Taking responsibility: being the author of your life

The words “take responsibility” are heard everywhere; they seem to be part of our contemporary vocabulary for living. Oprah Winfrey has said that she believed the world’s problems would be resolved if only people learned to take responsibility. For the person interested in personal or spiritual growth or self-help, it is worth reflecting on what is meant by these words and on how it is useful.

“Take responsibility” might for example be said by one person to another, meaning “you take charge of this and sort it”. This might be about a task, about being accountable, being the originator of something, and so on. In this article I will look at the term from a psycho-spiritual direction, taking its meaning to a deeper level. Here, it might be a whole attitude to how you live your life. In self-help or self-improvement, you might be deciding to take responsibility for your life and move it on in some way for the better.

In terms of how we live our lives in the West the idea of being in charge of ourselves, responsible for how we live and the choices we make, this approach is key. According to this belief, each person is responsible for his or her own destiny. S/he is in the driving seat. It is part of the Western notion of freedom. In this tradition that goes back at least to Jean Jacques Rousseau if not earlier, “man is born free and everywhere he is in chains”. His path in life is to assert his natural right to his freedom. Frequently, however, this belief has sat uneasily alongside other beliefs about one’s obligations to others and the community and others’ obligations to oneself, the power of the community, the social order, the state, and so on.

According to the “Third Force” humanistic psychology of the 50’s and 60’s, such as Carl Rogers or Abraham Maslow, I am a personally responsible being. According to this approach, I am responsible for my life in that I consciously create my experience and what occurs in my life. This took things to a deeper level. Being responsible meant being consciously aware of what was occurring in my life, as opposed to living unconsciously. I would be responding to my “candle flame”, my inner awareness. I was becoming responsive. I was the author of my destiny. Being the “author”, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is not only one who writes but also one who originates, causes or gives rise to something. Hence we become our own authority on ourselves. In psychotherapy or counselling, the client thus became the best authority on him or her self, as opposed to the interpretations of the psychoanalyst.

This way of thinking of course clashes with our experience. We have usually learned as children that others are responsible for our welfare. The process of growing, both physically and psychologically, is to emancipate ourselves from the decisions of other and also – and this is crucial – to be responsible for our own thoughts, feelings and behaviours, rather than to see them as caused by others, events, situations or life. This is a major psychological shift, one that many do not find easy to do, or do it in parts of their lives while not in others. For example, I might be perfectly able to accept that I am responsible for my feelings, until I next fall out with my partner and feel angry or upset with something she said or did. What people find so hard to see is that there is a difference between something happening or somebody saying or doing something and how we react. It is of course us who are choosing to react, although we think it has come from another. We internally generate the feelings, which we have learned to do habitually from our previous life experience – and we can if we choose, respond differently. This is the power of taking responsibility. We can deal with ourselves and life differently.

This way of looking at our experience has become merged with Eastern as well as some Western mystical spiritual traditions. In meditation, for example, if I take my awareness within, focusing perhaps on my breath, I may notice my mind at work but by practice I can become consciously aware of my mind, and that I am not my mind, that I am a witness of my mind, that I am more than just my mind. As such I can contact a vastly more profound self that exists beyond the superficial chattering of my ego. This is a conscious, intentional use of awareness to manage my state and enter a higher level of experience and inner contentment. I am using responsibility to respond to my inner state of being.

Being personally responsible, in this sense, means I seek to live from a conscious awareness of myself at my core, my essence, my Self, my Oneness, or whichever tradition you are comfortable with.

We often state this as being centred in oneself. This is however an art that needs to be developed, and hence the great value of adopting some self-help practice. Taking responsibility becomes a practice of intentionally using awareness and focusing the mind. It involves an act of will. I become aware of what is occurring in me, I take responsibility and I choose to do something about it. I use my mind to manage my mind, by becoming aware of my thoughts and exercising a choice about them, which could be for example to take action on them, to think differently or to let them go. I am no longer a victim of my own stream of consciousness, the meanderings of my mind. I consciously choose to not let it go in negative and ultimately self-detrimental or self-destructive directions. I develop my self-awareness, so that I become more and more aware over time of my emotional, mental and spiritual patterns, and I use my awareness to manage my state. As I am more able to use my awareness, and manage my mind, I increasingly develop an awareness of my centred self that lies beyond these mental ramblings. And I come to rest in inner peace.

This is the great power of responsibility. We can use our own capabilities to be master of our destinies and create our own inner peace and our capacity to be at one with others. For it follows that one who is at peace with him or herself, knows intuitively how he or she can be at one with others. But this is the subject of another article.

John Gloster-Smith © The Empowering Partnership Ltd 2007.