What Does “Responsibility” Mean?
I’m going on BBC Radio Four’s Free Thinking programme soon. Subject: responsibility. So I thought I’d better write something to clarify my thoughts about responsibility to give myself a chance of being able to articulate what I feel about the subject.
There is a version of modern life that encourages us to think of ourselves as permanently wronged. Sometimes this is justified. People are betrayed, neglected, abused, discriminated against, unlucky. Terrible things happen and some people are handed far heavier burdens than others. Acknowledging suffering is not self indulgence, it is often the beginning of healing. But there is a difference between recognising what has happened to us and building our identity around it.
We psychotherapists sometimes talk about an “external locus of control”, meaning the belief that our lives are largely directed by forces outside ourselves: fate, bad luck, difficult parents, bad bosses, manipulative lovers, governments, algorithms, economic conditions, other people’s choices. To pretend those things don’t influence us would be absurd. Yet if we locate all power outside ourselves, we can end up feeling as though we are merely passengers in our own lives, waiting for rescue, fairness, recognition or revenge. I’ve been known to say to a client or people writing into my Substack: when are you going to get into the driving seat of your own life? People have dreams about driving and whether they can steer or not. Someone I know had a recurring dream he called, “the handlebars of life.”
When people feel trapped in this way, in the back seat, to continue with the metaphor, they often become preoccupied with blame. The mind circles endlessly around who caused the damage and who should apologise for it. Sometimes blame is entirely accurate. But even justified blame can become a place of psychological residence. Energy that might once have gone into adaptation, rebuilding or risk taking is redirected into prosecuting a case. We begin collecting evidence for our own powerlessness.
There can also be rewards for inhabiting this position, because sympathy is soothing, low expectations can feel protective. If we convince ourselves that nothing can change, we are spared the terror of trying and failing. This is known as “learnt helplessness”, a state in which repeated disappointments teach us to stop acting on our own behalf because we no longer believe our actions matter. The tragedy is that the less agency we practise, the weaker it becomes. Like a neglected muscle, it starts to waste away.
I sometimes notice this in therapy when people speak as though their feelings arrive from nowhere and dictate behaviour entirely. “He made me angry.” “She ruined my confidence.” “My childhood destroyed my ability to trust.” There may be truth in all these statements, but they can conceal another truth too: that between what happens to us and what we do next, there is a space. The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, writing after surviving concentration camps, described this space as the place where our freedom lives. Between stimulus and response, he argued, there is the possibility of choice. Response - ability!
Choice does not mean omnipotence. We cannot choose not to feel grief after loss, fear after trauma or hurt after betrayal. We cannot think ourselves out of structural injustice or illness. But we can influence what we do with our experiences. Responsibility, in its most useful sense, is not about blame or moral superiority. It is about response. The ability to respond.
An internal locus of control does not mean believing we can dominate every outcome. It means understanding that our actions, habits, interpretations and decisions exert influence over the shape of our lives. It is the difference between asking, “Whose fault is this?” and “What can I do now?” One question keeps us fixed to the scene of injury but the other begins movement.
Some of us were raised in environments where initiative was punished, confidence mocked or dependency encouraged. Others were protected so thoroughly that they never developed much tolerance for frustration or failure. Responsibility can feel frightening because it asks us to relinquish fantasies: the fantasy that someone else will eventually repair everything for us, the fantasy that certainty exists, the fantasy that safety lies in never risking change.
Yet responsibility is tied to freedom. The more responsibility we take for our responses, the more authorship we experience over our own lives. This is not the same as becoming harsh with ourselves. In fact, excessive self blame is often just another form of self sabotage. Responsibility is more practical than that. It’s more: this is where I am, this is what happened, and now I must decide what I am going to do with it.
People sometimes fear that moving away from a victim identity means minimising suffering. I think the opposite is true. When we are able to acknowledge pain without making it the organising principle of our personality, suffering becomes something we can work with rather than something we must endlessly prove. We stop waiting for life to become fair before participating in it.
Perhaps maturity involves recognising two apparently contradictory truths at once: we are shaped by what has happened to us, and we are not only what has happened to us.
Now, what else should I be aware of by Tuesday when the program is being recorded?
I really enjoyed reading this. I too believe in taking responsibility for my own life.
I also thought I would share that the first thing that sprung to mind was being called 'very responsible' as a child. In this context it meant that I could be trusted to follow the rules and to challenge those that didn't. I would often be put 'in charge' of my younger sibling and other kids by my mum, or a small group of peers at school. Despite being very shy during parts of life I have always identified as being a 'responsible' person so would always step up or put myself forward at university or at work for things I didn't particularly want to do but seemed like the responsible thing!
Later in my career I was deemed to have 'strong leadership skills' I wonder if I had been male if this distinction would be made earlier. I wish I had realised earlier that striving to be a leader would be a better goal than being responsible for everything! Are girls encouraged to be 'responsible' more than boys who are encouraged to be leaders?
There’s also feeling responsible for everyone around you, which can be a way of displacing attending to oneself. I’m sure many sandwich generation women know about this.