In his book Ego and Archetype, Jungian analyst Edward Edinger notes an interesting observation, one that I have gone back to many times in my attempt to understand the human experience, the relationship to freedom, and the responsibilities associated with individuality:

“In my experience, the basis of almost all psychological problems is an unsatisfactory relation to one’s urge to individuality. And the healing process often involves an acceptance of what is commonly called selfish. . . . The majority of patients in psychotherapy need to learn how to be more effectively selfish and more effective in the use of their personal power; they need to accept responsibility for the fact of being centers of power and effectiveness. . . . We demand from others only what we fail to give ourselves. If we have insufficient self-love or self-prestige, our need expresses itself unconsciously by coercive tactics toward others. And often the coercion occurs under the guise of virtue, love, or altruism.”

This is a commentary on responsibility and its relevance to the individual. Responsibility is usually only thought of in terms of guilt or duty. But the word responsibility also refers to the personal power to make decisions. Responsibility is just as much about what one has the power to do as it is about what one may have an obligation towards. In most ways the two are interconnected, but the problem is that in understanding the term solely in its obligatory form we lose out on owning the aspect of the word that denotes one’s personal power and effectiveness in how one decides to orient themselves in life.

I use the word orient as opposed to choose because there is much debate around whether free will exists or not. Much of that debate and where one stands within it, depends greatly on the technical perspective from which one is arguing. Of course, given a wide enough birth, no one is free at all, while on another, individuals clearly have some ability to manipulate their surroundings to their will, even if that will is ultimately dependent on something else such as the dependency on air to breathe, water to drink, and food to eat. 

Furthermore, in the very least, the belief that one has free will clearly seems to produce results that would not occur had the person not believed they had the free will to do it. This is similar in my opinion to how a placebo works, i.e. something with the inability to produce an effect, produces a measurable effect due to a person’s mental attitude towards it even though that placebo is inert.  

However comfortable one feels with the concept of free will it is fair to make a distinction between one’s circumstances and one’s reactions to them, between what may happen to us and how we respond. This is nothing new. Many philosophical and spiritual traditions have emphasized the difference over the centuries, noting that the awareness one has of the attitude one takes in respect to what occurs is a power that, although may be difficult to hone, nonetheless exists, and can be developed in reasonable ways. Such an ability involves a development in consciousness where one learns to hone a separation between one’s thought processes and one awareness or attention. With meditative and reflective practice comes the ability to gradually increase the distance between what happens and how one responds. 

A common way this perspective is interpreted is through the fashionable dictum that pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. That is, life is entails difficulty, but this in no way defines life in entirety. Life is hard and unsatisfactory at times, but one can choose how to respond, what to learn, and how make use of those situations that are less than desirable. Not only is there such a choice in the matter, it is one’s responsibility. This is responsibility in the sense of being the one in charge of their life to a certain degree, tasked with the duty of orienting one’s self, but also responsibility in the sense of having the power to craft a response, to nurture a perspective that is grounded in wisdom.

This is important because indeed much of life is not under one’s control. Many things happen to us that one did not choose and often times does not deserve. If one gets injured in a car accident for instance due to the fault of another, it is not that the person is injured is responsible in a karmic sense for another person’s wrongdoing, but that the injured person is responsible for how they react, how they decide to learn and move forward from the incident. 

It is important to hold people accountable when they commit acts that harm or injure others, but it is also essential that individuals do not get mired in overestimating the reality of responsibility one has in the matter. When they do they undercut their own power and ability to take action and craft a perspective relative to a healthy way of moving forward in life. 

Perhaps a person crashes their car into yours. That person may be responsible for the crash, but regardless of that reality is the fact that you are the one in now in charge of responding to the event, of learning from it, moving forward, staying grounded, and that is a reality and a fact that putting the blame on the other, even if they are responsible, cannot change. Even once the person takes responsibility, it is still your responsibility to figure out a “meaning” to what happened or to decide what to learn from it, how to move forward, and that remains the case for every situation that ever occurs.  

Often it becomes very easy to fall in love with victimhood, of always blaming circumstance, or always blaming the other. Such overindulgence occurs and with it one undermines and denies one’s innate power to change their lives. When Edinger states that “The majority of patients in psychotherapy need to learn how to be more effectively selfish and more effective in the use of their personal power; they need to accept responsibility for the fact of being centers of power and effectiveness,” and that “We demand from others only what we fail to give ourselves” he is pointing to the reluctance on the part of many people to own an aspect of freedom that is part in parcel to being human. In the statement is also the warning that this is a power most people are reluctant to embrace because of the risks inherent to being responsible. If we can act than we can fail; much easier to blame others.  

This was underscored in a short documentary narrated by a counselor who discussed overcoming physical and sexual abuse as a child. The counselor ends up stating that he eventually realized that it was not that what happened to him was the problem, it was his attachment to it that was causing his suffering. That is, his suffering was the product of being unable to put a sufficient amount of distance between what had happened to him and who he still was. This was not a denial or repression of what occurred, nor a refusal to hold others accountable, but a thoughtful and powerful acknowledgment where he could state, “Yes, I was abused, and it was a painful and troubling experience, but it does not define me. I can choose to what degree those incidents make up my being and selfhood.”            

Of course we love to come up with dark counter examples (counter examples we usually have no experience with) in order to refute a position and deny the possibility of staying grounded in some kind of present awareness even in the darkest of times, but this usually involves a misunderstanding. There is no need to be superhuman; there is no denial of the suffering that accompanies much of life, just an awareness in the moment that there is a presence behind experience and that it is up to each person how they decide to orient themselves or respond, and in what ways. You have no choice.