Owning Your Life — Self-responsible as compared to Blaming — Whole Being

---

Owning Your Life — We’ve been conditioned since birth to blame — to make others responsible for who and where we are, and to let ourselves off the hook. Self-responsibility is all about turning the light on your behaviours and understandings, and accepting that what you do and who you are is a solo act.

---

You’ve probably heard it a million times, but the word responsibility means “having the ability to respond.”

The idea behind respond­ing is this: as a stim­u­lus comes in, I have a small win­dow of choice, even if it is not appar­ent. With­in that win­dow are two options — I can react or I can respond.

Reactions are multiple

I was with a client, a guy I’d most­ly done Body­work with. We were talk­ing about an inci­dent at work. There was a guy he worked with who was quite vocal with smart remarks and cut­ting asides. My client did­n’t like being the brunt of the ver­biage, but learned, grow­ing up, to keep his mouth shut.

We had been talk­ing a lot about find­ing, and then hav­ing his feel­ings. He final­ly real­ized, as the guy was going at him, that he real­ly didn’t like the attacks. So, rather than stuff­ing his anger, he told the guy to stick it where the sun didn’t shine. 

This new approach worked; the guy left him alone (and didn’t speak to him) for a week.

I asked him, 

“So, what was it like to choose to strate­gi­cal­ly use an angry remark in order to see what results you’d get?”

He did what I think of as a “full shut-down” — he gave me a blank stare, then silence, while hold­ing his breath. Then, he said, 

“Wait a minute! I thought I was sup­posed to just let my emo­tions out! Now you’re telling me I’m sup­posed to think about it before I yell at someone?”

I said,

“I think that it might even be more com­pli­cat­ed than that. You might want to con­sid­er, most­ly, not yelling at all.”

He looked even more con­fused, and said, 

“This sounds like I’d have to be pay­ing atten­tion all the time, think­ing, mak­ing choic­es about how and what I’m say­ing and think­ing. I’m just learn­ing to let go, and now you’re talk­ing about more control.”

I agreed that I was saying something like that, but more like this:

“We all have feel­ings, and some­times peo­ple do stuff that we find objec­tion­able. There needs to be an out­let for the feel­ings, and we also have to con­sid­er what we are try­ing to accom­plish.
If the per­son is a col­league, or my part­ner or par­ent or kid, or an inti­mate friend, there might be more to it that just dump­ing our emo­tions all over the per­son and sit­u­a­tion.
Sel­dom does “let­ting it all hang out” accom­plish much more than con­tribut­ing to hard feel­ings. You might want to con­sid­er the dis­ci­pline of let­ting your emo­tions out at an inan­i­mate object, while learn­ing to be clear in your com­mu­ni­ca­tion about what is and is not accept­able to you.”

Admit­ted­ly, there’s a cer­tain charge to let­ting it all hang out - let­ting go of what­ev­er is inside, a free-flow­ing dump­ing of emotion.

The dump can be anger, or sar­casm, or self-right­eous­ness. It might be sad­ness or grief. 

Let’s look at where knee-jerk reac­tions come from.

From the time we were hatched, peo­ple have been say­ing, in our pres­ence, “You make me so ________ (fill in the blank.)” 

The idea is that some­one says or does some­thing, and I have no choice as to my reaction. 

I can’t tell you how many clients said, with a straight face, 

“I can’t help yelling at her. She makes me so angry. Besides, my father yelled at my moth­er,” or,
“Sure, I drink when I’m upset. Peo­ple should just stop piss­ing me off,” or,
“The only way I can get by is by being con­trol­ling. When peo­ple try to tell me what to do, I just have to stop them.”

This is what is called a con­di­tioned response.

Rat Lab 101 — how we get conditioned

In the lab, a rat press­es a but­ton and gets fed maybe 100 times. Then, the rat press­es a bar, and gets shocked. The rat quick­ly learns to always press the but­ton and avoid the bar. 

Clas­si­cal conditioning. 

The weird part — once the rat has learned the food pro­duc­ing behav­iour, it will con­tin­ue to press the but­ton, even after the food pel­lets stop com­ing. They’ll starve to death, press­ing the button.

Peo­ple react sim­i­lar­ly. Through some strange process, they devel­op a way of being that gets lousy results. 

• Either it worked ini­tial­ly (Whin­ing often gets kids lis­tened to — it‘s not so effec­tive for adults…) 
• Or, they might have seen mom or dad do it. 

The weird part — even though the behav­iour gets pre­dictably lousy results, peo­ple want to some­how repair the behav­iour, as opposed to devel­op­ing a new way of being and acting.

---

In most areas of our life, there is a pat­tern to our learn­ing, even if we’re not par­tic­u­lar­ly aware of it.

1. First, we learn to do what we do through rep­e­ti­tion, and then
2. through think­ing the process through, and then
3. through abstrac­tion. At this stage, we begin to see pat­terns emerg­ing, and can take what we’ve learned and shift it around — make it into some­thing more elegant.

I got a hunch that when it comes to our relationships, most people don’t get past repetition.

So, we blame, because that’s what our elders did to us. 

We blame because we can’t believe that life is real­ly all about me, as an indi­vid­ual, decid­ing (again and again and again!) what I’m going to do and how I’m going to live.

The self-respon­si­ble per­son engages with life. Dances with it. Sees it, and decides what to do next.

This requires pay­ing atten­tion, both to the choic­es avail­able, and to the results of each behav­iour. There are end­less choic­es avail­able to each of us, if only we will take the time to notice.

---