Responsibility vs Fault

My mom's death was...complicated and it left me completely bereft. I desperately wanted to understand the circumstances surrounding it. But there was no way that would ever happen because the parties involved all had their own experiences that colored their interpretation of said events...including me. But it was a great lesson in learning that problems can be powerful, and less painful, when we take full responsibility for the issue at hand. Problems can be powerful in that they provide us an opportunity to self-examine, reflect, and notice our failures, blindspots and even innocent-ish mistakes.

One of the issues that slowed my own recovery from this traumatic event was my confusion over responsibility versus fault. My therapist kept telling me, "This is not your fault" and she was right but it was hard for me to agree with her.

Over time, I came to realize that I resisted her determined attempts to draw a distinction between responsibility and fault because if I could find a way I was at fault, I unconsciously believed I could find a way to control and change the outcome. Which, when I think about it, is really silly. But it is true. I also had the opposite problem. There were parts of this family drama that I absolutely did not want to claim any fault for - no way! I did not know how to believe that I could be responsible without being at fault. And, I struggled to think about how to be responsible in areas where I was at fault.

Here is what was helpful for me. Fault is past tense. We find someone at "fault" as a result of the decisions they already made. Responsibility is what we choose to do in the present moment. Responsibility is claimed as we make choices in the here and now.

There are people whose decisions and their outcomes can result in fault being found and named. But no one is responsible for my situation because my situation is always my responsibility. The guy who hit us head on was at fault for speeding, driving on worn out tires and trying to change his radio while smoking a cigarette and navigating a turn on a rainy day. But only I am be responsible for how I follow up after the accident. I had to choose how to treat my medical conditions; our family had to choose the next vehicle. He is not responsible for that even though his faulty driving resulted in us needing to take on some additional responsibilities.

If you were able to separate fault from responsibility, would any of your nagging problems become more clear? Would solutions present themselves? Would life feel a bit more free from the burden of complicated grief?

Fail Better

When I was a little kid we lived in Virginia Beach. On the weekends we would often go through the tunnel and head back to Portsmouth, where my father's people lived, for family visits. For the length of the tunnel ride, my dad would yell, "Don't open those windows kids, if you do the water will come in!" I was terrified. I thought we were driving through water and our life depended on quickly plowing through it in our Chevy before our oxygen ran our or we sprung a leak. It turns out, I was also wrong about that tunnel. It was keeping the water out, not providing a mysterious passage via underwater travel in a Chevy.

Much of my life has been spent searching for the "right" belief system, the "correct" way to behave, the "best practice" for whatever project I undertook. I was wrong. I had it all backwards.

Growth, change, transformation - none of that stuff that I value so very much - is achieved through getting stuff right. I have fired myself from my endless search for the right answers in favor of what is turning out to be a ton more fun - wading through all the ways I am wrong, acknowledge it, embrace it and learn from it. If we can find a way to use our mistakes to make a few less mistakes tomorrow - we are growing!

Where is your tunnel-full-of-water leading you astray? Where is your endless search for improvement really taking you? What about if we all could get a bit more excited about noticing what we don't know, what we've gotten wrong, what we've failed at....and how that can help us learn something new, do something a little less wrong tomorrow, fail better?

Own It

For a month’s worth of posts, I (Scott) am critiquing my own past blog posts. I’m viewing this as an experiment in being willing to admit when I’m wrong, change my mind, and to do so publicly.

...continued from yesterday...

In order to learn something from our outbursts, we need to be willing to rigorously examine ourselves in the aftermath.  If we assume we were in the right and the other person was in the wrong, there is nothing to be gained.  In (almost) any fight, both parties are wrong, though to varying degrees.  One party may have more stuff to own than the other, but this does not mean the person with less has permission to avoid self-examination.  

We ask ourselves, “Where did I go wrong?”  “In what ways did I contribute to the mess?”  In other words, we start with the assumption that we did contribute and then work our way backwards towards the truth.  

If we begin with the assumption that we weren’t wrong and did not contribute to the mess, we will struggle to find evidence to the contrary.  

New Scott vs. Old Scott:

I totally agree with myself! It is crucially important in the aftermath of a conflict to seek out things you can take ownership of to the person you had conflict with. It is a huge trust and relationship builder if we can get ahead of these things. Owning mistakes before they’re brought to your attention is a relationship game-changer. 

Now, this is hard to do. We have blind spots. So- if you can’t figure out where you “went wrong” and  the other person points something out- then that’s also great. Work on being mindful of your defensiveness and choosing to set it to the side in order own your mistakes. 

What if failure is

We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

- Marilynne Robinson, Paris Review

How do you deal with the mistakes that you have made that harmed yourself and others? Do you try to forget it happened? Do you blame others or make excuses for yourself? Do you humiliate yourself in a fit of remorse? What part does manipulation play?

What if instead of leaning into our fear of failure and our dread over acknowledging our own fragility and humanity, we took a look at our list of shortcomings (selfishness, self-serving, dishonesty and fear) and thought about what our life would be like if these character flaws were removed by God?

What do you think your life would be like if God were to remove all your shortcomings?

This is Suffering

Anyone who has lived through it, or those who are now living through it, knows that caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself. At my worst, I even resented Nic because an addict, at least when high, has a momentary respite from his suffering. There is no similar relief for parents or children or husbands or wives or others who love them.

David Sheff, Beautiful Boy

How has your suffering exacerbated your mistakes?

What has it taught you and how might it have refined you?

If one shortcoming is fear - everyone who loves a person with a substance use disorder is plagued by it.

How does fear sometimes cause us to harm ourselves and/or others?

This is suffering. There is no need for judgment but plenty of opportunity to take a different path. Who can help you take a different path if you are suffering and find yourself living in ways that do not fit your intentions? As Mr. Rogers says, “Look for the helpers.” This saying was meant for preschoolers, and lately it has been used to bear more weight than I think Mr. Rogers could have imagined. But if we refuse to allow it to be a cliche, it still has value. We can look for someone to help us sort through our lives. That’s always a good thing.