Contemplating Responsibility

(Nimue)

I’ve never liked the approach that says we are 100% responsible for how we respond to things. It ignores what panic does to the body (fight, flight, freeze, fawn). It ignores what triggers do to the body (flashbacks, intrusive thought, panic). All too often it’s used as a get-out card for people who cause harm and refuse to take responsibility.

“I can’t be responsible for how you react to me,” isn’t a fair response when someone has told you that actions you are choosing are harmful. An obvious example would be insisting on touching someone who has problems with being touched on the grounds that it is normal behaviour for you and therefore shouldn’t be a problem. I’ve run into that one repeatedly.

I firmly believe that we all have responsibilities when it comes to how we treat each other. We have a duty not to cause harm through lack of care and attention. If someone tells us something is a problem to them and we blithely keep doing it, that makes us assholes.

This can of course be played the other way. Anything can be weaponised, which is why conversations about human behaviour need to be nuanced and not full of absolutes. There are a number of psychological conditions that leave people struggling to cope with negative feedback. At the gentler end there’s rejection sensitive dysphoria. That’s something to handle gently, because it can be very tough on sufferers. However, to function as a person, they still need to know what’s going on and what other people need. Handling difficult issues kindly makes a lot of odds.

Narcissism is another condition that makes criticism unbearable for the sufferer. Narcissists tend to deal with this pain by lashing back, blaming the person who has called them out, and reversing the situation. Try to explain to a narcissist why their behaviour isn’t ok and the odds are you’ll be accused of abusing them. This need to reverse everything so that they are always the injured party leads narcissists to gaslighting themselves and others – consciously or not. It’s a horrible condition and harms the sufferer at least as much as it does the people they mistreat.

Then there are the people who know perfectly well that what they’re doing isn’t ok, but they’d quite like to keep doing it. I expect there’s a technical term for that, but I don’t know what it is! These are people with low empathy, who actively enjoy hurting others or whose extreme selfishness dominates all their choices. While I can feel some compassion for people struggling with narcissism, this is a whole other level.

The green flag here is the idea of shared responsibility. No matter how messy things are, if people are actively trying to cooperate and trying to be accountable to each other then that’s a very good sign. Well meaning people can get into all kinds of messes. People working through their own traumas and issues can be challenging, but that urge to share responsibility and find collective ways through is a pretty good indicator that it’s worth trying. A person can be difficult without being deliberately harmful. A person can have limits on their own capacity for responsibility and can need help handling things. When we work together these are challenges that can be overcome.

What needs avoiding are situations where one person has all the power and another person bears all the responsibility.