role in every situation. That is what personal responsibility is really about.
Is it possible to maintain recovery from an addiction without embracing personal responsibility? Many specialists don’t believe so, and I agree. People cannot improve their lives without realizing that they have a part to play in the outcome. One psychologist explained:
People are often afraid of change and so they stay in less-than-satisfying situations because it’s easier than making a change. But if you are self-aware, you can start acknowledging that there are things you can do that empower you and allow you to put yourself in the driver’s seat of your life. A lot of people say recovery to them is a second chance to become the person they wanted to be before addiction took their life away. They had to shed their moral code in order to survive as an addict. A successful addict has to lie, cover-up, and deceive. To be in active recovery, you have to rediscover the practice of a moral code and that includes the lesson of accepting personal responsibility.
WHAT EVERYONE CAN LEARN
You have to know who you are and who you aren’t, and you need to cultivate an idea of who you want to become—all grounded in a foundation of personal responsibility—if you hope to achieve some level of contentment within your life.
“What people in broader society don’t yet understand about people in recovery,” explained Dan Duncan of the St. Louis-area National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, “is that those in recovery have taken responsibility for their illness. Recovery means you take responsibility for your own wellness. For general society there is a lesson in that because too often, as human beings, we get stuck in life, with depression or anxiety or lack of ambition. And then we say, ‘Oh well, this is the way I am.’ That is a huge cop-out. Those in recovery know the addiction is not who they are or want to be.”
I think every human being has a desire to attain a higher self, to be a better person in every way possible. Yet society too often rewards people who aren’t searching for the higher self. Take, for example, the abundant cases from Wall Street, Washington, DC, and Hollywood. Those cultures reward people who are looking out for themselves. Cutthroat behaviors and attitudes are effective and become the norm.
When I first got to Hollywood a friend of mine said, “The ethic here is not that you succeed. It’s that you have to succeed and your best friend has to fail.” The people who dominate Wall Street, Washington, DC, and Hollywood aren’t necessarily sociopaths, but many of them have little concern about their actions and their actions’ impact on others. Such people seem incapable of holding themselves accountable.
You may be reading this and thinking, What does this have to do with me? I don’t have any of these problems. What I am saying is that we addicts have had to change ourselves and we’ve had to embrace spiritual principles to try to find our higher selves. It’s a matter of survival for us. We’ve had to own what happens to us and take responsibility for our thoughts and actions. It may not be that much of a life and death issue right now for a non-addict but it’s still an important path to greater well-being. And to get there, you’ll have to have the courage to embrace these recovery principles.
What we learn as addicts in recovery is that if we focus on ourselves and we change ourselves according to spiritual principles, then we get along better with other people and, as a result, our little part of the world is a better place. It’s that simple—yet it means everything.
PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY INVOLVES FORGIVENESS
Many people forgive others for transgressions simply so they can move on and aren’t stuck in the past. “Without forgiveness we remain locked in a jail cell of past hurt and pain,” wrote psychotherapist Donald Altman in his book The Joy Compass: Eight Ways to Find Lasting Happiness, Gratitude, and Optimism in the Present Moment, “all the while missing out on one of life’s greatest learning opportunities. Consider that when you sit in that cell, you have labeled yourself as a victim and thrown away the key. Holding on to resentment, anger, and bitterness may provide some sense of vindication, justification, and solace, but it does not offer any hope of joy.”
Joy and contentment are states of being we all seek in life, yet something we only see more clearly once we strip away materialistic pretensions and unrealistic expectations. The act of offering forgiveness to ourselves and others provides a time-tested way of transcending life’s accumulated sufferings. This isn’t a new idea, of course. Ancient wisdom enshrined the practice of forgiveness as part of a foundation for leading a spiritual life. But its relevance hasn’t in any way diminished over the centuries.
In the 2,500-year-old Buddhist meditation known as “loving-kindness,” a statement of forgiveness is the first blessing offered. Forgiveness is extended to anyone who may have harmed us, forgiveness is requested from anyone we may have harmed, and then forgiveness is offered back to us for any harm we have done to our own selves. That harm to self usually comes from the incessant sniping of our inner critic.
Our inner critic is that mental voice (or voices) that whispers or sometimes even screams at us with instructions about how we should feel and behave. We are told we aren’t good enough, we’re not deserving, we should always be right, we should never forget past wrongs, or we shouldn’t trust anyone or anything—especially when it comes to giving or receiving love.
Taking a daily inventory of yourself and your thoughts—and in the process, raising your self-awareness—will help you identify that inner critic and begin to diminish its power over you. As Altman observed in his book, “Know that it will take time and practice to let go of old critical scripts or behaviors. Letting go is a first step. Remember to offer forgiveness to yourself when the critic reappears. Then, let go again. It takes time to rewire your brain for joy.”
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