I was in session with my therapist recently. We were discussing some ways of coping with and handling my disease. All the realizations we were coming to were falling squarely on my shoulders. They were all things that I could change. Some things that I could do differently. Out of frustration I said something along the lines of “why can’t the answer be something else for once?, why does it always have to come back to me?” To which my therapist brilliantly remarked “well, isn’t it better for all the answers to be on you? Because that way you can actually do something about them.”
I sat there dumbfounded for a few seconds, awed by the power of her subtlety. What a complete shift! With just a small tweak in perspective!
After I closed my mouth, an overwhelming feeling started to set in. I thought “I don’t want all that power and responsibility, give it to someone else”. Of course I thought this way. We’re sold this way of thinking every single day. In hindsight, I’m able to see what this really is, an avoidance maneuver. One that we’re all accustomed to. We tend to seek external sources of potential blame as a deflection method.
Accepting ultimate responsibility for our own lives is a heavy burden to bear. This burden might be worth the weight however, because, as Tara Brach stated in her book, Radical Acceptance:
The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom.
Accepting this “burden of responsibility” for ourselves can be terrifying. I know I feel it. It seems so scary because, what happens when things don’t go how we want them to? All the blame only has one place to go. On us… right? And blame is a slippery slope lined with negative self talk, guilt and shame.
Last week, on the day of my therapy session, I was still recovering from a busy weekend of hosting some friends. I overextended myself, as I am known to do, and paid the consequences. I laid in bed for the majority of Monday. Tuesday was not much better, but I decided to gut it out. I was sitting in bed, drinking coffee, trying to mentally coax myself into leaving the house. A feeling of regret over the previous weekend was consuming me. It was making a really fun weekend spent with friends seem like I did something wrong. A feeling that has become all too familiar for me this last year. “I shouldn’t have done that”, “I should have known better”, “why did you push yourself so much?”. I was fully buying into the idea that my actions during the weekend were 100% to blame for the physical discomfort I was feeling. That I was at fault for the fatigue and soreness I was feeling.
After sending myself some compassionate thoughts, a simple, yet profound thought came into my mind, “this is not your fault”. And woah! That was a revelation! And man, did it relieve some weight off my shoulders. I mean, after all, the real reason for my fatigue was the CML, and that is not my fault whatsoever.
Blame has this parasitic quality where it latches on to whatever is closest and blurs out all the rest. Unfortunately, blame does much of it’s leeching on us. We tend to become hyper focused on singular reasons for things going wrong. In reality, there are myriad things which contribute to each individual situation. It’s really hard to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt sometimes and realize that a lot of what we’re experiencing and feeling is out of our control. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of playing this blame game.
All of us come into this crazy world doing our best to survive and be happy. We experience things that we didn’t and wouldn’t have chosen for ourselves. I think it’s important for us to remember that in truth, much of what we struggle with is not our fault.
— Dennis Tirch PhD (@DennisTirchPhD) April 3, 2019
Accepting full responsibility for ourselves does not mean taking full blame. In fact, true acceptance doesn’t need to blame. We can wholeheartedly accept full responsibility for our lives without weighing ourselves down with blame. If we can get here, this “burden of responsibility” might not seem like such a burden after all. If we can get here, we might not have to buy those magic pills sold to us on the television. If we can get here, maybe we can stop looking for external scapegoats when things don’t go according to plan. If we can get here, we can start to get our lives back.
My therapist was right when she reminded me that having ultimate responsibility of my life is a good thing. As Viktor Frankl put it in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, “when we can no longer change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves”. It’s a hard truth to face up to. Something that I’m clearly still working on. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to the point where I’m not working on it. And maybe that’s okay.