The empowerment of taking responsibility
An owner's manual on suffering
Lately I have been reflecting on how easy (and how automatic) it is to blame.
There is a lightning switch that gets flipped when we feel uncomfortable sensations or experience negative emotions. As humans, we generally have a trained reflex to point to other people, to outside circumstances or situations, to or conditions of the world we live in, and make that bad person or that bad thing into the probable cause for our suffering.
But holding this perspective is exactly what keeps us trapped in a loop, repeating the same suffering over and over again. It is a victim mindset.
If our happiness or our peace requires someone else or something else to change, we have actually given our power away completely to the external world. There are a whole host of questions that we can be asking ourselves instead, in order to take our power back.
Am I outsourcing authority to another to avoid making my own decisions?
Am I waiting to be rescued because I don’t feel confident learning something new?
Am I being overly generous to another who feels a sense of entitlement?
Am I showing up as consistent support for another who is unreliable?
Am I spending lots of energy to share with another who cannot listen?
Am I highly invested in connections where my level of effort or care is not reciprocated?
Am I giving too many chances to another who lacks commitment to change?
Am I offering transparency to another who has hidden the truth from me?
Am I prioritizing time with another who does not treat my time as precious?
This is the only true power move: Taking that finger of blame, turning it around, and pointing it back to ourselves.
I am the one deciding what to do. I am the one choosing who to be with. I am the one setting and enforcing boundaries. I am the one moving through life, with more or less awareness, more or less self-love, and more or less self-respect. I am the one to point to.
We must be honest with ourselves about the role we played, to create or contribute to what is causing us pain. Freedom is the fruit, when we see what we’ve done. Because it’s only once we see what we’ve done that we can open to the possibility of doing things differently.
Perhaps it’s a bit easier to take back responsibility on the individual level. Okay maybe not easy. But possible. With enough self-awareness and forgiveness, we can do it.
It’s possible for us to see: it’s not our mother’s fault that we experience social anxiety. Maybe we were programmed that way because of her personality, but now that we recognize that pattern in ourselves, it is up to us to find healing.
It’s possible for us to see: it’s not our partner’s fault that we suffer bouts of jealousy and insecurity. Maybe we see the partner’s behaviors that trigger those feelings, but as an adult, we grow the capacity to manage our emotional reactivity and move to make requests to address our needs or set better boundaries.
On the collective level, taking responsibility requires a more radical way of perceiving reality.
We see corporate leaders, government officials, law enforcement, social media influencers and other public figures who are getting up to all kinds of crazy shenanigans. It’s possible that they are legitimately degenerate and doing horrible things to humankind and the planet. And also, the more visible a figure is, the bigger the screen they are for all our projections. Both of those things can be true at the same time.
We sit at home staring at screens and scrolling through media. We roll our eyes and sigh heavily, as we complain loudly about the state of the world. We spiral into some sort of despairing doomsday narrative. We’re f&%cked. The sky is falling. Humanity is done.
We think to ourselves, “The world is going to shit because of them. And there’s nothing that little old me can do about it.”
This is exactly the kind of learned helplessness that will end us.
It can require more mental gymnastics to take responsibility (and thus power) when we are trying to break free from the collective hallucination. I think it’s largely because our shared distortions are reinforced by many other points of collusion. But with respect to the dynamics of reclaiming our power, it works exactly the same way on the collective level as on the individual level.
In order to reclaim our personal power to effect change in the world, we have to own our contribution and embrace our responsibility.
We can bemoan government subsidies for unhealthy food, boons for weapons manufacturing, or the deterioration of public education. We can wag a finger at clothing manufacturing that creates microplastic pollution or complain about business practices that devastate ecosystems. We can march the streets to protest foreign policy that supports genocidal aggression.
All of that is entirely valid. It’s just not particularly useful, or empowered.
This is the self-responsible question to ask ourselves around everything we see as being wrong with the world: how have I consciously or unconsciously bought into this undesirable reality?
What consumer products have I purchased? What companies have I worked for? What kind of clothing have I been wearing? What kind of petrol-fueled vehicle have I been driving? What groceries are in my fridge? What organizations do I pay dues to?
These are uncomfortable questions to ask. Taking responsibility means a willingness to face uncomfortable questions and embrace uncomfortable changes. These changes will likely threaten our sense of security, and perhaps even our sense of identity. But it is critical that we confront these questions, and take action once we find out where we can make a difference. That is how “we the people” take our power back.
Image source: Sovereign Collective