Self-responsibility can be a frightening concept to many people. It is dull, painful or has a prison-like response and we avoid everything about it…
Self-responsibility propels us outwards, creating a fragmented existence, as we would rather think about (or do) anything else but be with our wholehearted honest truth. An all-encompassing task, as we spend effort and energy fighting against the thing that is drawing our attention, seeking restitution. Finding opportunities to numb, avoid and deflect, yet it somehow still seems to seep into everything we do. It is as if the amount of energy it takes to blindly repress is ever greater than the energy of holding our fundamental truth. Energy is spent avoiding; addictions, over-aggrandised beliefs, deflecting, spinning new stories, vehemently holding onto out-dated versions of our history. What we are really avoiding is our fear of the consequences of responsibility and non-responsibility, of honesty, the original wounding, the ricochet of our authentic self in ‘favour’ of a facsimile.
The oxymoron is that avoidance of self-responsibility, fearing a loss of freedom can develop into a dreamlike, chaotic, unreal state of ‘being-avoidance’. Self-acceptance, taking self responsibility can be a pathway to recovery of self and therein lies personal freedom. The depth of knowing ourselves is the depth of knowing our ability to hold the truth.
Sitting down to write this blog, a heavy fugue like state weighed down. Seeking a point of stillness, the light, our attention was drawn to the compellers, the avoiders…the consequences of responsibility:
Blame is a creative displacement of responsibility // as is the shame felt at the jarring of our own integrity and of our expectations // the terror of the encounter and the defence against the encounter as reality hits. In order to stay oblivious, further rupture to self is incurred. Avoidance of truth, fearing it will hurt, we will once again be shamed is integral and locked into this isolated state of non-being. This indulgence is a crushing, breathless, sinking-feeling, where our incarnation becomes stagnant and in order to move away from the fear of annihilation from our own actions / inactions, we seek to point the finger at any one, any organisation, any society, any thing but ourselves and our part in it, in order to submit to our own lethargic lie. It is this very objectification that imposes an objectification of self that maintains the status, the denial of self, sustaining the toxicity of internalised shame.
The classic place to look at remedying this is in any one the various 12-step programmes, which start by acknowledging our inability to deal with anything, and our subsequent fear based controlling behaviour. They then entertain the idea of trust and faith, before guiding a personal and intimate look at all areas of our lives where we have avoided taking responsibility and the consequences, seek to encourage a view of the world where coming into relationship with the responsibility for our past brings us into a different relationship with present. In psychosynthesis, we work with identification, acceptance of ourselves and our responsibility, in order to disidentify from the sticky feelings that keep us locked away from authenticity and from our soul connection.
The flip side of the coin is martyrdom and aggrandisement when everything is our responsibility, which in turn dilutes the impact of what is truly ours – hiding our nugget in the mist of the all. Like hiding our golden coin in a wishing well. This ‘learned helplessness’ perpetuates the myth of the self as not good enough, the rupture of authenticity, as a way to avoid taking any responsibility, as the all-encompassing responsibility of dealing with everything is simply too much…after all, it is not our fault.
Working with our own and our clients narcissistic tendencies, can feel at times annihilating, as the extent to which we are allowed to survive in the room is called into question again and again through the painful process of soul recovery. Abandonment is a key moral under-tone. The room can fill with detachment, unreality, staleness, fury and at times we are given the ‘gift’ of feeling the feelings of the original rupture. We are called to model relationship, in a seemingly hostile environment where even relationship with self is called into question. With our head spinning, as we question the fabric of reality, re-experience the rawness, the excruciation, as our clients act out, using this as an expression, as a gift, in the only language that can tell us of their plight, we need to remain steady, committed to the most valuable work; the recovery of their very own connection to self and to recognise that fundamentally it is the evocation of their Will, their self responsibility that is the antidote.
The journey encompasses the unravelling of not feeling loved, of non-empathic mirroring, of annihilation, a lonely, bleak, arrogant or rage-full existence. Throughout this all, the only thing that we can do and be is hold a kindness in our honesty, a sense of our own boundaries and truthfulness, our own connection to self. To be kind to ourselves when the room is spinning and we lose the thread or when the toxicity of the furious attack seeps out, threatening to burn us. After all, this is a joint journey that we share…the recovery of our very own self and connection…in an act of service. A service that ripples through the generations, the family and it’s pre-imposed systems, the organisations that our clients work in and are impacted by and societal needs. Our therapeutic challenge is not about what we do or say, it is about what supports the client to remove or let go of, to reveal the original truth of the soul and to take responsibility for their free will. There-in lies acceptance and freedom.
Kim Shiller MSc, MBACP & Tara di Talamo MA, UKCP, AAMET
Tara is a trainer, supervisor, psychotherapist and training therapist working in private practice. Tara has a background at the Department of Health, and as a senior counsellor and manager of addictions treatment programmes for determinate and indeterminate prisoners using 12-step and transpersonal modalities.
Director of Training and Quality Assurance at Teens and Toddlers, Kim works educationally, transculturally, therapeutically, and in developing accessible curriculum and trainings, for groups, adults and young people in personal and professional development. Kim is also a group facilitator and trainer at the Psychosynthesis Trust and at WYSE, and a counsellor and psychological coach in private practice.
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