Self Responsibility is the subject of this post in the Change of Being series. Self responsibility is the cornerstone of beginning effective change.

Anyone can have a sad story. After all, life brings its troubles to everyone one way or another. However, taking a sad story of troubles into a persistent view of being a victim is following the saddest path of all.

Being a victim is easy to justify, easy to prove to yourself. The victim mindset interprets any experience as additional proof of powerless and helpless existence, increasing the victim spiral.

Fortunately, at any time, you can choose to take responsibility now for your own life. This is an empowering stance that is as easy to justify as the victim stance, but far more productive.

I find taking a sharp look at my own contribution to my problems can be extremely revealing, even if quite painful at times. Sometimes the problems may seem out of scale with the error that led me into them, but no matter.

The important thing is to simply take responsibility for what I am doing now about the situation and move forward. I may discover a new understanding about my errors or lack of perception that led me into the situation. I can then alter my behavior, and therefore my results. At the very least I can alter how I am handling the situation in the present, even if I cannot change the past.

This mindset leads to effective problem solving and the awareness one can always change what does not work. If one method fails, try another until you find something that is effective for you.

Contrast this with the victim state of mind, where the pain of recognizing your mistakes and/or taking personal responsibility for handling the problem is completely avoided. This avoidance comes at the cost of forever remaining in the pain of the unresolved situation.

Victims may appear humble but really are often highly arrogant in their avoidance of any personal responsibility. They stubbornly believe they are exactly right in their thoughts and actions, and if things go badly, it can only be everyone else’s fault.

The other common but sometimes more subtle way that humans avoid personal responsibility is in handling our emotions. We project our emotions onto others without recognizing ourselves in the process. We use other people as garbage pails into which we dump our own toxic emotions. We also allow our unrecognized emotions to spill into apparently unrelated actions with distorted and chaotic results.

In short, we human beings often utterly fail at recognizing or understanding our own emotions. As a result we then do everything we can to make others responsible for our own emotions, which is inherently dishonest on a deep internal level.

This lack of energetic integrity makes communications distorted and clean solution of problems impossible. It is vital that we take responsibility for our own emotional and energetic space and learn to handle it effectively.

This may lead to actions we might prefer to avoid, such as recognizing our own incorrect patterns in order to identify the changes we need to make. This can also lead to removing or drastically altering interactions with other individuals, which can certainly upset relationships.

In some cases these are likely to be relationships we would rather not disturb or even see too clearly. There certainly are serious consequences for increased self responsibility.

At the root of this self responsibility is the honesty to look ourselves in the mirror and work with what is really there. Anything else is a sham, a pathway to nowhere.

The practice of self responsibility opens the doorway to authentic being. Authentic being is the only way we can experience our own genuine inner joy, so the prize is well worth the price of admission, at least for those of us who choose that path.

I would like to ask for your comments on how you deal with your own self responsibility and the results you have seen in your own life. I would also like to hear how you handle your interactions with those who remain stuck in a victim mentality.

The next post in this series is Reverence for Life.

Copyright © Lexi Sundell 2008. All Rights Reserved.