Surrender and accountability

I want to touch on the subject on accountability and surrender when it comes to your own behavioural patterns. Because, I think there is a general lack of accountability for our own behaviour, especially our behavioural patterns. We are very quick to find excuses and explanatory models for why we act the way we act, while forgetting that we are the one’s that in the end are responsible for our own behaviour.

There are countless explanatory models for everything. Some of them are created in pursuit of just that, the ability to explain a behaviour, usually for oneself. It’s that striving of feeling like what you do, however dysfunctional, can be explained. It’s a dangerous pursuit that can easily lure you down the road of blaming something or someone else for your own behaviour.

The saying goes that it matters not what happens to you, but how you choose to deal with it. And this ties into this very subject, because if you can somehow explain your bad behaviour for being a result of a bad parent, or bully, or abusive partner, it’s crucial that it remains just a way to understand, not excuse the behaviour. Nothing can ever excuse a bad behaviour, but some things could explain them.

Why it is so important to make sure that an explanatory model simply becomes an explanation, is simply because what matters in the end is that you can quit the bad behaviour. If the explanatory model, or the realisation, can help you understand the underlying problem, which then could help you break your bad behaviour through realisation and dealing with things, then that is fantastic. Because then, you have actually gotten rid of the behaviour.

But what often happens is, we look for something to blame. We don’t think we are, because we simply want something to explain why we are the way we are. We hate standing out, we hate being different and we hate feeling like there is something wrong with us. So, in order to not have to deal with the reality that there might be something wrong with us, we look desperately for something to explain why we are the way we are.

Is it inherently wrong to try to understand why we are the way we are. No, of course not. If you are someone who grew up in a deeply dysfunctional home with abusive parents and fell into bad behaviour through bad relationships and friend groups, and you now try to understand why you can’t develop a lasting and healthy relationship, then it is good to do that work.

But how that work is done, and with what kind of intention and accountability, is in the end what matters. If you can surrender to the reality that you are flawed, much like everyone else, and realise that you have parts of yourself that you need to fix in order to live a healthy and good life, then you have a chance to change for good.

The key here, is surrender, and accountability. It’s realising that, no matter the cause for your behaviour, whether it started as something you thought was a good way to behave, or as a response to an abusive parent, it’s still your responsibility. Not the cause, but your behaviour. No matter how much you’d want to, that parent could never make your behaviour change for you, because it’s all in your own mind.

If you can cultivate the mindset that, no matter what happens, no matter what you go through and what you feel is being done to you, you are in the end responsible for what you say and do, then you will never feel trapped in your own life. Because you will never be able to point the finger at anyone but yourself, and that is, however uncomfortable, true freedom. To never feel like it’s due to someone else that you are where you are, but yourself.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way."

Viktor Frankl