About Guilt And Responsibility

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

About guilt and responsibility

One of the most popular topics for online disputes regarding counseling and crisis assistance is the topic of shifting responsibility. "My psychologist says my parents are to blame for everything." "Psychotherapists teach to shift responsibility for their actions to others." "The victim must take responsibility for the violence." All these are conversations beyond the brink of incompetence, in my opinion, because they radically mix two very important, but almost opposite concepts: guilt and responsibility.

"Who's guilty?" and "What to do?" - not just two different novels of Russian literature, but also two fundamentally different ideologies. And the goal of psychotherapy is not to find out who is to blame, not to relieve your anxiety by looking for cause-and-effect relationships ("oh, is it because of your partner? Well then, okay …" hitting them - with the possibility of a successful exit with minimal losses. So, guilt is about who is to blame. And responsibility is, first of all, about what to do. place to place like a brick) will not help, but self-accusation will not help either.

Why does the topic of guilt come up so often in psychotherapy? In many ways, this is how our culture works. The human brain is sharpened to look for causal relationships and explanations of any events, meaninglessness and lack of internal logic in processes cause unbearable anxiety in an unprepared person. That is why we are so traumatized by disasters, sudden accidents, illnesses with an incomprehensible genesis: we want to know why, for what, for what. In addition, our culture is characterized by the myth of crime and punishment, that every event is caused by one or another of our actions, that no trouble happens just like that - this reinforces one of our most important psychological defenses, faith in a just world, where everyone is rewarded what they deserve and bad things happen only to those who deserve it.

Finding the causes and the guilty ones eases the experience of pain or grief, reduces the level of anxiety (though not effectively, not for a long time). Remember how many people, starting to sneeze, begin to thoroughly find out which of their acquaintances could infect ("and Tanya looked with a cold, but still came to work"), where the window could not be closed, where and what they could "pick up" - and this sometimes takes more energy than treatment or finding an adequate doctor.

When something unpleasant and incomprehensible happens in the life of a young child, he most often blames himself, because blaming the parents means getting angry with them, becoming bad, losing the chance for love. If there is an opportunity to blame a stranger and an unnecessary person, he can become the object of anger application, but more often the anger is transformed into a feeling of guilt (if this happened to me, but I am bad) and auto-aggression. The same thing happens with adults who are faced with the unsightly sides of their lives - either they need someone to be angry with, or the person goes into self-flagellation. By the way, there is no smell of responsibility here.

The search for the causes, roots of the state is one of the important components of psychotherapeutic work. But this is not done to find the culprit. And in order to solve the problem. If the reason for your fear today is parental abuse, it is important for us to understand this in order to help heal the inner traumatized child, get rid of toxic feelings towards parents, stop following the programs of emotional reactions inherent in childhood, and not so that someone accuse. Clients often respond to the search for causes or initial trauma precisely as an attempt to blame, therefore they actively defend those who participated in the formation of the trauma. But here it is important to understand that everyone has their own story, and the fact that the conditional "aggressor" had his own reasons for such behavior does not change the feelings of the conditional victim, who can still get angry, offended, afraid - and it is with these feelings that you will have to work (and not with a rational explanation of the reasons for this or that behavior). If your psychologist says that your problem is related to the traumatic behavior of your mother or father in your childhood, this does not mean that your mom or dad was bad - it means that you were traumatized, that you felt bad, and this must be lived through. And to live is to regain the right to experience the whole gamut of feelings about this, without rationalizations, excuses, smoothing corners. And this is what is called "taking responsibility" - in this case, responsibility for your feelings and the behavior dictated by them, and not for the situation as a whole and not for the behavior of someone else in this situation. The same is with the consequences of your own actions - sometimes you need to understand the “mechanics” of the situation, in order to get into it more, but not in order to make sure that you are to blame.

The same confusion occurs when dealing with people in crisis and with victims of violence. Some of the “specialists”, knowing how painfully pathological the state of learned helplessness is and how powerlessness traumatizes, insist on the need to take responsibility for what is happening - which for the “victim” sounds like an attempt to shift the blame onto her (and for some psychologists, not only sounds, but it is such an attempt, because it protects the specialist himself from the unpleasant thought that trouble can happen to everyone and it is impossible to insure against it, and no correct behavior or "positive thinking" will save you from a catastrophe). Another part of specialists support the helplessness and powerlessness of the conditional victim, thus trying to show that they are on her side. Both of these approaches are ineffective, distort the perception of reality, complicate the way out of the crisis. And both serve the defense mechanisms and fears of the psychologist himself rather than the needs of the client.

So, responsibility is the willingness to make choices and face the consequences. Guilt is a destructive feeling that only leads to increased symptoms, self-flagellation, and auto-aggression. Responsibility is about rights, including the right to feeling, to anger, to pain, to self-pity, and also to self-defense, to defense. And also - on mistakes, on impulsive actions, on behavior dictated by trauma. And guilt is about the inability to forgive oneself for certain actions, about irreversibility, about the inability to defend oneself.

Even if you injured yourself an arm or a leg because you ran carelessly, you still have the right to pain and pity, instead of being accused of “doing it right”. Even if you find yourself in an unpleasant situation because of your mistake, this does not mean that you do not deserve help. In general, it is absolutely unimportant what caused your pain - you have the right to feel it, try to soften or heal it, get angry, grieve, take offense - and the search for the guilty or the acceptance of the guilt on yourself only blocks these natural feelings.

And finally:

What a person is responsible for:

- for their own experiences

- for their elections

- for their actions

(and responsibility here is not equal to "guilt", sometimes it is important to admit that you had no other choice, or in the current situation, this behavior was optimal for survival, and even if this is not so, you are responsible for your actions, but are not to blame for them_

For which no person can and should not be held responsible:

- for other people's emotions and experiences

- for other people's actions

- for the behavior of other people

It is impossible to bear responsibility for aggression or violence against you, even if this aggression arose after certain actions on your part - it was not you who caused it, this is the reaction of another person to your actions, and in addition to your behavior there are many factors that cause this aggression (the mental state of the aggressor, his own fantasies and projections, his ways of interpreting your actions, his behavioral habits, how he responds, and so on - and he is responsible for them).

In addition, there is responsibility due to the nature of the relationship, always limited by the type of "contract" that regulates these relations (even if the contract is unwritten) or the degree of dependence of the participants on each other. This is, first of all, the responsibility of parents to children (and there are limitations here), because children are dependent on adults, because they are emotionally less mature, because decisions are made by adults, and so on. This is precisely the responsibility, and it is important not to confuse it with a sense of guilt. If the actions and behavior of the mother reflect badly on the child, it is important to accept this and try to act differently or try to correct the situation, change the behavior, and not go into self-flagellation like "I am a bad mother." Similarly, the concept of responsibility in all types of relationships that imply inequality of responsibility (doctor-patient, therapist-client, teacher-student, etc.) is worth - the one with more power, knowledge, information or rights bears more responsibility, but this does not mean that only he is to blame for everything.

In psychotherapy, the expression “return responsibility” is popular, but, unfortunately, it is often interpreted as “hanging guilt”. Taking responsibility for your life is, first of all, recognizing its right to live, to make certain choices, not to be afraid of censure and accusations, not to be afraid to change an unpleasant situation, to leave unbearable circumstances and relationships. And to admit your own limitations: to admit that in some situations you could not or cannot make a choice, that everyone sometimes makes mistakes, that sometimes our behavior is dictated by our pain and neuroses, and this is also a component of survival.

When “responsibility” turns into a “whipping stick” for the victim, we are dealing with the self-defense of potential aggressors or with the defense of those who believe that nothing bad will happen to them and that they always do the right thing. And now this already borders on violence, on "finishing off" the sufferer - and does not give any healing.