- If something affects you, bothers you, or creates problems for you, it’s yours to participate in fixing, even if you didn’t create it or it’s not “your” fault.
- Some of us are given the tremendous advantage of having the majority of our physical, social, emotional, and financial needs met from an early age. Most of us are not.
- When we don’t have those needs met it can effect our ability to trust, connect, hold boundaries, be vulnerable with others, and be in touch with our inner world in a productive way.
- Regardless, the accountability and responsibility lies within each of us to do what is in our power to move towards creating the life we want to have.
- For many of us that can mean “cleaning up” after early formative experiences you didn’t have control over, but that have shaped you into being a person who has developed dynamics or patterns that create problems in your life moving forward.
- Those dynamics and patterns become our responsibility to manage and deal with as we go through our lives, even if they were formed because of experiences we didn’t create
- Many of us can get stuck in the in-between of “it affected me” but “I didn’t cause it”, leaving us in a passive or helpless place wishing for someone else to “clean up”, “deal with”, or tolerate some dynamic within us.
- While, there is validity in the feelings of fear, anger, loss, and sadness that are tied to how unfair a situation may be, those feelings are your responsibility to work through so they don’t interfere with your ability to move towards creating the life you want to lead
- No one creates all of the problems in their life; regardless each of us is responsible for dealing with them anyways.
- With this mindset we can be the victim of something, but not a casualty of it
According to Dialectal Behavior Therapy we are ultimately the ones responsible for participating in our lives in a way that brings us meaning, joy, and satisfaction. Our ability to connect, relate, trust, share, hold boundaries, be vulnerable, and be productively connected to our thoughts and feelings is hugely shaped by our early relationships, relationships we have at a time when we don’t get to choose who we are around. For some of us, those relationships and that environment provide a ripe and fertile ground for healthy and safe development. Most of us, however, hit some “snags” along the way and struggle on some level with the dynamics just listed.
Those “snags” are our responsibility, even if we didn’t participate in creating them. For example, your difficulty with vulnerability becomes your responsibility, even if you were the victim of earlier experiences that made being vulnerable inaccessible.
DBT encourages each of us to hold our end goals, values, and priorities in mind, and to do what we need to – and can do (there will be limits here) to get ourselves in the life we want to lead. This does not mean “what happens” in your life is your sole responsibility. There are far too many external forces at play for that to be possible. What it does mean is the roadblocks you hit are yours to work through, regardless of how they got there.
For some of us we run into a thought traps around a fairness or a “who caused it” mindset. We can come to believe because a “mess” or “problem” in our life wasn’t created or initiated by us it isn’t our responsibility to participate in dealing with. We can get so focused on “who created it” or “how it got there” that we become distracted, helpless, and more focused on what is outside of our control (the choices someone else made) than what could be within our control (how we cope, manage, or can grow as a result of an experience).
There is validity in the unfairness or the bitterness felt around cleaning up a problem you didn’t create. Own, accept, process and work through those feelings rather than let them stop you from focusing on your growth and your goals.
Notes:
- This perspective would most certainly acknowledge that some of us have more work to do than others because of factors totally outside of our control. That’s unfair. But it’s reality, and for us to be able to have the life we want its our work to do.
- This does not mean there is no point to working to make the world and our society / culture a more fair place. What it does mean is that we don’t want the unfairness of something to create passivity in us that stops us in our tracks and strips us from working towards what is meaningful and important to us as individuals. What this principle says is that it may be unfair, but you are ultimately the one that suffers if you let that stop you or hold you back.
- This perspective would also not say that “if we are unhappy it is our fault”, however it would say if we are unhappy we want to be on the lookout for ways in which we may also be struggling with passivity or helplessness in certain areas that may be interfering with our ability to improve our circumstances. For some, a lot more energy is focused on “who started it”. While is helpless to bring insight and awareness into how something developed, if we stop there we are at a stalemate of helplessness.
- I can appreciate some may be reading this and thinking about it through the lens of community or systemic factors that have a huge impact on wellbeing (think gangs, gun violence, etc). This principle is much more about helping an individual challenge patterns of helplessness or passivity that may be keeping them stuck than it is about how to effect change on a much larger system (like a community). It is worth noting that the systems we are in have a huge impact on our wellbeing, happiness, and health and the more privilege we have the more able we are to minimize the impact of those systemic forces. If you read the post thinking more about larger systemic forces I’d encourage you to go back and re-read it through the lens of the individual.
- Unsure why you’d want to be in touch with your inner world? See this post on Emotional Blocking, and this post on how our emotions are like traffic signals.
- Helplessness and passivity are often NATURAL and HEALTHY reactions to environments where we don’t have control. If you struggle with these dynamics know that you may be applying a tactic that used to work in one life scenario in a way that no longer serves you. See Your Brain as An Association Machine for more information on how this can happen.
- Elements of this post may be confusing for someone that identifies as “co-dependent”, given the lack of clear boundaries I am describing. If this is you, think about this through the lens of how you can “fix” by focusing on what is within your internal world or scope of control rather than how you can “fix” by working to change another person.