Avoiding responsibility

The word “responsibility” has many shades of meaning. We call a reliable, trustworthy person “responsible.” “Responsibility” also implies accountability – legal, financial, or moral. In the field of mental health, “responsibility” refers to the patient’s ability to behave rationally, as well as the therapist’s moral obligations to the patient. Although each of these meanings has one way or another to do with our topic, here I use the word “responsibility” in one specific sense – in the same sense as Jean-Paul Sartre, when he wrote that being responsible means being “the undisputed author of an event or thing.”

Compulsion

One of the most common dynamic defenses against responsibility is the creation of a mental world in which there is no experience of freedom, but rather existence under the rule of some kind of insurmountable force alien to the Ego (“not me”). We call this defense “compulsivity.”

A clinical illustration is the case of Bernard, a twenty-five-year-old traveling salesman whose main problems centered around guilt and “obsession.” He was obsessed with his sexual behavior, his work, and even his free time. This is the man mentioned in the example given in the introduction to Part II. when he failed to arrange an intimate meeting (he deliberately called too late), he breathed a sigh of relief: “Now I can read and sleep tonight–which is what I really wanted.” This remarkable phrase, “what I really wanted,” encapsulates the mystery of Bernard’s problems. An obvious question arises. “Bernard, if that’s what you really want, why don’t you just do it?” Bernard answered this question in different ways. “I didn’t know that this was what I really wanted until I felt a wave of relief pass through my body when the last woman refused me.” Another time, his answer was that he didn’t realize he had a choice. “Taking off a woman is all that was discussed.” The attraction was so domineering that he could not even think about not going to bed with an available woman, although it was quite clear that brief sexual arousal was not worth the unpleasant experiences associated with it – anticipatory anxiety, feelings of dissatisfaction with himself (constant reflection sexual topics reduced his potency), feelings of guilt and fear that his wife would find out about his sexual promiscuity, self-contempt due to the consciousness that he acted dishonestly, using women as inanimate objects. Bernard thus avoided the problem of responsibility and choice with the help of compulsivity, which eliminated choice, in his subjective experience it was as if he, fighting for his life, was trying to stay astride a crazed, uncontrollable wild horse. He sought therapeutic help seeking relief from his dysphoria, but he did not want to see that on a certain level he was responsible for his dysphoria, his compulsivity–in short, for creating every aspect of his difficult life situation.

Transfer of responsibility

Many people avoid personal responsibility by transferring it to someone else. This maneuver is especially common in a psychotherapeutic situation. One of the main themes of my work with Bernard was his desire to shift responsibility from himself to me. Between sessions, he didn’t think about his problem, instead he just collected the material and “dumped” it on my lap. (He cunningly countered my comment on this, saying that if he had “processed” the material in advance, there would have been no spontaneity in the sessions.) He rarely brought dreams, because he couldn’t bring himself to write them down during brief nighttime awakenings, and by morning he had forgotten. On the rare occasions when Bernard recorded a dream, he never looked at the recording between the time of writing and the session, and often in the end was unable to decipher his own handwriting. During the summer break, when I went on vacation, he “counted the hours” until my return, and the night before our scheduled meeting, he had a dream that he was playing soccer and saw himself sitting on my shoulders and receiving the ball behind the opponent’s field line. In the first session, he symbolically played out this dream: he overwhelmed me with detailed reports about his summer worries, feelings of guilt, sexual behavior, and self-deprecation. For four weeks, he succumbed to his compulsivity and anxiety, waiting for me to return so that I could show him how to counter them. Often using brainstorming techniques in his work, he nevertheless seemed confused when I suggested that he do a simple exercise (reflect on himself for twenty minutes and then write down his observations). After several (fruitful) attempts, he “couldn’t find the time” for the exercise. After the session, in which I persistently continued to show him how he was shifting his problems onto me, he had a dream: “Man X (an individual who resembled Bernard, obviously a doppelganger) called me, wanting to meet with me. He said that I knew his mother and now he wants to see me. I felt like I didn’t want to meet him. Then I decided that since he works in the field of public relations, maybe I should think about what I can get from him. But then we couldn’t set aside time for a meeting: our plans were incompatible. I told him, “Maybe we should schedule a meeting to talk about your plan!’ I woke up laughing.” Bernard drove fifty miles to meet me, and he never felt burdened by a long road. However, as the dream clearly shows, he could not and did not seek to find time for a session with himself. Undoubtedly, for Bernard, as for any other patient who does not work in the absence of a therapist, it is not a matter of time or convenience. It’s about facing your personal responsibility for your own life and the process of change. And the consciousness of responsibility is invariably accompanied by the fear of lack of soil. Taking responsibility is a necessary prerequisite for therapeutic change. As long as a person believes that his situation and his dysphoria are caused by someone else or some external force, what is the point of striving for personal change? People show inexhaustible ingenuity in finding ways to avoid the consciousness of responsibility. One patient, for example, complained of severe, long-standing sexual problems in his marriage. I am convinced that if he had accepted responsibility for his situation, he would have faced a frightening confrontation with his own freedom, discovering that he was imprisoned in a prison of his own creation. Indeed, he was free: if sex was important enough to him, he could leave his wife, or find another woman, or think about leaving his wife (just the thought of breaking up with her was enough to cause a paroxysm of anxiety). He was free to change any aspect of his sex life, and this fact was also significant because it meant that this man had to accept responsibility for the lifelong suppression of his sexual feelings, as well as many other aspects of his affective life. As a result, he stubbornly avoided meeting with responsibility and explained his sexual problems by a number of factors external to himself: his wife’s lack of sexual interest and tendency to change; creaking bed springs (so loud that the children could hear the sounds of intercourse; for many absurd reasons, the bed could not be changed); his age (to him he was forty-five) and an innate libidinal deficiency; his unresolved problems with his mother (as often happens with genetic explanations, this served more as an excuse to avoid responsibility than as a catalyst for change). There are other ways of transferring responsibility that are often found in therapeutic practice. Paranoid patients obviously delegate responsibility to other individuals and forces. They renounce their own feelings and desires, invariably explaining their dysphoria and their failures by external influences. The main and often impossible therapeutic task in working with paranoid patients is to help them accept their own authorship of their projected feelings. Avoiding responsibility is also a fundamental obstacle in the psychotherapy of patients with psychosomatic illnesses. In such patients, responsibility is excluded twice: they experience somatic distress instead of psychological distress; even recognizing the psychological substrate of their somatic disorder, they tend to resort to protection through externalization – explaining their psychological dysphoria by bad nerves or unfavorable environmental conditions.

Denial of responsibility: an innocent victim

A separate type of responsibility avoidance is the tendency of some individuals (usually classified as hysterical individuals) to deny responsibility by feeling like an innocent victim of events that they themselves (unwittingly) initiated. For example, Clarissa, a forty-year-old woman practicing psychotherapy, joined the therapeutic group to work on her long-standing difficulties in developing intimate relationships. She had extremely difficult relationship problems with men, starting with her rude, accusing father, who habitually rejected and punished her. During our first meeting before joining the group, she told me that she had stopped long-term psychoanalytic therapy a few months ago and now believes that it is better to deal with her problems in a group situation. After several months of visiting the group, she informed us that she resumed her analysis shortly after joining the group, but did not consider this circumstance important enough to inform the group. However, now her therapist, who strongly disapproves of group therapy, interprets her participation in the therapeutic group as a “reaction.” Obviously, a patient cannot work in a therapeutic group if his individual therapist objects to this work and undermines it. At Clarissa’s suggestion, I tried to get in touch with her therapist, but he preferred to remain in a psychoanalytical position of complete confidentiality and–in my opinion, with some arrogance – refused to even talk to me about this topic. I felt that Clarissa had “set me up”, I was annoyed with her therapist and stunned by the turn of events. Clarissa maintained an air of complete innocence and slight perplexity about the confusing events happening to her all the time. The members of the group believed that she was “playing dumb” and, trying to help Xi see her own role in these events, became more categorical, almost accusatory in their comments. Clarissa felt persecuted again, especially by men, and “due to circumstances beyond her control” she was forced to leave the band. This incident reproduced in miniature Clarissa’s central problem – avoiding responsibility, which she achieved by playing the role of an innocent victim. Although she wasn’t ready to see it yet, this situation contained the solution to her difficulties in an intimate relationship. Two important men in her life, her analyst and her group therapist, felt that they were being manipulated, and–speaking of me–they were angry with her. The other band members also felt used. Her relationship with them was not sincere; on the contrary, they felt like mere puppets in the drama she was playing out with her therapists. Let us recall that Clarissa sought therapeutic help because of her difficulties in establishing an intimate relationship. Her responsibility for these difficulties was very clear to the group. She’s never really been with anyone. Being with the group members, she was with me at the time: being with me, she was with her therapist; and undoubtedly, being with him, she was actually with her father. Her mental dynamics as an innocent victim were all the more obvious because she was an experienced psychotherapist herself, led therapeutic groups, and was well aware of the importance of contact between an individual and a group therapist.

Denial of responsibility: loss of control

Another way to throw off responsibility is to temporarily be “out of your mind.” Some patients tend to temporarily enter an irrational state, in which they seem to be given the right to act irresponsibly, because they are unable to account for their behavior, even to themselves. This is exactly the problem that the therapist raised in one of the examples given at the beginning of part II, when he asked the patient (who complained that her behavior was not intentional): “Whose unconscious is this?” It is important to note that, after carefully examining such a patient, the therapist will find that the “loss of control” does not occur by chance, it is purposeful. and it allows the patient to both receive secondary benefits (“rewards”) and experience self-deception of avoiding responsibility. The patient, who was subjected to rough and cruel treatment by an insensitive, sadistic lover and then rejected by him, “lost control” and, “going crazy,” radically changed the balance of power in the relationship. She continuously harassed him for several weeks; repeatedly broke into his apartment, causing senseless destruction there; staged scenes with piercing screams and throwing dishes in restaurants when he was having lunch there with friends. Thanks to her crazy, unpredictable behavior, she won a complete victory. The former lover panicked, began to seek protection from the police and eventually called for urgent psychiatric help. At that moment, having achieved her goal, she – strangely enough – regained control of herself and began to behave completely rationally. A milder version of this dynamic is by no means uncommon. For many people, their own potential irrationality serves as a means of tyranny over their partner. Losing control brings with it another common reward: intimate care. Some patients crave so much for a therapist to babysit them, spoon-feed them, and generally take care of them in the most intimate way that they “lose control” for this, even to the point of deep regression requiring hospitalization.

Avoiding autonomous behavior

Therapists are often perplexed by patients who know very well what to do to help themselves, but inexplicably refuse to take the necessary step. Paul, a depressed patient who was in the process of finding a job, came to New York for an interview with employers. He felt terribly lonely: the interviews filled only six hours of the three-day period, and the rest of the time was spent in a lonely, feverish expectation. In the past, Paul had lived in New York for a long time, and he had many friends there, whose presence would undoubtedly cheer him up. He spent two lonely evenings looking at his phone and wishing they would call. which was impossible, since there was no way they could find out about his stay in the city. However, he couldn’t pick up the phone and call them. Why? We analyzed this situation in detail, starting with explanations like “no energy”, “I feel too humiliated to look for a company”, “they would decide that I only call them when I need them”. It was only gradually that we realized that his behavior reflected a lack of willingness to accept that his well-being and comfort were in his own hands and that help would not come until he took action to bring that help closer. At one point, I said that he was afraid of the prospect of being his own father; this phrase had a powerful effect on Paul, and in the course of further therapy, he repeatedly returned to it. The paradox of his situation was that in order to overcome his social loneliness, he had to experience his existential loneliness. In these examples, we see a confluence of reference structures: accepting responsibility leads to abandoning faith in the existence of the ultimate savior – an extremely difficult task for an individual who has built his worldview on the foundation of this faith. These two reference structures together define the basic dynamics of addiction, and also provide the therapist with a complete and powerful explanatory system that allows them to understand the pathologically dependent nature.

Disorders in the sphere of desires and decision-making

The one who, fully aware, feels the desire and makes a decision, invariably faces responsibility. Everyone creates themselves, and the central theme of the next one is that experiencing desires and making decisions are the constituent elements of creation. As Sartre often said, an individual’s life is constituted by his choices. The individual comes into existence by his own will in the form of what he is. If a person is terrified of the consciousness of self-constitution (and of the concomitant consciousness of lack of ground), then he may avoid exercising his will, for example, by making himself insensitive to his desires or feelings, refusing to make a choice or shifting the choice to other people, institutions or external events.

Source: Irwin Yalom “Existential Psychotherapy”.