Principle 5 - Responsibility as Empowerment

I will admit to getting frustrated when people say “You made me mad.” Or “He/She really pissed me off.” I get frustrated because it’s neither true, nor possible.

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, in real-life when something happens we don't like, even those who have an extensive history of personal growth experience, begin blaming something outside of themselves for what has happened.

Giving lip service a principles is not helpful. Sophisticated mental acrobatics or rationalizations to convince yourself and others that you are not responsible for what is happening isn’t helpful to you either.

Why? Because until you realize that you create your experience of your world, including every happiness and every 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. Good luck with that.

And you know, if you think about it, you have a much greater statistical chance of winning the lottery.

The truth is, you are responsible for every feeling or behavior 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 (see Principle 3).

This is very different from saying you are to blame for every feeling or behavior 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 at cause, you have power and can do something to change your experience of the situation to one that is happier and more peaceful. Things outside of you may be a stimulus or trigger (I’ll talk more about the term “trigger” in a minute) 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 high price. The price is that you will feel bad a great deal of the time. Or, you can choose to totally take responsibility for every feeling you have and every behavior 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 you are making a choice to feel something or to behave in a certain way, 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 behaviors that seem to come unbidden, automatically? Since for most people, even those who are "advanced" seekers of consciousness, the majority of feelings and behaviors fall into this category, this is a very important question.

First, you have to begin by accepting the main premise of this blog, that you ARE responsible for what ever feelings and behaviors you have, even if you cannot directly see how this could be so. Most feelings and behaviors that "happen" to you are conditioned responses, and somewhere, unconsciously, you have been conditioned 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. Then there may be a behavior you choose to deal with being angry.

It seems like these emotions are caused by the yelling. They are not. They are triggered by the yelling perhaps, these emotions are caused by the conditioned response set up in you by your past. Break the conditioned response and you might have a completely different feeling followed by a completely different behavior.

If the only yelling you had ever heard was Ricky yelling at Lucy or Fred at Ethel, you might have a conditioned response to laugh every time you heard yelling. Same yelling, different conditioning.

Therapists often describe this phenomenon of exhibiting a certain feeling as a conditioned response due to childhood trauma going into a regressed state. This means someone yells at you now, but you feel like a powerless child 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 something that is causing something and something that is triggering something?

This is important - If there is more than one possible response, if different people respond in different ways, 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 conditioned responses of the person being yelled at. Yelling is a trigger, not a cause.

Even though yelling may make you angry, just knowing that it is triggering some conditioned response in you is a start in taking responsibility for what is happening, and will move you toward being able to break the conditioned response and make a different choice.

There are many ways to become Conscious and break the chain of automatic conditioned responses, but that’s a subject for another blog. A good therapist can help, an NLP practitioner can help, a behavioral or transpersonal psychologist can help, even tools such as Anthony Robbins books and tapes can help.

Effective growth and change means to be moving toward the point where each response you have to each event in your world is a choice. This means you can choose to do what is most resourceful for you, what makes you happiest, most peaceful, and most productive. As personal growth mentor Hyrum Smith (he’s a cousin of Stephen Covey and his “Franklin Reality Model” is widely used in prisons) says, what “meets your needs over time”. As long as you are an automatic response mechanism, you cannot do this and you are at the whim of events and people around you, which would be find if everyone was normal and rational, like you. Fat chance of that!

Until you firmly acknowledge that every feeling and every behavior is coming from you, regardless of what stimuli are coming at you from the world, 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 do all of this so as to be the most resourceful human being you can be in any given moment, is one of the major components of freedom, and is very worth working toward.

One of the easiest techniques for developing a sense of this is to learn to use the "Witness" part of you that is able to objectively pay attention to everything without being emotionally involved. This is sometimes called expanded awareness, and it allows you to see your conditioned responses for what they are. I’ll talk more about this in another blog.

Our culture has gravitated toward the popularization 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.

At the same time, it is so easy to say "I can't do ____. I have (traumatic stress disorder, ADD, a cold, alcoholism, no money, don't read well, my father was distant, my mother was smothering, I grew up in the inner city, I grew up in the country, blah, blah, blah). In this popularization of victimhood, there is an underlying presupposition that it is somehow easier to be a victim, and that taking responsibility would be onerous, difficult, a struggle, too much work.

I am here to tell you that 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 behavior is the easy way to live. It is the way to happiness, to inner peace, and to a productive life. It is a way to end all the dramas in your life.

Consider it… you may not be able to change many circumstances in your life, but you can change your thinking about those circumstances to quote Robert Frost, “…and that has made all the difference.”