“BEING & CARING, A PSYCHOLOGY FOR LIVING” by Victor Daniels and Laurence J. Horowitz, 1976, 1984
Highlights from the book chosen by The Happy President.
CHAPTER FIVE: CHOICE AND RESPONSIBILITY
When I pay attention to how my actions affect other people, I open the door to making the world around me more agreeable and a little more benevolently disposed toward me.
Each of us is touched by the effects of almost everything we do. We create a web of opportunities and obstacles for ourselves. Our temperaments, early learnings, and environments provide materials, but we ourselves are the architects, general contractors, carpenters, and stonemasons of our lives. We choose what to build and how to build it – as local representatives of the Karmic Construction Company.
RESPONSIBILITY AND SELF-SUPPORT
Ordinarily the word responsibility is synonymous with “accountability.” But there’s another equally important meaning. Perls separates the word into two parts: response-ability. In this often forgotten dimension, it means the ability to respond, to be alive, to feel, to be sensitive. It doesn’t just mean “obligations” or “duty” – especially not in the sense of something I’ve been directed to do without involvement, so that I do it automatically, without thinking – like a robot rather than a person. Growth in these terms is a move from letting others be responsible for me to taking responsibility for myself.
A relationship is enriching and satisfying when both people share the responsibility for clearly stating what they want and sharing what they have to give. Keeping a person dependent can cause hostility.
When I assign the cause of my behavior to you, to my “unconscious,” to my parents or my past, I make it difficult for me to change. I f my parents did it to me, they’re the ones who must undo it if it’s to be undone. If they’re gone out of my life, presumably I’m stuck with what they did: “It’s all their fault.”
Recognizing my responsibility for myself doesn’t mean I have to give up being any way I am, or doing anything I do. It does mean that I need to stop believing that I act in these ways only because of my ancient history. Each day I choose to act in the ways I do.
Responsibility and Authenticity
Responsibility and freedom are related to self-determination and authenticity. I can be authentic only to the degree that I make my own choices about who I am and what I do = including choosing those times when I’m willing to go along with what others want for me.
“What is not possible is not to choose…If I do not choose, I am still choosing.” Sartre.
To forget that I discover, create, and maintain the conditions of my life leads to alienation – the feeling that I have no control over my own destiny, that I”ma pawn moved by the hands of the unseen “They” who sit in seats of power. But as I regain my sense of being the doer, the thinker, the feeler, my life becomes my own and I reclaim the power that is rightfully my own.
The Effects of Our Social Environments
Each of us is born in a historical period, a race, a culture, a rich family or a poor one, and a neighborhood. No matter what personal transformations we undergo, these elements are part of our personal history.
But there is a difference between speaking of responsibility for our life situation and responsibility for how we are in our life situation. I have a choice about how I wish to be in that situation. Within the limits set by my environment, I can choose how I let the forces around me influence me. Deliberately or by default, I can select the way I am wherever I am.
Next time you watch TV, be sensitive to how the program or commercial manipulates your thoughts and feelings. Much of that is intentional, with objectives different from your own. You’re making all those things you watch, read, and listen to part of your existence. With them, and with other places where you spend your time, you can ask yourself “Do I want to make that part of me?” This question has both a personal and a political aspect: “How am I affected by my environment?” and “What’s in it for my environment to have me accept the messages it’s giving me?”
Many of our social institutions seem to want me to be available for ready manipulation. If I feel inadequate about making my own decisions, I give up my power, my responsibility, and my right to define who I am to big business, the media, government agencies, and other influential groups. As I discover how my social environment wants me to be, and why, I can more wisely choose with of its elements I want to incorporate into my life and which I don’t.
ACTIONS AND EXPERIENCE
To others, I am what I do and say. My acts, and how others view them, define me in my world. To myself, I am also what I think and feel – my intentions and urges that determine my actions.
I Am What I Do
Jean-Paul Sartre’s distinction between an action and an attribute. “Six feet tallness” and “tableness” are attributes. They can’t be changed. “Bravery” is different. It’s based on actions. There’s no such thing as a “brave man,” declares Sartre. If a man usually acts bravely, that’s all we can say. To others, his acts define him: “Man is…nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life.”
I choose how I want to be. My authenticity depends on it. I create ways of thinking and feeling about myself. No matter how I may claim that my deeds don’t represent me, in fact they do. Though I may claim that I can’t act otherwise, in fact I can.
I Am What I Experience
To hear from you how your world is for you can be very different from defining how you are in my terms. Such a knowing opens dialogue and provides new access to each other.
Both our observable actions and our inner experiences are related to other currents in our personalities, conscious and unconscious, to which we now turn.
Intention and Volition
With our intentions we formulate our values, construct our behavior, and define our ways of approaching or withdrawing to get or be what we want. In their theory of positive intent, Luthman and Kirshenbaum point to a deep level of intentionality in which we want to be secure, to feel good, to love and be loved, and to express ourselves in our own ways.
It’s useful to distinguish the act of forming an intention from the act of carrying it out. How commonly we say of someone, “He has good intentions, but…” So I define intention as conceiving of, at some level of awareness, what I wish to do; and volition as mobilizing the energy to carry out an intention and doing so.
Unconscious Choices and Intentions
When my intentions and volitions derive from a fuller dialogue with myself, I’m less likely to do things today that I’ll regret tomorrow. I’m more likely to do things that in accord with my own nature – and that are responsive to the needs of others in my world. Then my subconscious me and my conscious me start to talk to each other, get along better, and use each other’s resources.
WHAT’S DONE TO ME AND WHAT I DO
Do you promise yourself that “someday” you’ll work on things you need to work on in your life? Do you expect someone else – a psychologist, social worker, friend, or minister – to solve your problems for you? Do you let the expectations of people in your past define what you can and can’t do for yourself today?
What do you need to do to be good to yourself? How do you avoid asking yourself that question? Once you’ve asked it, how do you answer? By avoidance, or by doing something for yourself? How is avoidance a way of doing something for yourself?
When I trace my problems back to their source, it almost always turns out that, in some way, I chose them. If I apologize for being alive, people will treat me as though I have no right to be here. And if I ask for something as though I don’t expect to get it, the chances are I won’t.
The way I ask a question tells the other person what kind of answer I expect. I can ask for something in a way that makes it easy to reply.
In my daily life, I can give myself at least as much consideration as I give others. I don’t have to set myself up to be a victim.
Whatever I’m doing, I’m creating a whole mood, whether it be a vigorous, lively one, or a shoulder-slumping droopiness. If I look pugnacious, I’ll probably intimidate some people and get into fights with others. If I come on like a doormat, I’m likely to get walked on. My way of presenting myself crates the context for my relationships.
Blaming Others
How often and how automatically many of us place responsibility outside ourselves when something goes wrong: “It wasn’t my fault!” “I couldn’t help it!” Democrats and Republicans do it all the time.
As long as I defend where you attack and blame, you control the action. I’m on the defensive. But I can protect myself against your blaming, and others’, by remembering that I am not obliged to accept anyone else’s evaluation of me. As counselor Norman Brice points out, When I depend on what others think of me, I’m vulnerable to being made to feel bad by every ill-dispositioned person I happen to meet. “There are few of us,” says Brice, “who have the presence of mind to say, ‘Oh no! That’s your truth. That’s not the truth!”
Self-Blame
When I acknowledge some of my responsibility for my own troubles, I can no longer use my presumed “helplessness” or “inadequacy” to distract myself from doing anything to change. I can tell myself, “I got into this; now I can get out of it and into a situation I’ll feel better about.”
Mistakes are familiar mice in everybody’s cornfield. If I think as clearly and act as honestly and wisely as I can, that’s enough. We can decrease our self-aggravation and suffereing by learning to take our mistakes, failures, and half-successes as a “texture” in our lives. My “errors” and “defeats” sometimes teach me more than my successes. In that important sense they aren’t failures at all.
What’s Yours and What’s Mine
In most cases, what happens between you and me results from what we both do. You anger yourself, feel hurt, feeld good, etc., in response to my words and actions. I can’t, all by myself, make you angry, hurt your feelings, or make you feel good. You’ve got to be willing to use my input to go to one of those places. Usually, the most I can do is create the situation.
In the many instances when I don’t know how you’ll respond to what I say or do, however, I take responsibility only for my wants and actions. I have no responsibility for – or control over – your response.
Likewise, how I feel in response to what you do is my own doing – not yours. Even when I have ot deal with difficulties you cause me, it’s within my power to maintain a creative state of mind. I don’t have to get in my own way by making myself miserable and thereby making life even harder.
ONLY I CAN DO IT
A monk asked: “How does one get emancipated?” The master said: “Who has ever put you in bondage?” – D.T. Suzuki
We often say, “I can’t,” when the truth is, “I won.t”
The Happy President 