Taking Responsibility for Behavior

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Be Responsible For Your Behavior?

By knowing the signs of mental health conditions, you will be better equipped to recognize when you, or someone you know, may need professional help.

Typically, when we experience a negative emotional reaction towards someone else, our first inclination is to blame the other person.

"When he/she said 'such-and-such,' he hurt my feelings."

We see our hurt feelings as the other person's fault, and we believe we need to prevent him/her from repeating his/her hurtful behavior or else try to avoid him/her in the future.

This is most evident in situations where you find yourself upset by someone else's behavior while others who are present are not bothered by the same behavior. Each of us has our own unique, built-in "hot buttons."

Address Your Reactions Sensibly. If you find yourself triggered by someone else's behavior, try taking these steps:

Take responsibility for your negative reaction. This is your own emotional response. It is not someone else's fault that you are sensitive to particular behaviors. You have a habitual mental pattern that arises when you perceive and interpret certain situations in a negative way.

Name the emotional reaction you are experiencing... fear, anger, hurt, shame, etc.

Drop the blaming story-line. Your mind will want to cast the other person as the perpetrator and yourself as the victim. Poor you. If So-and-So had not done such-and-such, I would not be feeling so ... blah blah blah. Do your best to drop this drama-trauma story-line.

Restrain in the desire to blame the other or defend your self-righteously.

Take the time to feel and then investigate your emotions.

Identify your hot button(s).

You have a choice. You can blame others in your world for making your time here on earth miserable, or you can use mindfulness to take responsibility for your reactions.

Reflections

If you are human like me, then you may have gotten a little offended when reading certain phrases from this article. Imagine how I felt typing it.

The article speaks about 'hot buttons'. I have quite a few actually, most, I am still working on, because when I do think about them, or saying it out loud to another person when I am venting, the whole reason for me getting upset seemed, well, minute and trivial. But Hey! That's my hot button! Right?

In the "Mental Health" article I previously posted, I commented that sometimes, often most times, our attitudes and behaviors today has a lot to do with what we've been through as children or young adults... especially if the experiences and events were painful and traumatic. We tend to put up a 'defense barrier' around ourselves; an electrical fence around our entire body and mind, where if anyone even attempts to penetrate that fence the wrong way, they get lit up with high voltages of anger (for some it's more a literal response where physical in nature i.e. abusive reactions).

Some of my hot buttons that trigger emotional actions or reactions are:

when I am called either too emotional or sensitive (go-figure);

when I am ignored;

when people criticize and judge negatively, things I do positively;

lazy and pessimistic people;

people who are deceptive and pretentious, but act like saints;

talebearers... false witnesses...;

when someone says I am whining or crying... always complaining...

My list is very long. Did I tell you I was abused, witnessed abuse, and bullied throughout my childhood? Well now you know. This is why I have a strong opinion that some behaviors trigger some of those memories and experiences that we would love to forget about. But scars, they never totally heal, do they. They can scab over, they can fade with time, but never with memory.

There is a line from one of my favorite reggae artists, Buju Banton.

"Memories, don't live like people do; they will always remember you; whether they are good or they are bad..."

Here is an illustration:
Most people when they hear the word "scar" or see someone's scar(s) on their body, automatically they perceive that that scar represents something bad that happened. But is this totally accurate?