“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. 

"Mind and Body"

"There, there’s a place

Where I can go

When I feel low

And I feel blue

And it’s my mind……"  Beatles

Brian Lynch

A glaring problem in modern psychology and psychiatry is that we are unwilling to admit a glaring disconnect, or contradiction, in our thinking.

It boils down to the thought that there is no distinction between the “mind” and the “body.” If there is no difference between the “mind” and the “body” then at there is a lot to explain. 

That is the contradiction is that, first of all, the old “mind” “body” distinction that we like to believe in is defended and believed in so much because if there is a “mind” separated from the body then there is a “place” where we can go to be “safe” and “control” “everything.” We can invent “there in our mind” everything about ourselves; our fantasies, our hates, loves, cultures, relations, everything about ourselves. Our “mind” is our retreat.

Does the mind exist? Well of course it does as we do exactly what I just explained. But on the other hand the mind is “only” part and parcel of the “body.” Or maybe better stated the body is only part and parcel of the mind. The brain is three pounds of physical flesh and I am fond of pointing out that the rest of the body is “nothing more than a projection of the physical brain.” Everything about us is bound and determined by the brain.

But since the brain is in control of everything, it is in effect the mind and the body. 

Our problem is that often “the mind” is not as in control as we think it is. We think that we are in rational control. This is, of course, the only way it really can be. We, for the most part, are not going to jump to the conclusion that we are “wrong” about the world.

But why can this happen? This can happen because our “body”, our nervous system is sophisticated and the brain is a copy of our entire body, or as I said our body is a copy of our brain. Not just the “mind.” It is doing everything and so much can get confused. A lot of damage can be done. We can indeed think that white is black when it is white to everyone else.

There is a famous drawing called the “rat man” In psychology you show it to people and some people see a rat and some the face of a man. Reality is not the same for all of us. It is not. You cannot say the picture is of a rat or a man, it is of both.

Our emotions will often take over the more rational part of our brain and sabotage us. We are increasingly aware that the nervous system “maps” our “scripts” throughout the body. These “scripts” determine “rat” or “man.”

The only reason we can do anything is due to memory. We anticipate much of everything we do. Getting up and walking across the room is a complex task. Your body responds “instantaneously” but that does not mean it still does not “instantaneously” prepare itself to do the action. Movement does not start from zero. The action involves an “image’ of what I will do next and this image immediately follows a road map to get it done. We are “scripted” to do most everything and these scripts are laid down not in some “thought” that is not physical. They are laid down as the wiring in our house or the computer this was typed on. Most everything we do is programmed. We are indeed “knee jerk” responders.

All of this is “good” and “bad”. Without this total integration, we would be bound up in complex rituals to do anything. Scripts free up much of our capacity so we can do other things like pay attention to one another. On the other hand, if the “script” can be one that “solved” a problem early on and it turned out to be a not-so-good but temporary solution. Such as the urge to use physical violence, get high or spend money each time we feel bad.

Do Children Matter?

Brian Lynch

“Paddling in 2010? "We're too old to get spanked," she told CNN. "This is not the 1940's." Erica DeRamous

I am going to comment on a few aspects of not “child care” but children’s status. Children are people.

A friend of mine pointed out an amazingly thought several years ago that clarified so much about child-rearing. We were talking about the use of corporal punishment and child abuse in general, we were also always in a discussion about the overall uselessness of punishing anyone. Yes, I believe that punishment does not serve a purpose we need to rehabilitate people. We need to understand why people do what they do.

So is it “good” that parents that abuse their children are arrested and prosecuted? For now, it seems the answer is yes. Why? Is that not punishment? It is good because we are just not very evolved. It is because we are evolving. This is so because only a short time ago you could do anything to your child you wanted, even kill them and probably nothing would happen. Children were your property. Still, in much of the world, this is the case so for society to take any action to protect children is a great advance. Holding parents criminally responsible is an advance.

It is a simple thought if I thought you were acting “badly” and verbally threatened you or maybe even struck you I would be guilty in the first instance of assault and in the second of what is called “battery.” Why on earth are we not guilty of the same when we threaten and hit children?

Now there is just one problem when we arrest and even jail the parents of children, and what is that? Well, the children are left without their parents! We know that as strange as it may seem that the situation has to be quite bad at home before the children are better off not at home so enlightened prosecutors and social service agencies do not necessarily press for convictions and sentences but for intense intervention, rehabilitation and supervision. It does take a village to raise a child.

 We Are All Emperors Without Cloths : “Mirroring II”

“Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't the fine line between sanity and madness gotten finer?”

  - George Price

I am writing this with restraint. I am not going to use the usual terms that psychiatry and psychology use to “label” people. I don’t because I think the only way to get beyond these terms and labels is simply to stop using them.

I want, as do a growing number of us, to replace almost all “labels” with a new way of looking at human behavior. That is that the line between normal and “abnormal” is vague if and when it exists at all. 

There are, of course, clearly defined “genetic” disorders but more and more, there are fewer and fewer “pure” disorders. As we see even a condition such as Downs Syndrome over the last fifty years has made great progress. They now lead much more normal lives.

I believe that almost all human activity can be summarized as 1) A focused interest in a goal where effort can be sustained whether the goal is achieved or not. Or in contrast, 2) due to confusion, hurt, or shame; short or long term, the person will a) withdraw from their goal, b) blame themselves for not achieving their goal, c) avoid the problem using sex, drugs, or any number of methods of distracting ourselves and lastly, when all else fails we will attack. Then, if all else fails we will start the cycle all over again. Why, one way over another? It is because we have learned from an early age to move forward using one method over another.

Often lovers will get caught in the above circle. All kinds of terrible labels will be thrown at everyone in the situation. It has been my experience, as a therapist, that all this is pretty much hooey. That is the part about “terrible labels.” No doubt, no doubt, all the research and writing, and work that has led to all this classification has helped, and has been useful, as we as humans have to articulate. We have to describe situations. To name is to know. To describe is to know. Yet it is also to control too much and to humiliate.

Humans are not lab rats. Yet, am I not reducing everything to five actions? But I think reducing our behavior to five generic actions is liberating. It says we all are emperors without clothes”

So when any of us are feeling pain we “only” have five “choices” and if we are not doing too well and cannot focus on what is bothering us and can not solve the problem we might do this: we might engage in a type of “false interest”, say “fall in love.” 

Now this is tricky as people are people. The “Interest” can no doubt be “real”. On the other hand, our pain may be so great that we search out anyone to be with, and in the meantime, darn it, there we go, we “fall in love” ( A common theme in, say, spy movies, such as “Bond” movies but here it is an “almost always an “obvious” manipulation at first Bond falls in love and then gets hurt.). So “love” and this “bastardized” interest (love). Why “bastardized” because much of the energy is coming from avoiding something rather than true attention to the person. That is we are confused and think we are “just” in a relationship not realizing the true cost. None of this may be conscious. 

So much of what we do is because we have “learned” that we cannot directly ask for anything, this I have covered before. This is from a history of abuse. 

I “have” to be deceptive otherwise I will be denied. Of course, if it is not conscious then we do think we are “falling in love” only later to be shocked into reality by our subconscious when the “truth” leaks through and we find out the “real” “subconscious” truth.

But everything here is much more interesting and unfortunately tragic. But what if I find that this “interest” is not working? What happens? I find fault with myself. What else can I do? 

 

I did this. I engaged. Did I not? I alone know the lie. But I continue the lie. I continue the interest. But what is the lie? The lie is human. The relationship is human. Interest is real. This is real. This lie is real. This person is real. This love is real!

But the original “I am here due to a lie” hunts me. I am here due to a scar, a tear in my heart that I cannot face. So I persist. I protest that you must understand, “I am only trying to avoid the pain of my past of facing the past. Please don’t make me do that. I have to do something. That is the only reason I am ‘using’ you.” 

I move now to “avoid.” “Let’s talk” “what are you interested in.” I become you. I become you. “I am you.” I “lose” myself in you. If you do drugs I do drugs.

If you drink I drink. If you smoke I smoke. If you rob banks, I rob banks. If you study astrophysics well, darn it I’ll try or I’ll sure make your eggs. Or, of course, we will have great sex. Yes, sex, sex, sex.

But then what if it all ends? What if the other “catches on?” What if they want a “real” relationship? Well, that would mean that they would be questioning you. What audacity. I still have not even thought about my original problem, have I? Why I am here with you? I am here with you because I am running from my pain. But you are not cooperating! You have discovered my lie so what can I do? I have to attack you. I have to attack you. I must destroy you. How? Well, humiliation might be a good way. 

Now what if this does not work? Well, well we can start all over; we can try and run away, withdraw, then blame ourselves and avoid and attack. Or we can start a slow process and heal. The good news is the “interest” was partially real. Grab on to that real interest, the “now” interest. Some “avoidances” are not all “bad.” We can do well without attacking ourselves or others almost all the time.

h