Tag: responsible

Creating Inner Peace – Clear-cut Sense of Responsibility

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What is your current decision regarding each person’s responsibility for their own intentions and actions?

I’m not saying I was not terrified as a child. I’m just saying that I didn’t also have the added stress of a mental quandary in some situations. The first time the monstrous men put a knife in my hand to kill someone was when they insisted I kill an older girl who had always tried to shield me. As soon as the knife handle touched my hand, I threw it with all my might and buried it in the shoulder of one of the men. They were momentarily shocked, then went berserk and made the other children pay dearly for my act of defiance. Then they made one of the younger men crush my hand around the knife handle and the younger man actually killed the child. By that time, I had shut down and was pretty limp anyway. Crushing my hand didn’t remove the responsibility from their shoulders. I’m not going to take on their perverse intentions as my own. It’s not even really stubbornness. It’s just a fact. Perhaps it’s a decision I made in a previous lifetime. But it’s a decision anyone can make in this lifetime, if they wish to.

Creating Inner Peace – At Peace with Helplessness

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Where have you given your power away? Where have you kept your power?

Obviously, the example here is for the onset of the feeling of helplessness and not the resolving of it. Another control game the monstrous men played was: ‘Drink this poison or we’ll kill you.’ It’s amazing to me how many people would drink the poison, thinking that gave them control over the situation. What an illusion! If the result of both options is a death the person would not normally choose; then neither option takes away the person’s helplessness. Denial has never resolved an emotion. It just buries it deeper so it’s not felt as acutely. So, what does help when we’re helpless in outer situations and we’re not being offered reasonable options? Do we then heap other emotions upon the helplessness by being overwhelmed by fear or anger or hate or rage or all four? That’s not going to help us. As a child I didn’t think any of what I’m saying and certainly I was terrified being exposed to these monsters. But my pre-made decision that they had to bear the responsibility for their actions, that they had to “do the deed,” not me – that came to my rescue so many times.

I accepted I was a child and felt helpless to change the outer situation. Within myself I acknowledged that I felt terrified. And I determined that to the best of my ability I was not going to do what they wanted. That included reacting from the fear I felt or going into anger, hate or rage. I had no idea that by just standing there mute, I was maintaining control within myself. I was keeping my power. My power in any situation is over my own inner reactions. Isn’t it amazing that when we are helpless, we are still powerful. Helpless on the outside does not make us helpless on the inside. We can give our power away. But we can also keep it. It’s our power. Our power over ourselves. I had no idea acceptance, acknowledgment and determination create a calming effect within that allows peace. Thankfully, it worked.

Creating Inner Peace – Pre-made clear-cut decisions

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What decisions have you already made that would help reduce stress and drama for you in a traumatic or survival situation?

Except for expressing anger towards my mom, because so early in life I had made the decision not to cause harm; to the best of my ability, I avoided doing what the monstrous men wanted. I firmly felt that they were responsible for the harm they wanted to cause; and therefore, they had to perform the heinous acts they wanted me to do. The age old: ‘Hurt this other person or we’ll hurt you.’ Well, obviously they were going to hurt me anyway; so if they wanted that other child hurt, they had to do it or they had to physically force me. Of course, physically I was too weak to fight them, but to the best of my ability in my mind I refused to accept the responsibility they wanted to heap upon me. Having pre-made decisions was something that helped me have some semblance of peace. It gave me some bit of shield from accepting their responsibility for the many horrible things they did. Of course, some of their insidious desire to put the responsibility for their actions on me still did get through. But knowing that the desire to cause harm did not come from within me helped me sort it out easier when I had the tools to heal all the havoc they wreaked within me.

Creating Inner Peace – Manipulation and Boundaries

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(Reminder – One reason I began with examples from childhood was to remind us that we already have some foundation for creating inner peace.)

What are some of examples from your own life of where you have learned to avoid being manipulated and to strengthen your boundaries?

My mother tried to inflict her fears on me, tried to make me responsible for how she felt, tried to make me feel guilty in order to manipulate me. She probably wasn’t so much conscious of this. She just worried a lot about things I felt were pretty silly, like being afraid of dogs. And her mother had instilled a lot of fears in her that she had readily accepted. I refused to live according to her fears and learned not to inflict my own fears on other people. It took me until high school, but I also learned not to let her inflict guilt on me for supposedly creating her feelings. Again, this probably wasn’t her conscious intent, but it’s how it came across to me and how I reacted. It came full circle when I was 45 and she was 85 and she wanted to live up a flight of stairs. I didn’t let the concerns of my brother and sister for her safety limit where she could live. I trusted her to know the capabilities of her own body and make her own decisions. It goes back to people being responsible for their own stuff, their own thoughts, beliefs and feelings. This goes right along with being responsible for our own actions. Also, setting and knowing our own boundaries. But not being so rigid with them that we behave like porcupines to other people. We can quietly maintain our boundaries without having to get in people’s faces about it. Even now, there our times I yell at my brother when he steps on one of my invisible boundaries and it simply doesn’t need to be handled that way.

Creating Inner Peace – Independent Approach

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What helps you accept responsibility for your own choices?

An independent approach to life assists building inner peace by simplifying the equations. It reduces outer interference. Less input from other people makes it easier to accept responsibility for our decisions, as well as our inner peace. Inner peace is not dependent on anyone else. Making our own decisions doesn’t mean we can’t have input. It just means we don’t have to worry about making others angry if we don’t accept their input. We do this simply by carrying the attitude that ultimately it’s our decision, our responsibility, and we accept the consequences.

Example: My parents encouraged my already independent nature. I don’t know how my parents managed to bring me up to be so independent. I do know that even in little things like asking my father the definition of a word, he’d tell me to look it up myself. I was headstrong without being disobedient. In grade school I wrote down my disgust at how the principal handled a situation with another child. I wisely threw it away, thinking nobody would ever see it. Another child that apparently felt I had put into words what many of us were feeling, took the paper out of the trash and took it to the principal as if she had written it. The principal promptly disciplined her by making her stay after school to clean all the trash cans. Well, this put me in the position of having to go and tell the principal I had written the note. She simply said I could help the other girl clean the trash cans.