From Where I Sit

I’d been meeting with Harry (no real names or individual stories are used in this blog) on and off over several months as he worked to overcome an addiction to a gambling lifestyle. Harry (and his family) had not been happy with the amount of time and money that was taken up by gambling. Harry had been making such good progress that he had taken a break and I hadn’t seen him for a little while. He returned explaining that he had recently found himself in the casino and had once again lost more money than he could afford to lose.

This story though isn’t about beating addiction, (that will be for another post), nor is this story about the lapses and setbacks that happen as people struggle to step away from the behaviours of addiction (the road to progress is paved with potholes and bumps); This story is about how Harry explained why he got separated from his better judgement and spent an afternoon gambling in the casino. In Harry’s explanation it was not his fault.

This is the initial story Harry gave for why he ended up in the casino; It started with waiting for the bus to come to take him off to visit a friend, but no bus was coming so he had to start walking to the train station. According to Harry if the bus had come he wouldn’t have gambled the afternoon away. On the way to the train station, the street was blocked for repairs and Harry had to take a detour which took him right past the casino, “If the road hadn’t been blocked then I wouldn’t have taken a detour and walked past the casino and gone in” was Harry’s reasoning. As he was passing the casino, it started to rain heavily and that was when Harry decided to go inside for shelter. You can probably guess that Harry also blamed the weather for ending up inside the casino.

What was missing from Harry’s account for why he ended up in the casino was any mention of personal responsibility for a poor choice. Harry was barely recognising he had made any choice at all.

It’s very understandable that Harry might be avoiding taking responsibility for the choice he made, after all personal responsibility can bring forward a sense of guilt, remorse, regret or self-recrimination, as well as leaving us feeling we let ourselves (and others) down, or that we should know better. This is the bad news about personal responsibility; it can be painful.

It can be so painful that we do everything to avoid facing up to it. We look for reasons and rationalisations for why it wasn’t our fault, why we weren’t to blame, why the odds were stacked against us. After all if we’re not to blame then we don’t end up feeling so bad about ourselves.

So it’s easy to see why people shift the blame for the actions they feel bad about onto other people or external causes. However, what’s harder to see is the hidden cost that comes with blaming other people or external events for the choices we make. The hidden cost is that if we believe that other people or external events caused us to behave in a certain way then we are in effect saying we are not in control of our own lives, and if we are working hard to overcome a problem behaviour like an addiction, then this is very bad news indeed.

So here’s the good news on personal responsibility; if we want to take control of our lives and move away from less desirable behaviours, it is very much in our interest to feel that we shape our own decisions and behaviours. If we control our own behaviours then we have a fighting chance to shape our own lives and the choices we make. If other people or external circumstances really were in control of our behaviour and the choices we make this would be very bad news for us particularly if we wanted a change of direction in our life.

So for Harry the bad news is that it feels a little uncomfortable to face up to personal responsibility, but the good news is that he regains a sense of control over choices and decisions for his own life.

We are then just left to investigate why Harry made a poor choice on that particular day, but that’s for another post.

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