“Responsibility”

 of Responsibility

Brian Lynch

I have been reading several personal histories and testimonials lately of people who are in therapy or have given themselves diagnoses, often serious diagnoses.

I have written other pieces on responsibility but the logic of this particular thinking always pains me so much that I feel this can never be said enough.

It goes like this: These narratives are written when the person is in a calmer safer place and when they can reflect. They have great insight concerning their pain. They tell us their loved ones, lovers, friends, and therapist that they have great psychic wounds due to abuse, abandonment, and shame. They explain, often in detail, the havoc they have visited on everyone in their life; their addictions, broken relationships, and financial messes.

Now you may be surprised as to where I will go with this. The pain I feel is that they then ask if are they seriously ill or disturbed and their answer is “yes” then they ask if are they “responsible” for their actions and then they say “yes” too.

And I wonder about the world and my sanity and I wonder too about how many therapists repeat the same thing to these people. That is that they are “responsible” for their actions.

How is it that you can be “crazy” and “responsible” at the same time? First of all, I abjure the use of the term “crazy” unless we all admit to it. I use it therefore to make the needed point and that is one cannot make a responsible decision while unable to reason properly, a pretty straightforward thought. I say that is when we are overwhelmed by emotions.

We have good evidence that the center for feeling emotional pain is the same as the center for visceral or “gut” pain. So that is if you get “kicked in the gut” literally or figuratively your brain will light up in the same place. Now if you get kicked in the gut are you sure you are going to be in “control of yourself/” If you suffer a second-degree burn or break your leg are you going to be in control of yourself? If you receive news of a parent's death or of your wife’s betrayal? 

This week alone I have heard the line on T.V. of men in respectable professions saying they drowned their sorry in a bottle for 1-2 months after a breakup.

When we stop and analyze these statements of being “responsible” they quickly make no sense, but somehow we need to make sense of the world and so force the world to be orderly. An orderly world is one where man’s reason must prevail and if it doesn’t then we must blame ourselves, that is our nature, man’s nature. We are “weak”, “weak-minded” unfit to exist. We either attack others for being weak or attack ourselves for being weak and failing to make the right decision.

 

  People do what they do for good reasons.

Someone once told me that actually no matter how we are reacting for the “good” or the “bad”…..

we are reacting to stimuli exactly as our organism “should” be reacting at that moment.

 We are “nothing more” than our memory banks. We can only react based on what we know how to do in a given situation.

    We can not do what we don’t know how to do.

 

Either we are hopeless without redemption, we are, that is, so biologically damaged that were have to be removed from society. Or that to the best of our present knowledge one has no capacity for empathy (To be clear: not punished, but removed from society.) Or we have the capacity for empathy but have been traumatized to the point that our negative emotions continually overwhelm us in the present so we are thrown into turmoil.

 

We are reacting to stimuli exactly as our organism “should” be reacting at that moment.

 

To the observer, the two situations will appear the same. They both appear to be unable to empathize. It is important to sort them out because the latter person can be and needs to be helped. And in the end, all should be helped.

One point is you cannot be “crazy” and responsible at the same time. In both cases, the emotive side has taken over. In one case permanently and in the other momentarily. For those caught in the moment, it is a “shame” bind. It can be a setup for eternal failure. “Oh my God I did such a terrible thing and I am responsible for it!” 

The shame one feels at that moment now is as overwhelming as the original shame and rage or terror and it freezes one into inaction. One now is incapable, even now in what seems to be a calmer state, a more rational state, to have the wherewithal to apologize, pay for damages, or repair harm done in other ways.  

Why is this? I believe one reason is that deep inside one feels the truth with which this essay started that their organism could not have done anything different than it did at the time it did it and so in the most strict cosmic sense there is never any guilt or responsibility. There is at least a kind of emotional determinism. Why should I apologize for the emotional demons that control me and for whom I cannot control? I did not traumatize myself.

But the world attempts to work in the here and now: this organism does harm to that organism now and the one that has harm done to it is not expected to understand anything other than that they are hurt. They want and need reparation.

A popular phrase now is “Hurt people hurt people.”

How does society grow and begin to accommodate both of these understandings? A serious attempt is being made through the Restorative Justice Movement

(see http://www.brianlynchmd.com/TWELVE/restorativejustice.htm). When Restorative Justice is done correctly it invites all injured parties to come together on equal footing to express their narrative and understand.

It is almost an entirely new way of thinking. Humans have always argued, and since Aristotle supposedly convincingly, that we can indeed control our emotions and therefore our actions. I say it is not convincing at all and that Aristotle’s teacher Plato knew better and tells us so through his elegant defense of why we should not punish in the Republic. Now, punishing goes hand in hand with understanding motivation and the conditions that caused the harm.

As this is entitled "Responsibility" a final note on the word. We might take note that the word is made up of the words "response" and "ability." That is don't we first have to have the ability to respond? The "knee jerk" admonition of "be responsible" I hope is now seen in a new light. We would "act" better, be better, and do better if we knew how. We all need help in learning.