One of the essential steps in my own healing journey, and many others I serve as they navigate grief, is to choose to accept responsibility for my response to what happened to me—at least 1%.
Victor Frankl has been a source of encouragement and support for me in this area. Frankl was interned in a Nazi Concentration Camp and noticed the different ways his fellow prisoners reacted to life in the concentration camp, its cruelty and unimaginable horror. One of his observations:
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, (is) to choose one's own way.”
To be clear - we’re not accepting responsibility for the painful things that happened to us beyond our control - just for our response to them.
Likewise, accepting at least 1% responsibility for our response to our circumstances is not an attempt to deny or bypass our painful emotions. Rather, it is a doorway to engage our painful emotions and choose how we respond to them.
With as little as 1%, we begin to escape the gravitational pull of the Black Hole of victimhood and its feelings of powerlessness and regain some agency in what happened and our path moving through the emotional pain. This is no saccharine Pollyanna or denial of reality; rather, it is the presence of the reality of the pain of loss that we choose what kind of people we want to be and, as best as we are able, live accordingly.
A dragon guards this treasure.
I don’t know your pain, but I know mine, and a challenge for me was just the stifling fear. The fear of having to engage the memories and pain can be VERY formidable and make the act of accepting 1% responsibility for our response very daunting. Fear that we may be swallowed up and be lost in it all can be truly paralyzingly. Doing so requires courage. A lot of courage that often looks like a series of small steps, and often with good support.
Painting a Fence with a Screwdriver
Sadly, many of us have tools that don’t really deal with our pain. Instead, they help us avoid, disguise and deny our pain. It gives us a sense of relief for the short term, but that pain is still very much there.
Some of these unhelpful tools are pretty obvious: abusing drugs, alcohol, retail therapy, eating, sex, exercise and even religion - even beneficial things used to avoid dealing with the pain of our trauma can be unhelpful tools. And there are some sneaky, unhelpful tools, and these might include:
“They (those who hurt us) were broken; they didn’t understand what they were doing.” “They were trying their best with what they had.” “They meant well.” Or “I forgive them.”
These can be entirely true factually, but it doesn’t change the reality that you have still experienced loss, and it is this pain that needs to be addressed.
Sometimes, we give away our responsibility for our responses and our own power by blaming. While it is often legitimate to assign responsibility to persons and situations that hurt us so deeply, this doesn’t help us heal our hearts.
Accepting at least 1% of the responsibility for our response to our hurt can be enough for us to begin to take action. It might be enough to help us reach out for support, to learn and practice the helpful ways of engaging with our pain in ways that may lead to a little bit of healing, a little more wholeness and making space for a little more peace.
Make no mistake, we will still have our scars and our limps because our best tools and support can’t change the past, but by accepting at least 1% responsibility for our response to our pain, we can begin our healing journey.
There are really no shortcuts for addressing our deepest pain. The path is through it, and there are good resources and supports to help you do so, but this journey starts with our choice to do so - at least 1%.