability when it is warranted, but rather to establish a more realistic and reasonable perspective.
Understanding and accurately distributing responsibility for negative events can significantly lessen emotional distress, particularly in trauma survivors.
To address guilt, shame, or self-blame linked to trauma.
To challenge clients' overestimation of their responsibility.
To reduce self-blame for negative social experiences.
Determine the event or outcome the client feels responsible for.
Assess the client's perceived degree of responsibility.
Identify all the contributing factors.
Use a pie chart to assign a percentage responsibility to each item.
Help the client reflect on the pie chart and its implications.
Re-rate the client’s perceived degree of responsibility after the exercise.
Feelings of guilt are often linked to the belief that one should have acted, thought, or felt differently. While guilt can be beneficial when it motivates pro-social behaviors like apologizing or making amends, it can also arise when individuals blame themselves inappropriately or feel overly responsible for events, particularly in the case of trauma survivors. However, feeling guilty does not always accurately reflect one's actual responsibility for a situation. Several cognitive biases can contribute to excessive guilt and lead to incorrect interpretations of events. These include hindsight bias, black-and-white thinking, and personalizing, where individuals mistakenly assume that negative situations or outcomes are related to them.
Regarding responsibility, certain cognitive processes can explain the excessive and inappropriate guilt observed in some clinical groups (Kubany & Watson, 2003; Young et al., 2021). For instance, individuals may overestimate their personal responsibility for negative events, underestimate the responsibility of others, or believe that negative outcomes were foreseeable and preventable.
To address the overestimation of responsibility, the use of pie charts has been described in various clinical reports. The Pie Chart – Responsibility exercise aims to help clients clarify and reassess their responsibility for negative events. The goal is not to absolve clients of legitimate responsibility or minimize accountability, but rather to foster a more reasonable, reality-based perspective (Scurfield, 1994).
