Responsibility as empowerment

Responsibility as empowerment versus victims of delusion (wresting satisfaction if only others would …)

Everyone who has been on a personal growth path for any length of time has been told that ‘you are the creator of your world’ or ‘you are not a victim’ or some variation thereof. Most would agree to both statements if asked. However, when in a real-life situation, where something happens we don’t like, even those who ‘have been meditating 75 years’ or ‘knew Werner Erhardt personally and helped design all his trainings’ or who claim to have taken every personal growth training and read every self-help book on Earth (twice), begin blaming something outside of themselves for what has happened.

Giving lip service to these principles is not going to be helpful to you. Intelligent and sophisticated sophistries to convince yourself and others that you are not responsible for what is happening are not going to help you, either.

Why? Because until you realise that you create your experience of your world, including all happiness and all suffering, you will be at the effect end of the cause-and-effect process. You, and your experience of life, will be controlled by, and at the whim of, whatever is happening around you. Your only chance for happiness will be to find perfect circumstances and to find a way to keep them that way

And you know, if you think about it, how likely that is.

The truth is, you are responsible for every feeling or behaviour you have, in the sense that it is either your chosen response to something that happens, or is an automatic unconscious response based on the way your internal map of reality has been structured.

This is very different from saying you are to blame for every feeling or behaviour you have. Taking personal responsibility is not about blame but rather about personal power. If someone or something outside of you is the cause of how you feel or behave, you are powerless—a victim. If you, or at least your unconscious processes, are the cause, you have power and can do something to change the situation to one that is happier and more peaceful. Things outside of you may be a stimulus for you, but how you respond comes from you, either consciously or unconsciously.

You can live in a world where other people or events ‘cause’ you to feel the way you feel, but there is a price. The price is that you will feel bad a great deal of the time. Or, you can choose to take total responsibility for every feeling you have and every behaviour you have. Having done so, you suddenly are at the ‘cause’ end of the cause-and-effect process, where you can choose how you feel and how you behave.

If what you feel and how you behave is a choice, you can, of course, just make the right choice: to feel something that feels good, or to behave in a way that has the greatest chance of having a good outcome. But what do you do with all those feelings and behaviours that seem to come unbidden, automatically? Since for most people, even those who are ‘advanced’ seekers, the majority of feelings and behaviours fall into this category, this is a very important question.

First, begin by accepting this main premise: that you are responsible for the feelings and behaviours you have—even if you cannot directly see how you are creating them. Most feelings and behaviours that ‘happen’ to you are conditioned responses, and somewhere, unconsciously, your internal map of reality tells you to feel or behave in a certain way when you are stimulated in a certain way. Perhaps when your father yelled at you as a child, you felt afraid, then angry. Once this has been set up as a conditioned response, like Pavlov’s dogs salivating when they heard the bell announcing dinner, someone yelling at you will cause you to become afraid and then angry, and then perhaps behave in a certain way.

It seems as if these emotions are caused by the yelling. They are not. They are triggered by the yelling perhaps, but they are caused by the conditioned response set up, by your past, in your internal map of reality. Change the parts of your internal map of reality that create this response and you could have a completely different feeling, followed by a completely different behaviour.

If the only yelling you had ever heard was Groucho yelling at Chico, you might have a conditioned response to laugh every time you heard yelling.

Therapists often describe the phenomenon of exhibiting a certain feeling as a conditioned response—due to childhood trauma—of going into a regressed state. This means someone yells at you now, but you feel like a powerless child, just as you did when your father yelled at you, even though you are now a much more powerful adult. Again, this is a conditioned response, and the yelling is not causing the feeling—it is merely triggering it.

How can you tell the difference between a cause and a trigger? If there is more than one possible response, if different people respond in different ways to the same stimulus, the stimulus is a trigger. If there is only one possible response, the stimulus is a cause. Pouring water over your head will get your head wet. The water causes the wetness. Everyone who has the water poured over their head will get wet. Yelling at someone could cause anger, laughter, disinterest, puzzlement, fear, or any number of other reactions, depending on the situation, and the way that person’s internal map of reality is structured. Yelling is a trigger, not a cause.

Even though yelling may result in some sort of uninvited feeling, just knowing that it is triggering a part of your internal map of reality, and that your internal map is generating your response, is a start in taking responsibility for what is happening. This will begin the process of changing your internal map of reality so you can make different choices.

The twelve steps are designed to help you make changes in your internal map of reality.

Your goal is for each response to each event to be a choice. This means you can choose what is most resourceful for you, what makes you happiest, most peaceful, and most successful, in the way you want. As long as you are an automatic response mechanism, with the part of you that generates your feelings and behaviours operating outside your awareness, you are at the whim of events and people around you.

But until you firmly acknowledge that every feeling and every behaviour is coming from you, regardless of what the world sends your way, you cannot make any progress toward this goal.

To be able to choose how to feel, to choose the state you are in at any given time, and to choose how you behave, and to be able to do all of this in the most resourceful way possible, is one of the major components of freedom, and is very worth working toward.

How does a twelve-step programme help this process? As you take the twelve steps, what was unconscious and out of awareness becomes increasingly conscious. Your conscious awareness of what you are doing, and why you are doing it, increases. The program develops a ‘witness’ part of you that is able to objectively pay attention to everything without being emotionally involved. This is what spiritual teachers mean when they speak of expanded awareness. Expanded awareness allows you to see your conditioned responses for what they are.

Our culture has gravitated toward the popularisation of victimhood over the past several decades. No one is responsible for anything that happens to them. Smokers are not responsible for getting lung cancer, shooters of guns are not responsible for firing them, burglars even sue homeowners for injuring themselves while breaking into a house. Criminals are not responsible for crimes they commit because they had an unhappy childhood, or were under the influence of drugs. Battering husbands (or wives) are not responsible for beating their spouses because the other made them angry, or did such and such to them. These are the more extreme cases, but you can, I’m sure, fill in the details from your own life, if you are honest.

A good sponsor will help by asking you to complete this sentence: ‘I can’t do ____’, to which one may reply with any number or variation of the following; I have traumatic stress disorder, ADHD, a cold, alcoholism, no money, or dyslexia; I had a distant father or a smothering mother; I grew up in the inner city; I grew up in the country, blah, blah, blah. In this popularisation of victimhood, there is an underlying presupposition that it is somehow easier to be a victim, that there is some benefit to not taking responsibility, that taking responsibility would be onerous, difficult, a struggle, too much work.

I want you to know that, without exception, it is being a victim that is onerous, difficult, a struggle, and too much work. Being responsible for everything that happens, and for every feeling and behaviour is the easy way to live. It is the way to happiness, inner peace, and a productive life. It is the sure way to end all the dramas in your life.

I highly recommend it.