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LESSON #2

ACCEPT PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY

The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life is the source from which self-respect springs.

—JOAN DIDION

People in recovery from addictions must take responsibility for their own actions and eventual wellness. Imagine how much more harmonious and healthy all human interactions would be if everyone stopped playing the blame game and the role of victim.

MEET JACK GRISHAM. As Jack’s father lay dying in a San Diego naval hospital following a heart attack, he looked up into his son’s eyes and mumbled, “I love you.” It was only the second time in twenty-three-year-old Jack’s life that he had ever heard his father say those words.

Not knowing how to respond, Jack replied with the only thing he could think of that might make his father happy: “I’ll go home and mow the lawn.”

The next day his father died, and Jack immediately bagged up all of his father’s clothing and other belongings and threw them into Dumpsters.

Not long afterward, Jack’s mother filed a lawsuit alleging that her husband had died prematurely from the stress induced by the demands of his shipping industry job. The employer fired back with legal documents arguing that the elder Grisham’s stress was due entirely to his son Jack, whose outrageous troublemaking had constantly weighed on Grisham.

There could be no doubt that Jack had caused his parents considerable grief. Jack’s mother affirmed that when she confessed to him years later, “Not a night went by that I wasn’t praying you wouldn’t get killed.”

Alone among the family’s five children, Jack had been arrested—taken into custody at least two dozen times, in fact—on charges ranging from vandalism and assault, to throwing a brick through a cop car window and incitement to riot. As the lead singer for a notorious West Coast punk rock band, Jack defiantly called himself an anarchist. He considered violence, drug use, and debauchery badges of honor. He painted his face pasty white, wore cowboy boots with sharpened spurs, and generally acted like a maniac during his band’s punk rock performances. He intentionally cultivated an aura of glowering menace.

Through all of the years of senseless mayhem, including having their home shot at and his car firebombed, Jack’s parents had stood by him, if only passively. They never kicked him out of the house. To this day, Jack marvels at that, though part of the reason may have been his father’s paralyzing alcoholism, which rendered the family dysfunctional on many different levels.

Within a year of his father’s death, Jack began trying to get sober from his drug and alcohol dependencies. He had simply grown tired of being out of control, and he had a girlfriend nursing a serious drug problem of her own. He wanted to get sober with her. Given the rampant drug abuse within the music circles he traveled, getting sober was a radical thing to do. Instead of thumbing his nose at government and other institutions of society, as his song lyrics so frequently did, he was now rejecting a central lifestyle tenet of the subculture within which he had become a role model. His friends thought he had either gone crazy or was pulling yet another prank on everyone.

His sobriety came in fits and starts. His wife, the girl he had gotten sober with, relapsed and left him, but he continued going to 12-Step meetings. Jack finally broke free of drugs and alcohol for good on January 8, 1989. He has been sober ever since.

“For me, when I got sober, it was like a tidal wave had come and I was swept along with it,” he explained to me several decades into his recovery.

I’m not really seeing what’s happening, and the tidal wave dropped me off, and as the water recedes, I start to see things. Like, I’m in my twenties and living with my mother. The water sucks back some more. I’ve got a daughter I haven’t been seeing. It sucks back some more. I am being blamed for my father’s death. It keeps receding, more and more, and I am able to see all of the damage my behavior has caused. It was like a coroner’s blanket being pulled back slowly from over a frightening mess. I had started to wake up, and my head began to clear.

Though some people tried to convince Jack it wasn’t his fault his father had died at age fifty-five, Jack wasn’t buying it. He said:

I got the full realization of what I had done to my father. I saw my role in his death. I had to accept my role, take responsibility, and stop playing the victim. My sobriety demanded it. Justice demanded it. I couldn’t blame anything anymore, not my anger, not my behavior, not my father’s alcoholism, not on our screwed-up society, not on police brutality, not on an untrustworthy government—not on any of the other targets I used to sing about on stage with my band. I realized how I had created all of the negativity I was wallowing in, and my own selfishness had created my own demons.

Not long into recovery Jack visited his father’s grave for the first time since the burial. He stood there alone, a stream of painful memories washing over him, and had the longest conversation of his life with his father. “I told him how sorry I was. I told him how I had hurt him and added to his stress and pain. I told him how I had changed. I was in recovery. I had a bright future ahead of me. I told him I hoped he could be proud of me now.”

With recovery, Jack was reborn into another way of thinking. He took responsibility for all parts of his life. He became a new kind of role model. He still plays music, but without any of the other lifestyle toxins and attachments from his previous life. He has become a clinical hypnotherapist and an inspirational speaker performing on a new stage—before hundreds of people at a time—extolling the life-changing miracles of recovery from addiction.

WHAT MAKING AMENDS DOES

When someone goes into recovery from an addiction, that person should take an inventory of who they really are. Everyone on the planet could benefit from doing this periodically, regardless of whether they are in recovery from an addiction or not, because that examination prepares you for a journey down the road of self-transformation toward becoming a more contented person.

This self-examination involves compiling a detailed checklist, much like what retail stores do in their annual inventory of merchandise, so you know what resources are available to you and what is missing. First, you must identify and understand the primary problem in your life, which could be just about anything, not just an addiction. Second, you need to develop an understanding of your responsibility in having created that problem. Third, accept that you’re responsible for changing the mind-set and behaviors that initiated or accompany the problems you experience.

Part of that process, the accepting personal responsibility piece, involves a realization that you’re responsible for virtually everything that happens in your life. You can’t legitimately claim victimhood. And you are the one who must fix the problems in your life—you can’t pawn off that responsibility. You must hold yourself accountable for your words and deeds.

Beginning in the 1970s, this theme struck a responsive chord with the more than one million people who participated in awareness training programs and workshops pioneered by groups such as est (Erhard Seminars Training), Landmark Forum, Lifespring, Temenos, and Pathways. These programs were designed to expand conscious awareness—bringing darkness into light—and improve the way people experience themselves and one another.

During these workshops, ground rules—stringently enforced—emphasized personal accountability, including something as simple as promising to be on time for each session. That might seem trivial, but punctuality (or lack of it) reveals a lot about people’s reliability. In many of these programs, if you were late to sessions or back from breaks, you were given the opportunity to stand up in front of everyone and confess that you had no one to blame but yourself. Excuses sound extremely lame when someone has to publicly confront an audience of faces staring back, like a giant mirror of self-reflection.

Early in my recovery, I blamed my upbringing for my having developed a drug dependency. I actually believed I was victimized on a variety of levels, and I felt totally justified in feeling and voicing that victimization. It’s true that I grew up in a family plagued by codependency, and I wasn’t taught very good interpersonal skills from my parents. They were both alcoholics, and my mother was devastated by the tragic events in her life, including losing two of her brothers to assassins. She became withdrawn and emotionally unavailable. People around me would get mad, and they couldn’t talk about it because they were afraid of their own anger. So they hid away all of this resentment and anger and plastered a smiley face on top of it. In our family, we would hide our feelings of victimization behind a mask of stoicism, which meant we couldn’t talk about any of it or deal with it on any level.

As with many people in recovery, I’ve struggled with an inability to get along with other people, whether it’s my kids, my family, or in my love life. I could be in a loving relationship, but then get suspicious, thinking the person was only in my life to get something. She didn’t really love me for me. She just loved where I had come from, the family I grew up with, or the possessions I had. She’s using me—that was my greatest fear.

Where did this message come from, and was it true? What was my responsibility insofar as dealing with it? I came to realize it wasn’t something being done to me. It was something I had created, and I had to take responsibility for it. Why did I create it? One reason has to do with self-worth. I did get a lot of attention for who I was in my life—the famous family I came from—and I became somewhat wedded to that image. In some ways, it was my only measure of my own self-worth.

During recovery, I slowly began to see my part in everything that happens to me. I no longer pretend to be a victim. So now when I’m in a good relationship and those whispers begin in my mind—“Maybe she’s not really here for you. Maybe she’s just really good at hiding her real intentions”—I recognize those inner voices as my fears resurfacing, as the feelings of insecurity that make me wonder whether or not I’m good enough for her and if she’s going to leave me.

Once I developed the understanding that I’m just manufacturing those fears, I had a choice and I could do something about it. When the inner voices try to sabotage me, I can call upon recovery skills and resources to counteract them and defuse their emotional impact.

Taking responsibility for thoughts and actions is a process. At every step you need to ask yourself what is real and what is merely your projection based on fear, habits, and upbringing. Most people don’t believe they have the time to work through this process. They’re running as fast as they can just to survive. Admittedly, it does take some time and energy to develop the capability and desire to do it. You need the willingness to engage yourself. It has to become important to you. That is true for everyone, but for addicts it’s absolutely crucial because for them it’s really a life and death issue.

LEVELS OF PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY

During my recovery from drug addiction, I’ve gotten to know dozens of experts in the recovery field. One of them, a well-known addictions-recovery specialist in New York, began an entire branch of research in 1998 to study the various approaches people use to stay in recovery from drugs and alcohol. Many of her close friends are in drug and alcohol recovery, and she has interviewed countless others in recovery, giving her a unique, valuable point of view.

“I’ve grown as a human being by accepting and acknowledging personal responsibility, and that’s happened as a result of being in contact with people working on themselves,” she told me.

When I began in recovery research, I interviewed people and heard their recovery stories and saw what they were going through in working the Twelve Steps. That experience taught me an enormous amount of what it means to be a human being. I am a “normie” but have grown enormously from learning these lessons, which can benefit everyone.

In looking back on their lives, many people insist on blaming others; they have to feel like victims. This blaming tendency goes back to childhood. We don’t usually teach children that all actions have consequences. For some reason in this society, saying I’m sorry or I was wrong feels so horrible that many people would rather not. It’s easier to blame what happens on someone else than to say you were wrong. I know many people whose lives haven’t turned out the way they wanted, and they blame it on circumstances or someone else. In any situation involving someone else, they had a role to play, even if it was just a small role. So it’s always best for us to ask ourselves if there is anything we would and could have done differently, and if so, would that have changed the outcome. Look at your 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.”