Uncompromising Self-Responsibility
Life can be tough. For some of us, it takes awhile to encounter our first real trauma. For others, it happens as soon as we’re born. On top of - or underneath? - that is generational trauma, passed through our families, societies, ethnic groups, cultures, or ancestors, and felt by us on some level. And then there’s the general challenge of life on Earth, where trauma can be a discrete event or a daily existence. So yeah, life is hard, and it can be easy to ask “why me?" or play the victim card, to assign blame for our suffering to anything and everything outside of ourselves because there’s just so much out there to defeat us, crush us, beat us down and keep us stuck.
Before I continue, I want to tell you - and hope you believe me when I say - that your trauma is valid, your feelings are valid, and you are not alone.
The truth is that life without suffering doesn’t exist. Because we are alive in a world defined by uncertainty, and because human beings are inherently flawed and deeply imperfect, trauma is unavoidable. We will encounter hardship, loss, pain, seemingly impossible choices, unfairness, brutality, and eventually we will die. As they say, death and taxes. But that’s not all life is, and when we place ourselves in the role of the helpless victim, we severely hamper or even eliminate our ability to see and experience the other part of life. Most importantly, playing the victim card means that you’re giving up your power to choose. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy in which everything is traumatic and negative because the victim in you is expecting - looking for - opportunities to feel victimized. So you find them, everywhere, and soon that’s all there is.
Let me point out that this has nothing to do with deserving what’s coming to us; since trauma happens to everyone, either we all deserve to be traumatized - in which case we’re all in it together anyway, and the stuff you take so personally isn’t personal - or we need a different way of looking at it. Maybe both. This is also not a suggestion that everything that happens to you is your fault. Again, life is chaotic and sometimes shit just happens; also, people can be vile and cruel and abusive. In those cases, it might be personal, but it’s not personal to you, it’s personal to them. So, not your fault.
Blame is a victim’s weapon, whether wielded against the world or against oneself. When I start blaming, I give away my own twin powers of choice and discernment, and I make everything personal and therefore all about me. Unfortunately (for my ego), it’s not all about me, and so I have to reexamine my relationship to my own traumas, to my hard choices and challenges and the things about the world that I don’t like, that affect me but aren’t strictly about me.
Let me give you a personal example, and since PLAYfree looks at the world through the lens of sports, it’ll be a sports story: Anyone who used to play hoops with me back in the day knows that I did not have a good relationship with the referees. I took every call personally, collected technical fouls like a kid on an Easter egg hunt, and lost sleep over the unfairness of it all. I was playing Go Fish with a deck of 52 victim cards. And of course, underneath all my blaming was a level of self-criticism and “never enough” and perfectionism with which I know my athlete readers and friends are intimately familiar.
This behavior - this blaming - followed me into my coaching career, and what I didn’t understand at the time was that the refs weren’t the problem (even though sometimes they really were, come on). The problem was that each time I took a call personally, every time I blamed the refs (what game are you watching?!) or my teammates (just play some defense!) or the janitor (why is this gym floor always so dirty!?), I was missing the opportunity to learn something. I was keeping myself stuck in the cycle of my own trauma, my own victimhood, missing chance after chance to reclaim my own free will and actually grow. Missing chances to become a better player, better coach, better teammate, better person. Missing out on the joy of the game.
My sports story is relatively benign compared to the horrific experiences that some people - perhaps some of you - have lived through. However, the principle is the same. Whatever we are carrying with us or living through right now, the antithesis of the victim mentality is uncompromising self-responsibility.
Why uncompromising? Because the opportunity for growth lies in self-reflection and subsequent action based on what is within our power to affect or choose, and doing it once isn’t enough. Yes, we have all been and will again be traumatized. And yes, it can be hard to face. Self-responsibility does not mean that you’re responsible for fixing everything or doing everything yourself; it means that you are conscious about looking at, and taking responsibility for, the ways in which you participate in the cycle of your own behaviors, agreements, and choices. It means taking care of the changes that you can, one tiny forward step at a time, and asking for help with the rest (hello, therapy!).
Self-responsibility also means recognizing your tendency to blame, to self-center, to “other,” to over-dramatize, to blow out of proportion, to take personally. Self-responsibility is not a one-time thing, but rather a continual choice, reinforced by a healthy dose of self-compassion and patience, and supported by the people you can trust to love you and hold you accountable.
It can be easy - and even useful, as an initial decentering tool - to look at my struggles and suffering and say, “so what?” But after that, in order to act, I have to take mindful, conscious stock of my situation, determine what is within my control, and ask a different question:
“Now what?”