The key to happiness is taking full responsibility for us and our life. I have worked with many clients who have experienced abuse in one form or the other in their lives and there are 2 common factors they experience: they all have a sense of anger, associated with a sense of powerlessness, and they struggle to take full responsibility and be happy. Ok, now I hear some people who might say: They are not taking responsibility for their lives, or They only do self-pity. No, no, no, I do not agree with that, I will never accept people blame others. There is always a reason why people do things, and in my experience sometimes people are not able to take responsibility or they do not know what exactly responsibility is. Ok, so what is responsibility? It is not something heavy on our shoulders; it is very simple and very empowering. It is taking back our power of making choices for everything in our life. It is acknowledging that we have created everything in our life through choices, whether conscious or unconscious ones; and also not making choices is a choice in itself, so we have really created everything. That is to say that if we have created everything, we can change everything, if we want to. Example, if I am angry, I can say: I have created this anger, so I can change it. How empowering is that? Taking responsibility is also acknowledging past or present behaviours, very simply, and deciding what to do about them. So, taking responsibility is: deciding what we do in our lives and with ourselves, organizing our lives, deciding what we want, being excited in creating our lives knowing that we can handle anything we encounter, and this implies a high level of self-esteem knowing that we need to respect ourselves first knowing that we also need to protect ourselves a little And also how about taking pride in having full responsibility and thanking yourself for having taken full responsibility? This will help you to feel good and keep taking responsibility. In particular for people who have experienced abuse, the way to let go of the anger and take responsibility is by developing a belief which says:No matter how other people are, they are outside me, I organize and live my life and enjoy it. And so taking responsibility is like owning ourselves and our life, but it is more, it is response-ability, it is the capacity to respond to anything we encounter in our lives. That is to say that we have the capacity to choose how we respond to events, situation, people, we have that power. And how do we do that? We can choose the meaning we give to events, situation, people, we can choose a meaning that is empowering, that allows us to move forward and grow. And we can choose how we talk to ourselves; we can choose how we communicate with ourselves, because personal response-ability is also that. How do you choose to talk to yourself? Copyright Piercarla Garusi 2006. All rights reserved. |
