One of the things I seem to notice about life more and more (particularly in American Culture) is that everything is reactionary. Everything that we ever do is in some way related to something or someone else. It’s a pretty simple idea; all the events in your life influence what kind of person you become. So to a certain degree all of your actions are a reaction to something that has happened in the past. Maturity is the accumulation of these events, and ideally, the ability to make wiser decisions based on those experiences.
Let’s look at some pretty simple examples:
Martha was adopted as a child, and her foster mother was extremely loving while her foster father was obviously not interested in raising anyone else’s kid. Maybe when Martha gets older she views men with suspicion and is never able to develop a trusting relationship with the opposite sex. Maybe she goes the other direction and becomes completely subservient to the men in her life by constantly seeking their approval.
Martin had a cleft lip as a child, and his parents didn’t have enough money to fix it until he was a teenager. He now wears a mustache even though the scar is minimal, because he’s still self-conscious of the ridicule he endured. Maybe Martin grows to be extremely sensitive about other people’s looks, and ends up counseling other people with physical deformities. On the other hand, maybe he becomes extremely superficial as an adult in reaction and ends up leaving his wife after ten years for a younger woman.
Both of these people had childhood experiences that would reasonably affect how they behave as adults (adult experiences also temper adult decisions, but it is certainly to a less significant degree than youthful experiences.) Now there are a variety of reactions each person can have to these experiences. Martha may end up never marrying, because she just can’t trust men. Or maybe she becomes a lesbian. Or maybe she ends up with masochistic sexual appetites. Or maybe she finds a man who was babied by his mother and dotes on her to a degree that complements her insecurities (or, if you believe in it, overcomes her insecurities.)
None of this is novel to any of you, I’m quite sure. You try to learn from your mistakes. The influence of people around you, particularly authority figures, has made an impact on the person you are today. If you have children, do you ever wonder if you spend so much time trying not making the same mistakes as your parents that your mistakes end up being the things your parents’ actually got right?
If we all recognize that our past influences our present, then we can consciously indicate the importance of specific experiences. That’s where you learn to recognize your faults and what may have caused them, and hopefully minimize them. But it also gives you the ability to place blame on every aspect of your personality and experiences onto something or someone else.
Martha is uncomfortable with men and never marries because of her foster father. It’s his fault.
Donald wouldn’t be as superficial if his parents had tried harder to get him the surgery he needed. His divorce is their fault.
See where this is going? We are becoming more and more a blame-oriented culture, and becoming a more sophisticated one at that. If we don’t have a drug for it, we can certainly find out whose fault it is (and it never has to be yours.) You can look at every mistake or hardship in your life and find a reason why it happened. It’s not your fault because you were just reacting to some other stimulus. Your abusive father. Your disinterested mother. That bully from elementary school who stole your money. The society that you were born in, where you grew up poor. Your race. Your neighbor who had a lot of money and made sure you knew that you didn’t.
Blame is easy, blame is right, and more importantly blame is scientific.
The truth is that you can blame every aspect of your life on something else if you want to. Not only is this possible, but it is at least partially correct, because you are a creature based on the accumulation of past experiences. The trouble is that while you can always reasonably deflect blame from yourself, it solves nothing.
I believe that understanding your past and how it affects the way you live your life is probably useful. But if you are focusing on your past to place blame, it’s not a way of improving yourself but rather a tool for excusing your behavior. People need to realize that knowing why you made a bad decision does not remove culpability. Your may be able to pinpoint some of the reasons behind your flaws, but the consequences remain your own.
I know that some people will think this isn’t fair, particularly those who have gone through significant trauma. I’m not in any way denying the importance and influence of past experiences. If you are a WWII veteran, your experience will obviously have a significant impact on the way you live your life. Our pasts are important, and understanding them is a great tool for recognizing our present actions. Where we often go astray is looking at the past as an excuse. Remember how there were a variety of ways that Martha could have reacted to her foster father’s indifference? She had no choice of her childhood circumstance, but her reaction is a decision. If you utilize your past experiences you can make a choice as to how it affects you.
Can you control every reaction? Absolutely not, there are too many overwhelming factors to completely control. Can you influence consequences of your past experiences? I really think you can. Complete control is never really an option anyway, if you think you have control over anything you are sorely mislead.
At the end of the day in the world I live in, which should be similar to the one you live in, why you make a decision doesn’t really matter. Nobody cares why you did something; they only care about what you did.
This is such a complicated subject with so many variables. There is temperament, degree of abuse or trauma, age at which the trauma occurred, the relation of the victim to the abuser, the environment a person was subject to following his trauma. etc....But the term "reaction" can imply that there is a lack of thought involved, and in the case of severe trauma it is more than likely a lack of choice even though it may not look that way from the outside.
ReplyDeleteit is a fact that whatever the age trauma occurs, ( it also applies to the onset of drug and alcohol abuse) there is a part of the victim that remains emotional at that age. it doesn't mean that if a child is abused at 4 years old that person acts like a 4 year old in every situation. But when a situation causes the same fear that person faced as a four year old, he or she will respond the same way they did when the initial trauma occurred.
Imagine the difficulty for a person who was raped at three in trying to manage an adult sexual relationship in a way that isn't reactionary. Particularly if that person does not feel completely safe with their partner. it just isn't possible for them to tell themself that it's okay now. it feels the same.The fear is the same. And whatever they did to survive when they were a child will be almost exactly the same now. That is unless they are able to face what happened to them and feel what they could not manage at the time. Just like a soldier would not be able to stop and consider what was actually happening around him in battle. To do so would mean death.It is the same for children who suffer trauma, They do what they must to stay alive. If the abuser is a parent or authority figure that should be self explanatory.
WHen looking at ones past we must consider that yes, someone is responsible for what happened. Someone is to blame. Of course stopping there is futile and does not help anyone recover. The question becomes, what do I do now?. While a person may not be responsible for what happened, they are responsible for what they do with it. But it takes a huge amount of work and it is a very scary thing to do. Facing your trauma means facing your worst fears as well as facing yourself and why you behave the way you do. Not many people are willing to go there. But those who do are the ones who change. They are the ones who stop reacting based on past experience and begin living in the present letting each new event be what it is. Of course wisdom of experience and maturity as you said are also in play. Anyone can blame others. If that is a pattern of life, that will be a miserable one. There is no power or impetus to improve oneself or one's situation. it will forever remain someone else's fault. The upside of blame has a better name. Truth. Some people blame the wrong person. Some blame themselves for things totally beyond their control. We need to know the truth. If that three year old rape victim grows up without the ability to protect herself or even the ability to run away they may end up blaming herself for what happened and even for things that happen later that sent them back to the place of fear they experienced as a child.
We cannot let blame rule, but we also cannot expect everyone to react in a healthy way in every situation.
Those who have been hurt need understanding and help to heal. it cannot be done alone. This does not mean we should let people get away harmful behavior. Even people who are traumatized cannot be allowed to abuse others.
I know this is long and in no way complete, but it is another side to consider.
Why we do things is crucial in order for us to change even if no one else cares why.
I don’t understand why you feel “reactionary” is a word that implies a lack of thought. Actually, this post is very specific on the subject and directly talks about conscious actions (particularly regarding blame) that are done in reaction to some person or event.
ReplyDeleteAlso, since we talking about a general cultural shift of using the past as a mechanism for displacing culpability, the nature of the event is irrelevant. I’m not sure why you are trying to change the discussion into a discourse about the nature of childhood trauma. You’re not presenting another side to consider, you are presenting a tangential topic. Granted, people deal with childhood trauma differently than their first bee sting. Past experience come in many shapes and sizes; the specific example you laid doesn’t change the broader discourse.
My only mention of trauma was to emphasize the point that the past is important and influential. There was no assertion that people need to forget about their past and ignore any negative events. It’s actually about the understanding and utilization of these experiences. The discussion is about how many people tend to use their past experiences as a crutch to blame others instead of accepting responsibility. As mentioned in the original post, no one is expected to control every reaction, but we can influence those reactions.
Blame is a choice, and the severity of the trauma has no bearing on whether you have that choice. Certain types experiences make the choices harder, but they cannot change who makes the decision. Blame isn’t about truth; blame serves the same purpose regardless of how honest it may be.
I get your point about using blame. We are an extremely litigious society because of it.
ReplyDeleteMy response was mainly to your Martha example. What may seem so simple form the outside is always more complicated on the inside. I should have specified that I was addressing the statement that Martha's reaction was a decision. It may not have been a decision that she had any control over.
I have to disagree that blame is a choice. Using blame as an excuse may be, but blame itself is not.
It is what it is, as you so often say.
The severity of trauma has everything to do with choice. Some trauma removes any consciousness of choice. Other forms may leave you conscious yet unable to act, which is even worse as one is left blaming himself. One of the most difficult aspects of trauma is that it can blind us to our choices.
Does the war veteran who,years later, hears a car backfire and hits the ground make the decision to do so?
Blame isn't about truth. But sometimes the truth involves knowing where the blame actually rests.
Blame isn't new. Every war throughout history is justified by blaming the enemy. Most are started because blame becomes cause. And there is the excuse.
The whole subject of blaming others . In regard to past experiences or even trauma is really a discussion of distraction. We have become a society that perfects distraction through ipods, TV, internet,etc. We are distracted form the source of our unease. And blame distracts us form the source of our pain. ( that being the emotions form the original source of the trauma, often trapped emotions) A healthy attitude whether in an individual or in a society as a whole takes responsibility for the tendency toward distraction and seeks out the source first and the cause second. Blame, then, becomes a non issue.
Difficult decisions are still decisions, so this idea that the severity of trauma precludes the ability to make a choice is off base. I refuse to renounce my ability to affect the nature of my life by falling into a trap of victimhood. Yes there are things in life over which we have little to no control. But how we respond to these situations is absolutely a choice. Sometimes that influence is minimal and takes a lifetime to encourage, but it’s still there. Remember we’re talking about influence; any idea of control is absurd.
ReplyDeleteDecisions are made in every situation in life, inaction being chief among them. Does this mean that every unfortunate situation in our lives is our own fault for making the wrong decision? Absolutely not. Sometimes there are no good options, so it is not a simple right vs. wrong discussion. Sometimes there are only bad choices, and in those circumstances bad things tend to happen.
By saying that everything in life involves a decision does not imply that it’s easy, or that it’s simply a matter of strong will. Some things are nearly impossible to overcome. Remember that the soldier on the battlefield can choose death over dealing with what is happening around them; they often do. The inability to make the choice you would like does not mean that a decision isn’t made.
I’m going to have to assert that blame is always a choice, but we need to be precise in our use of language. Blame is primarily a verb (I say primarily because English is among the more flexible languages,) it is an action, or for our purposes a choice. You place blame. Blame does not exist without an initiator.
As far as thinking “it is what it is,” I think the more precise terms you are looking for are guilt or fault. You do not give guilt, you earn it. It may seem like a small difference, but in this context diction is important.
As far as your war veteran example goes, I don’t see the appropriateness of this analogy because that is a physiological response to a stimulus. Not only that, but just like the anxiety associated with phobias, it can be overcome. A veteran’s choice of being bound by the Pavlovian stimulus in your example is absolutely a decision.
War is not always justified by blame. Historically speaking, wars are caused for a variety of reasons, often having no external stimulus. Revolts and civil wars are almost exclusively about blame, but even then blame is often only a propaganda tool rather than the cause. A simple example would be any conflict caused by an imperialist power. U.S. historical conflicts predicated on the Manifest Destiny movement would be another example.
I completely agree that distraction is strategy for avoiding pain, but I see at as a different issue. Distraction, as you say, is an act of avoiding pain by deflecting from reality. Blame is another tool entirely; it focuses energy on some other entity. Is this a type of deflection? Sure, in a way it can be. But that doesn’t make blame a non-issue.
So I agree with, I just think the issue of blame is broader than you do.
Thanks,
C