In the last part we looked at what it might be like to take the path of Personal Responsibility, as described by Marshall Rosenburg. It’s a hard road because on it, in a very real sense, we’re left with “no-one else to blame” but ourselves. In fact, during my struggle with exactly this fact, I began to understand that thinking in terms of “fault” and “blame” is not only inaccurate, as Rosenburg suggests, but also really unhelpful in the pursuit of happiness.
Unlucky for me, there was a big old mountain to climb before I could see it:
2. Acknowledge Your Past
If you’re anything like me, pretty soon after you start trying to take responsibility for your thoughts, feelings and actions, one of two things will happen.
- You’ll become angry and try extra hard to blame or find fault with people and things outside you.
- You’ll become depressed, anxious and unhappy because you start to blame or find fault with yourself.
If you’re really lucky, you’ll get both at the same time!
We’re all carrying pain in our past. If nothing else, the violence of being born is something. But for most of us, painful memories and experiences from later in our lives are there as well.
As children we learn to deal with the insults and beat-downs we receive, the times when we’re ignored or half listened-to, the injustices we face. Some of them are small, others much larger. In all cases, the flexibility of our brains allows us to develop strategies to cope without needing to think about it.
As I child I learned these four things:
- Intellectualisation – I read as much as I could about human motivation and behaviour, trying to understand why the people around me were doing things that hurt so much.
- Distraction – I kept myself as busy as I could, no matter how. This had the bonus that, when things I did were judged by others to be “worthwhile” I could get a self-esteem boost from their approval.
- False Humour – when people would call me names at school, I’d go along with it, agreeing with them and laughing, for example. Later I invented an extroverted, upbeat “camp” persona. Later still, I acted cool, happy and relaxed, even when I was dying inside.
- Externalisation – I made it my mission to root out injustice, finding elements of culture, politics or public life that I didn’t like, and constructing violent arguments against them.
These reflexes of thought and action really work! That’s why they exist in the first place: Encoded in the synapses of the brain, a pattern gets stronger each time it helps us to avoid pain or find pleasure. If a strategy doesn’t work, it’s soon replaced by one that does. By the time we reach adulthood, we’ve “got it figured out” and in time our strategies get so ingrained, so automatic that we think of them as “just the way I am”.
When we try and unravel the past, and to be accurate about what’s driving our thoughts, feelings and actions in the present, massive alarm bells start to ring. As far as our brains are concerned, nothing much has changed: We’re still vulnerable children in a confusing, possibly hostile world, and we need these defenses there to keep us safe.
For me it was definitely like this: each time I’d try to look at a painful memory or experience, it was as if I was hanging from a crane 50m in the air by a single thread, and some kind of gremlin was approaching with a pair of scissors. Very frightening, very hard to think rationally, and even harder to remain there, given any choice at all.
And what’s the point? You might well ask. Why dig up the past in the first place?
“…it was as if I was hanging from a crane 50m in the air by a single thread, and some kind of gremlin was approaching with a pair of scissors.”
The only answer I can really give is that “I had to”: Once I stopped blaming others and gave space to personal responsibility, I realised that these old patterns of behaviour were so powerful, so pervasive, that it was “them”, not “me”, if you like, that was running the show. I saw that I had no idea at all who I was or what I really wanted, and I needed to find out.
It wasn’t, and still isn’t easy. In many ways, the hardest thing to do is the simplest: to observe without judgement.
So often, after something had gone wrong, perhaps, I’d ask myself the question: “What am I feeling?”, “Why did I just say that?”, “What am I bringing to the table”, and a flood of judgement, criticism, blame, anger, fear, boredom or fatigue would bury me. I started crying all the time, became needy, paranoid and volatile, as if the last thing on earth I should do was carry on…
Part 3: Connect
If you’re touched by any of this, have gone through or are going through anything that feels similar, I’d really love to hear from you, especially if you’re a guy. Click below to tweet at me, leave a comment, or DM me here, I promise to get back to you.
Cover image via PxHere under creative commons license.
ShoalBehaviour 