Adult Accountability

Owning your Own Shit--Even (or especially) when it's not fun

“We are all both victims and victimizers. Just as everyone suffers, no one is innocent of causing suffering themselves.”

~Tullian Tchividjian

I have been thinking about how there is a great liberty in no longer playing the victim card, in no longer continue to ride that “woe is me” mentality.

This victimhood game can be endless, continue indefinitely. And though it seems like it protects you—after all, then nothing is your fault and everything happened TO you, it’s also like a hamster wheel—it just keeps you running in circles. You never really make any progress or forward motion.

When many of us are stuck in a bad place, within a cycle of pain, mentally unwell, and haven’t dealt with our junk, we may feel that we are simply victims and can always play that Trump card of victimhood to whomever. (With the assumption that my pain and victim stance matters more than yours. Because truly, we all have some sort of victim card.)

Here’s the thing—I’ve had to learn this through my own challenges and through questioning my own feelings of victimhood.

Ie—why the fuck did I have to be the one to have two suicides in my immediate family?

But this “everything is so hard” victim trump card, it doesn’t help. It temporarily strokes your ego. It can temporarily validate you, affirm your pain.

But, here’s the caveat and disclaimer to that—if that’s it, if that’s where the internal monologue ends, you don’t grow. You don’t change. You don’t feel you have to. You don’t act responsibly for how you treat others, because you are the only or the main victim; so much stuff has been done to you.

The kicker here too is that these cycles of blaming others for your hurt, projecting and deflecting our past trauma and hurt onto others feels cathartic.

It is; it can even be addictive, much like a drug. The deflection and projection serves the same purpose as substance abuse does. It numbs our pain. It makes us feel better for a little while. It helps us to try to cover up the genuine, underlying issue at hand.

The underlying issue being this—we may have residual pain and hurt and trauma that we haven’t healed from.

And adult accountability is that we are all responsible for our own healing.

That sucks.

Because life is brutal and there’s an awful lot of hard shit that we need to shoulder and we have to learn how to carry on.

But—it’s incredibly necessary for growth and happiness (the only genuine happiness that stems from within, from self love and compassion and self validation).

Otherwise, we repeat cycles of harm. We bleed all over others who did not cut us.

We may think that the problem resides solely with others (and certainly no one, with parents, with our families or romantic relationships is entirely faultless or blameless), but when we find ourselves only able to identify the problems of what the other one did TO us, to make us feel this way, we must to pause and reconsider. We need to back track to identify our own culpability and potential baggage that can be, and likely is, playing some sort of a role here.

All of this requires diving deep into pain—what past trauma, abuse, dysfunction that we may have had to endure, that we still haven’t addressed. And we get help and work through that with therapy, journaling, meditation, other methods of healing.

I get why so many don’t do this and run like hell in the opposite direction. Hide under a blanket. It’s oh so much easier to convince ourselves that the only and major problem is external, other people, the thing in life that is hard, whatever other excuses. The blame game can continue and never end. We can do that indefinitely.

Healing and emotional homework and owning your shit is not fun.

Therapy—when you’re actively making the effort (not just defending yourself or weaponizing it to others), when your therapist holds you accountable— it is so hard. It requires us to own our own shortcomings and limitations. It’s incredibly humbling.

But.

But.

I also firmly believe that it is the only way to avoid participating and perpetuating in cycles of harm.

Breaking patterns and intergenerational patterns of dysfunction (which seems to be the point of my life) involves addressing undiagnosed mental health issues that run in the dysfunctional families, seeing them as people with their own traumas.

I firmly believe that since most of choose not to live as complete recluses, shut-in hermits, we do have to do this work, Because we will have relationships and friends and we will interact with others; we will affect others in our hurt, through our pain through our victimhood, we also victimize others.

The truth is—everyone has a victim card to play, if you look hard enough.

I get frustrated because when people chalk up my position—despite my family’s suicides and deaths and dysfunction and my own mental health struggles—as oh you’re just so strong, or smart, I reject that.

No. Bullshit.

I am not strong because of my trauma. My trauma and all these deaths pained me deeply and gave me PTSD.

But I didn’t stay there. I knew I needed help. And I reached out and got it. I had to work through it. So I did. That’s not a unique quality to me. If it is—it’s as simple as being vulnerable to say, I need some help; I’ve got complex PTSD. This is hard shit.

I did the work. I continue to work on myself doing the work, putting the time into healing, through therapy and exercise and yoga and meditation, trying alternative forms of healing through biofield tuning and trying craniosacral therapy next week.

I am honest with myself about my shortcomings and limitations—and work within those problems. I’ve asked for help and been honest about when I have self-medicated, mirroring methods I saw in my parents and how they coped in unhealthy ways.

I have learned to acknowledge my wounded inner child. I mother her. I have taken the advice to be gentle with her, to shower her with self love and care and tenderness, remembering all the times when she didn’t get the help and support and security and stability that she so desperately craved and needed.

Yet, I can do that, but also— at the same time, I hold my adult self accountable to myself and to the treatment of the other people in my life. I make myself to do the work, to heal, to not perpetuate harm onto others.

Hence, my conscious decision to really self-love, heal, get support and strength and perspective before even thinking about entering a long term relationship again.

Because, as I approach 40, I can no longer deny—I am not a child anymore. I’m a full-fledged, middle-aged adult. I’m the grown up. I have the forehead wrinkles and eleven lines to prove it.

I’m wiser and I have learned.

I did not see this modeled by many adults in my family and community, but I strive to be the grown up who will own their own junk and fess up. To get help. It’s the only way to through it is to dive in, deep.

The first step to solving a problem is admitting that there is one. All the problems are not always outside of you.