In the very last part of the section on ethics in Present With Suffering, I say that each of us is one hundred percent responsible for our own emotions. I also say that this is important because when we take responsibility, total responsibility for absolutely everything we feel, in that moment we have complete agency. Nobody is doing anything to us. It is all in our own hands.
This is a principle that inevitably comes up in my practice of psychotherapy where it is understandable that someone from a difficult or abusive background may feel they are the victim of their circumstances. Surely I did not choose to have parents who mistreated or were disinterested in me? Or a husband who was violent? How could I be responsible for feeling anxious and depressed when I feel these things because of what they have done to me? Furthermore, my suggestion that we are responsible often triggers difficult reactions - am I saying that what happened to the person was their own fault? That they did something wrong that legitimised the damaging behaviours they were on the receiving end of?
The short answer to these questions is no. Those people who hurt us are similarly one hundred percent responsible for their own actions. Even though we may be able to trace the causes that contributed to their behaviours, they nonetheless remain responsible for what they did with these causes. I am not - not - letting anyone off the hook of personal responsibility. Nor am I denying that there is a cause and effect relationship in which our actions have an effect on others - for good or bad. If I were to deny this, then apart from it being obviously untrue, it would also deny the Buddhist principles of karma, interdependence and indeed the whole bodhisattva ideal of practicing not just for ourselves, but everyone else as well. So, yes, we do all affect each other.
What I am saying is that the way we receive what is done to us is dependent upon a whole array of our own previous conditionings that colour the experience of it. Someone attacks me but the way I receive and experience the attack is dependent on me. If the nature of the attack is something that doesn’t bother me than the attack will glance off or be easily recovered from. If the nature of the attack mirrors attacks I have experienced in the past, particularly my early childhood, then the attack will be more painful and sustained. The attack is a first arrow. I have no control over this. Attacks happen all the time one way or another. But the second arrow, how I receive what I experience, how I am with the sensations that arise within me, once I am conscious, is entirely my responsibility. And becoming conscious, making wise and skilful decisions about how I am with the emotions I feel, taking total responsibility for them, is what gives me agency. Taking things into my own hands I open the possibility of being free.
NW. 24.7.23
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