Following on from last week’s post, where I talked about looking within to find the reason’s to try and better myself, here’s a post I did on the work it’s taken for me to get where I am today.
The Onion of Responsibility
Taking responsibility is like peeling an onion. It can be painful and has many layers.
I plead guilty in court. I had killed somebody and there was no way of undoing my crime. All that was left in my power was to not make things worse. At that time I thought that this was taking responsibility – and it was. Well it was a start.
In hindsight I acknowledge that my pleading guilty was more an acknowledgment of my actions rather than a genuine acceptance of my responsibility. I am a convicted murderer – but it took nearly a decade to stop adding caveats to my crime.
For those first years in prison I was still insulating myself through cognitive dissonance – protecting myself from the horror of my crime. I had never been as drunk in my life. I had been provoked. I lost control. I was reacting. I hadn’t ever intended to actually kill them. For years I still believed all of my excuses.
“I lost control.” That one was the kicker. It wasn’t really me – how could it be? I would never hurt anybody. Like a car with a blown-out tyre I had lost control before the crash – it wasn’t my fault. I had been provoked and lost control – if I hadn’t been provoked then everything would have been fine. There is a double shame here. I am not only ashamed of my crime, but also that I hid behind a loss of control for so long.
I hadn’t lost control – I had been surrendering control over a long period of time. To return to the above analogy, I knew the tyres on my car were getting threadbare but I took no action. With this realisation I looked at my life leading up to my crime with a new perspective.
I had been steadily heading towards my crime for years – I had practically taken my hands off the steering wheel of my life. I was a walking paradox. I was an outgoing introvert. I wore a brash and confident shell with a fragile and insecure centre. I was a pleaser; utterly emotionally stunted. I bottled everything up and willfully ignored the bad things that I didn’t want to face. My crime was not a single explosive act – the volcano did not suddenly roar into life from nothing – there had been warning rumbles for years … I had just ignored them.
I read Matthew Syed’s book, ‘Black Box Thinking’ and recognised that I was committing text book versions of the thinking errors and suffering from the cognitive dissonances that he described. The Black Box he describes relates to how the aviation industry works tirelessly to understand how mistakes are made. Investigators examine every single factor that contributes to a crash. They piece the debris of a plane back together, examine data logs, listen to the voices in the cockpit, check service histories and interview air-traffic controllers. They wring every small detail and piece together the story of the failure – then put measures in place trying to ensure it can’t happen again. As Matthew described, when we fail to acknowledge a mistake we are missing a crucial opportunity to learn.
I was frightened of looking back. I didn’t want to see what I had done. I was like a fearful child, terrified of the monsters that were lurking under my bed. But I had to do it. I had killed somebody. My mistakes were lessons that had come at too high a price to ignore and to do so would be shameful. I tore back the bedsheets and forced my eyes wide open. There were no monsters. Just me – laid bare. When I began to examine my past I came to the realisation that my old beliefs and my previous actions no longer had the power to hurt me – unless I let them.
I tried to employ new investigative techniques when I re-watched the chapters of my life. Instead of defaulting to the same old excuses to spare my own blushes by I endeavoured to analyse events dispassionately – I viewed the events of my life like the episodes of a boxset and tried to identify where things had started to go wrong.
Instead of looking at how I reacted at a flashpoint, I examined the events that led up to it. It quickly became obvious that it was my own hang-ups and my own beliefs that had invariably led me to conflict. Things like having to have the last word or pursuing an argument until the bitter end – when there really was nothing to be gained.
I was deeply saddened when I identified so many missed opportunities in my past. There had been so very many times when I could have made the simplest of interventions. There were scores of times when I could have steered events in a completely different direction and my victim would still be alive. These opportunities were no longer obscure – in hindsight they were obvious – but I had never been able to identify these solutions because I had never realised that I had any problems. As I peeled back more and more layers, the rawness I felt started to ease. Instead of just dipping my toe into the bath of responsibility I have become fully immersed.
But perhaps the most important realisation was that my mistakes were not isolated events – I had been repeating the same processes time after time while hoping for a different outcome. I am still instinctively inclined to do the same damn things, it’s almost like a default setting – so I constantly have to check myself, re-examine my beliefs and measure my reactions. Thankfully, the more I do it – the more natural the process becomes.
Just as my actions had led me into conflict I now know how to take actions to steer me away from conflict. I no longer wait to see smoke from the volcano in order to react. I take action at the first inkling of a rumble.
