Avoidance of responsibility
American psychiatrist and psychotherapist, MD, professor of psychiatry at Stanford University Irwin Yalom on avoiding responsibility.
The word "responsibility" has many shades of meaning. We call a reliable, trustworthy person “responsible.” “Responsibility” also implies accountability – legal, financial or moral. In the field of mental health, “responsibility” refers to the patient's capacity for rational behavior, as well as the moral obligations of the therapist to the patient. Although each of these senses has some bearing on our topic, here I am using the word “responsibility” in one specific sense—the same sense that Jean-Paul Sartre used when he wrote that to be responsible is to be “indisputable.” the author of an event or thing."
Compulsivity
One of the most common dynamic defenses against awareness of responsibility is the creation of a mental world in which there is no experience of freedom, but there is existence under the power of some insurmountable force, alien to the Ego (“not me”). We call this defense "compulsiveness."
A clinical illustration is provided by the case of Bernard, a twenty-five-year-old traveling salesman whose main problems centered around guilt and “obsession.” He was obsessive in his sexual behavior, in his work, and even in his free time. This is the same man who was discussed in the example given in the introduction to Part II. when he failed to arrange an intimate meeting (he deliberately called too late), he sighed with relief: “Now I can read and sleep tonight - which is what I really wanted.” This remarkable phrase, “what I really wanted,” encapsulates the mystery of Bernard’s problems. An obvious question arises. “Bernard, if this is what you really want, why don’t you do it directly?” Bernard answered this question in different ways. “I didn’t know that this was what I really wanted until I felt a wave of relief pass through my body when the last woman turned me down.” Another time his answer was that he was not aware of having a choice. “Picking up a woman is all we were talking about.” The attraction was so powerful that he could not even think about not going to bed with an available woman, although it was absolutely clear: brief sexual excitement was not worth the unpleasant experiences associated with it - anticipatory anxiety, feelings of dissatisfaction with himself (constant thoughts on sexual topics reduced his potency), feelings of guilt and fear that his wife would find out about his sexual promiscuity, self-contempt due to the knowledge that he acted dishonestly, using women as inanimate objects. Bernard thus avoided the problem of responsibility and choice through compulsivity, which eliminated choice; in his subjective experience it was as if he were fighting for his life, trying to stay astride a maddened, uncontrollable wild horse. He sought therapeutic help seeking relief from his dysphoria, but was unwilling to see that at some level he was responsible for his dysphoria, his compulsivity—in short, for creating every aspect of his difficult life situation.
Transfer of responsibility
Many people avoid personal responsibility by transferring it to others. This maneuver is especially common in a psychotherapeutic situation. One of the main themes of my work with Bernard was his desire to shift responsibility from himself to me. Between sessions he didn't think about his problem, instead he simply collected material and "dumped" it into my lap. (He cleverly parried my comment on this matter, saying that if he had “processed” the material in advance, there would be no spontaneity in the sessions.) He rarely brought dreams because he could not bring himself to write them down during his brief awakenings at night, and to I forgot in the morning. On the rare occasions that Bernard recorded a dream, he never looked at the recording between the time of writing and the session, and often ended up being unable to read his own handwriting. During the summer break, when I went on holiday, he was “counting down the hours” until I returned, and the night before our arranged meeting he had a dream that he was playing football and saw himself sitting on my shoulders and receiving the ball behind the opponent’s line. . In the first session, he symbolically acted out this dream: he bombarded me with detailed accounts of his summer anxieties, guilt, sexual behavior, and self-deprecation. For four weeks he gave in to his compulsiveness and anxiety, waiting for me to return so I could show him how to confront them. Often using brainstorming techniques in his work, he nevertheless seemed confused when I suggested he do a simple exercise (think about himself for twenty minutes and then write down his observations). After several (fruitful) attempts, he "couldn't find the time" to do the exercise. After a session in which I persistently continued to show him how he was transferring his problems to me, he had a dream: “Man X (an individual who resembled Bernard, obviously a double) called me, wanting to meet with me. He said that I knew his mother and now he wants to see me. I felt like I didn't want to meet him. Then I decided that since he works in public relations, maybe I should see what I could get from him. But then we couldn’t find time for a meeting: our plans were incompatible. I told him, 'Maybe we should schedule a meeting to talk about your plan!' I woke up laughing." Bernard traveled fifty miles to meet me, and never felt burdened by the long journey. However, as the dream clearly shows, he could not and did not strive to find time for a session with himself. Of course, for Bernard, as for any other patient who is not working in the absence of a therapist, this is not a matter of time or convenience. It is about facing your personal responsibility for your own life and the process of change. And the consciousness of responsibility is invariably accompanied by the fear of lack of ground. Acceptance of responsibility is a necessary prerequisite for therapeutic change. As long as a person believes that his situation and his dysphoria are caused by someone else or some external force, what is the point of seeking personal change? People show inexhaustible ingenuity in finding ways to avoid the consciousness of responsibility. One patient, for example, complained of severe, long-standing sexual problems in his marriage. I am convinced that if he had accepted responsibility for his situation, he would have faced a frightening confrontation with his own freedom, the discovery that he was imprisoned in a prison of his own making. Indeed, he was free: if sex was important enough to him, he could leave his wife, or find another woman, or think about leaving his wife (the mere thought of breaking up with her was enough to cause a paroxysm of anxiety). He was free to change any aspect of his sex life, and this fact was also significant because it meant that the man had to accept responsibility for the lifelong repression of his sexual feelings as well as many other aspects of his affective life. As a result, he stubbornly avoided facing responsibility and attributed his sexual problems to a number of factors external to himself: his wife’s lack of sexual interest and tendency to change; squeaky bed springs (so loud that children could hear the sounds of coitus; for many absurd reasons, the bed could not be changed); his age (he was forty-five) and congenital libidinal deficiency; his unresolved relationship problems with his mother (as is often the case with genetic explanations, this served more as an excuse for avoiding responsibility than as a catalyst for change). There are other ways of transferring responsibility that are often found in therapeutic practice. Paranoid patients obviously delegate responsibility to other individuals and forces. They deny their own feelings and desires, invariably attributing their dysphoria and their failures to external influences. A major and often impossible therapeutic goal in working with paranoid patients is to help them accept their own authorship of the feelings they have projected. Avoidance of responsibility is also a fundamental obstacle in psychotherapy for patients with psychosomatic illnesses. In such patients, responsibility is excluded twice: they experience somatic distress instead of psychological distress; Even recognizing the psychological basis of their somatic disorder, they tend to resort to defenses through externalization - attributing their psychological dysphoria to bad nerves or unfavorable environmental conditions.
Denial of Responsibility: Innocent Victim
A separate type of avoidance of responsibility is the tendency of some individuals (usually classified as hysterical personalities) to deny responsibility by feeling like an innocent victim of events that they themselves (unwittingly) initiated. For example, Clarissa, a forty-year-old practicing psychotherapist, came to a therapy group to work on her long-standing difficulties in developing intimate relationships. She had extremely difficult relationship problems with men - starting with a rude, blaming father who habitually rejected and punished her. During our first meeting before joining the group, she told me that she had stopped long-term psychoanalytic therapy several months ago and now felt that her problems were better dealt with in a group situation. After visiting the group for several months, she informed us that she had resumed her analysis of the group shortly after joining the group, but did not consider this circumstance important enough to inform the group. However, her therapist, who strongly disapproves of group therapy, now interprets her participation in the therapy group as “reacting.” Obviously, a patient cannot work in a therapeutic group if his individual therapist objects to and undermines the work. At Clarissa's suggestion, I tried to get in touch with her therapist, but he preferred to remain in a psychoanalytic position of complete confidentiality and - in my opinion, with some arrogance - refused to even talk to me about this topic. I felt like I had been “set up” by Clarissa, was annoyed with her therapist, and was stunned by the turn of events. All this time Clarissa maintained an appearance of complete innocence and slight perplexity at the confusing events happening to her. The group members believed that she was “playing dumb” and, trying to help her see her own role in these events, they became more categorical, almost accusing in their comments. Clarissa again felt persecuted, especially by men, and "due to circumstances beyond her control" was forced to leave the group. This incident reproduced in miniature Clarissa's central problem - the avoidance of responsibility, which she achieved by playing the role of an innocent victim. Although she was not yet ready to see it, this situation contained a clue to her difficulties in intimate relationships. Two significant men in her life, her analyst and her group therapist, felt manipulated and—for me—became angry with her. Other group members also felt used. Her relationship with them was not sincere; on the contrary, they felt like puppets in the drama she was enacting with her therapists. Recall that Clarissa sought therapy because of her difficulties in forming intimate relationships. Her responsibility for these difficulties was made abundantly clear to the group. She had never really been with anyone. While she was with the group members, she was with me at the time; while she was with me, she was with her therapist; and undoubtedly, being near him, she was really with her father. Her psychic dynamics as an innocent victim were all the more obvious because she herself was an experienced psychotherapist, led therapy groups and was well aware of the importance of contact between the individual and group therapist.
Denial of responsibility: loss of control
Another way to shrug off the responsibility of being temporarily “out of your mind.” Some patients tend to temporarily enter an irrational state, in which they seem to gain the right to act irresponsibly, since they are not able to account for their behavior even to themselves. This is precisely the issue raised by the therapist in one of the examples given at the beginning of Part II, when he asked a patient (who was complaining that her behavior was not intentional), “Whose unconscious is this?” It is important to note that, having carefully studied such a patient, the therapist will discover: the “loss of control” does not occur by accident, it is purposeful and allows the patient both to receive secondary benefits (“rewards”) and to experience self-deception of avoiding responsibility. A patient who had been brutalized and abused by an insensitive, sadistic lover and then rejected by him “lost control” and, “going crazy,” radically altered the balance of power in the relationship. She pursued him continuously for several weeks; repeatedly broke into his apartment, causing senseless destruction there; created scenes of screaming and throwing dishes in restaurants when he dined there with friends. Thanks to her crazy, unpredictable behavior, she won a complete victory. The ex-lover panicked, sought police protection and eventually called emergency psychiatric help. At that moment, having achieved her goal, she - oddly enough - regained control of herself and began to behave completely rationally. A milder version of this dynamic is by no means rare. For many people, their own potential irrationality serves as a means of tyranny towards their partner. Losing control brings with it another common reward: intimate care. Some patients crave so much for the therapist to babysit them, spoon-feed them, and generally take care of them in the most intimate way that they “lose control” for this, to the point of deep regression requiring hospitalization.
Avoidance of autonomous behavior
Therapists are often perplexed by patients who know very well what to do to help themselves, but inexplicably refuse to take the necessary step. Paul, a depressed patient who was in the process of looking for a job, came to New York to interview with employers. He felt terribly lonely: the interview was completed for only six hours of the three-day period, and the rest of the time was spent in lonely, feverish anticipation. Paul had lived in New York for a long time in the past and had many friends there whose presence would undoubtedly have cheered him up. He spent two lonely evenings staring at the phone and wishing they would call. which was impossible, since they had no way of knowing about his presence in the city. However, he could not pick up the phone and call them. Why? We analyzed this situation in detail, starting with explanations like “no energy”, “I feel too low to look for . Only gradually did we realize that his behavior reflected a lack of willingness to accept that his well-being and comfort were in his own hands and that help would not come until he took action to bring that help closer. At one point I said that he was frightened by the prospect of being his own father; This phrase had a powerful effect on Paul, and in the course of further therapy he returned to it several times. The paradox of his situation was that in order to overcome his social loneliness he had to experience his existential loneliness. In these examples we see a fusion of referent structures: accepting responsibility leads to the abandonment of belief in the existence of an ultimate savior - an extremely difficult task for an individual who has built his worldview on the foundation of this belief. These two reference structures together define the basic dynamics of addiction and also provide the therapist with a coherent and powerful explanatory framework for understanding the addictive character.
Disorders in the area of desires and decision-making
He who, with full consciousness, experiences a desire and makes a decision, invariably faces responsibility. Everyone creates himself, the central theme of the next one is that experiencing desires and making decisions are the constituent elements of creation. As Sartre often said, the life of an individual is constituted by his choices. The individual, by his own will, comes into existence in the form of what he is. If a person is terrified of the consciousness of self-constitution (and the accompanying consciousness of lack of ground), then he may avoid the exercise of will, for example, by making himself insensitive to his desires or feelings, refusing to make choices, or shifting choices to other people, institutions, or external events.
Source: Irvin Yalom “Existential Psychotherapy.”
Where does the habit of shifting responsibility to others come from?
What makes a child say such things?
Lie = fantasy
Let's start with the most harmless reason, namely, that a child up to a certain age (up to 4-5 years) lives so much in his fantasies that they are often inseparable from reality.
For example, a child plays at being a cat, which is playing around at home in the absence of its owners. And this “cat” wanted to scatter the pencils, and after them other things. When you arrive to find that the child's room has become a dump, the child transfers this misdeed to the cat (fictional or real, if you have one).
What to do? Don’t panic that your child is growing up to be a liar and a coward. It is better to listen to the fable with a serious look, nod your head sympathetically with the words: “Wow,” “I understand,” then smile, thank you for the interesting tale and offer to put things in order together.
In this way, you will show your child your patience, respect (I’m listening to you attentively, I’m not judging) and instill in him the responsibility that is still lacking (let’s clean up what’s scattered).
Inability to take responsibility
The ability or inability to take responsibility for one’s actions is formed in a child as a result of observing the behavior of adults.
Mistaken behavior of parents:
- Personal example. Parents and close relatives, in front of the child’s eyes, shift the blame onto others: “The boss is crazy, if I’m a little late, I’ll go straight to the carpet,” “It’s your own fault: you didn’t remind me that I have to go to work early tomorrow,” etc.;
- Overprotection. To calm a crying baby, parents look for the culprit among other people, objects, animals: “Did you hit a pebble? Let's throw it with all our might. So for him!”, “Did the cat bite you? Oh, she's bad! Drive her away! Moreover, it is completely ignored that the baby was teasing her.
Looking at the above parental examples, the child understands that blaming others for his own failures is a common thing. Moreover, it is convenient. There is no need to correct your mistakes, learn from them, let those whom he accused do it.
What to do? Look after yourself, admit your guilt if you are guilty. Show by personal example that taking responsibility is the act of an adult and conscious person.
Return responsibility to the child: “It wasn’t a pebble that hit you (if the child really thinks so), but you hit yourself - let’s blow it,” “The cat bit you because you teased it. They don't like it. Don't tease cats anymore, please. Let’s go and apply some brilliant green.”
“Did you tell the truth? Get it!”
You've probably noticed more than once that parents seem to demand the truth from their child, and when they receive it, they immediately punish them. One mother, finding out which of the children painted the passport, in response to the child’s sincere confession, screamed and hit him.
Question: will a person with a well-developed conditioned reflex tell the truth in the future? No, because they beat her for it.
What to do? If you really want to find out which of your children spilled soup on the floor, why the child did not succeed in a craft project, why he bathed in the basin with magnets from his travels, promise that you will not shout at the culprit, but only praise him for his honesty and courage. This is a very important quality in life.
And an honest confession is an additional bonus, because it is valuable information for adjusting family relationships and improving home life: “Did you spill soup? Yes, it’s unpleasant... Just wipe up after yourself, okay?”, “The craft didn’t work out because the boy took the blue plasticine from you?” (ok, we’re sorting out the conflict and not scolding him for making a craft), “Did you buy the magnets because they’re cool?” (we remove the magnets out of sight and give them something that they can bathe).
“You are incompetent”, “Your hands grow from the wrong place”, “Nothing will come of you” and other negative af the child with such destructive affirmations, he will doubt his abilities. And then - more: either he will stop wanting to do anything at all, or, by doing something, he will begin to program himself in advance for failure. And if failure does happen, then, fearing anger, ridicule, reproach from his parents, he will go looking for the culprits in the external environment: “You bought me bad plasticine,” “You gave me defective skis,” “Vanya got out of the cradle and tore my snowflake.” ", "I didn't make a collage because the glue flew up and flew out the window."
What to do? Eliminate negative affirmations, offensive labels, nicknames and epithets from your speech. Check if you are making excessive demands on your child? Encourage the child in any endeavor, even if the drawn Santa Claus came out crooked, and the salad turned out to be too salty, and be sure to motivate him for further success.
What can the habit of shifting responsibility to others lead to?
Towards narcissism. To children, and after them to adults
Narcissism is a personality dysfunction that can lead to a personality disorder characterized by extreme narcissism.
A person gets used to thinking that he is better than others, masterfully devalues the actions, thoughts, successes of others, cannot find friends, understanding among the team, if he manages to start a family, then in family life he often becomes a moral tyrant, tormenting his other half and children. The narcissist does not see, does not understand his “I”, is often nervous, calms down only when he sees that he has driven his interlocutor into a corner.
Towards a tendency to reason like “Everyone around is to blame, I’m the only one white and fluffy”
A person gets used to blaming everyone around him and does not want to improve. You have probably met such people among colleagues, relatives, random fellow travelers, etc.
It can be difficult to communicate with them, because they turn any topic into a negative one. You tell them about men, and they: “Men can’t be trusted,” you tell them about a new team, and they tell you about theirs: “I have my heart for them - they set me up,” you tell them about your girlfriend, and they vehemently protest that Female friendship does not exist in principle.
Stuck in the role of a child (“I am the center of the universe, and the rest revolve around me”), such people cannot rationally resolve conflicts or negotiate. If they find a boyfriend or girlfriend, at first they idealize him (her) inadequately, and at the slightest trouble in the relationship they plunge into fierce hatred.
Toward the perfection of lies
If you don’t work with a child’s fear of punishment (don’t pay attention to fear, don’t praise for the courage to admit what you’ve done, but only blame for wrongdoing), this can develop into an adult habit of putting others on the spot, “as long as I feel good.”
At first, the child understands that he can blame it on his little brother, who has just begun to walk, and as he grows up, he learns to come up with more complex schemes of provocation and setups, which he will carry out in educational and work groups and in his own family.
To apathy, unwillingness to do anything
There is a possibility that, under the influence of negative affirmations, a growing person may become apathetic, not understanding what he needs from life. An adult may have problems with motivation: for example, he may get excited about something, invest a lot of money, but abandon it halfway, hiding behind various reasons. Also, such a person can become a weak link in the family, become involved in chemical addiction, sects, dubious companies, or simply withdraw from society and become depressed.
