Personal Responsibility Counselling And Therapy

An Integrative Approach

Richard Nelson-Jones

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781317737681
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First Published in 1988. All counselling approaches are means to helping people stand on their own two feet and assume effective responsibility for their lives. Thus personal responsibility becomes an obvious integrating focus. Though the concept gets implicitly or explicitly emphasized in all existing theoretical positions, none has provided the deserved coverage. Focusing on personal responsibility is almost like focusing on one's nose. Though right in front of the face, the concept is not always easy to observe. This book aims at integration in a number of ways. It rejects the narrow 'my theory right or wrong' approach to counselling. Theoretical concepts and practical interventions are derived from a number of different sources, including the research literature. The book does not take a one-dimensional approach to behaviour in emphasizing people's actions alone. Instead it takes a three-dimensional approach emphasizing feelings, thoughts and actions.

Chapter 1 WHY FOCUS ON PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315792163-1

This book provides a framework for counselling, life skills training and selfhelp or self-therapy that uses personal responsibility as a central integrating concept. Its purpose is not to have people going around saying ‘my fault’ all the time, but rather to explore how they can become more effective agents in securing their own and others’ happiness and fulfilment. The focus here is on the struggles and problems of ordinary people rather than on those of moderately to severely disturbed psychiatric populations. In 1969, in a widely publicized presidential address to the American Psychological Association, George Miller spoke of the need to give psychology away to nonpsychologists (Miller: 1969). The psychology of how to help people to help themselves has now reached the stage where more people should be able to learn from it.

Focusing on personal responsibility

Two vignettes: Mark and Peter

The following two vignettes illustrate the point that psychological problems, and hence issues of personal responsibility, are not just pertinent to the psychiatrically disturbed.

Mark is a senior company executive in his mid-40s. He finds it difficult to get up in the morning partly because he stayed up late watching television and then took a sleeping pill. As he goes down to breakfast he senses that there are still a considerable number of unresolved issues in his marriage. His wife gets the breakfast and there is little communication with his family. He is preoccupied with eating quickly and getting out to work. He has not considered that if he got up earlier this would take the pressure off everyone.

At work Mark drives himself and others very hard. People respect his energy and ability, but do not find him an easy colleague. Other executives feel that he is competitive and continually jockeying for position in the company, sometimes at their expense. He tries to be pleasant to junior staff and secretaries. They feel that he is critical rather than supportive. Furthermore, they have noticed his absorption with his own career and advancement. Today Mark chairs a staff meeting for his unit. Though he has asked for agenda items, he arranges that items important to him come first. Instead of a genuine exchange of ideas, almost all comments are either addressed by or to Mark.

On the way home from work he has a couple of drinks and arrives late for supper. His wife and family are quite glad to see him, apart from when he comes back really irritable or tipsy. However, they wish he would show more interest in their lives. As it is they collude with him by communicating on a superficial level and avoiding challenging his behaviour. Furthermore, they continually edit what they say to prevent upsetting him by disagreeing strongly or appearing too different from his picture of them. After supper Mark does some paperwork, watches television and again goes to bed later than he really wants. For the past year neither he nor his wife have been or are particularly interested in their sex life.

Peter works in the same office as Mark. Now let us look at a day in the life of Peter.

Peter is in his late 20s with a wife Mary and a 3-year-old daughter Jane. The morning starts with a visit from Jane who wants to snuggle into bed for fifteen minutes before Peter and Mary get up. Peter enjoys seeing his daughter and spending this time with her. Peter gets up in good time for breakfast and helps prepare it. He enjoys his breakfast. Mary is able to discuss one or two housekeeping matters with him, then he leaves for work with a warm hug and kiss for Mary and Jane.

At work Peter is a junior executive. He has a responsible job and is conscientious. He works at a steady rate. Wherever necessary, he consults with his colleagues. He is afraid to admit neither ignorance nor errors. He has the knack of bringing out the best in colleagues. They see him as collaborating rather than competing. The secretaries also feel his friendliness and respect. They like working with him. During the day he attends the staff meeting with Mark. He feels uneasy at the contrived atmosphere. Disagreeing with Mark on a point which cannot be ignored, he states his position calmly and cogently, not backing down under pressure.

Arriving home, he and his family always spend time discussing their respective days and enjoying each others’ company. After putting Jane to bed and having supper, Peter helps Mary with the washing up. He looks forward to the remainder of the evening with Mary. They know that, if they wish to have sex, it will be a mutually enriching experience. They have always tried to work on problems in their marriage as they arise rather than risk letting them fester and become serious.

Although neither Mark nor Peter is psychiatrically disturbed, they differ considerably in their happiness and fulfilment. Additionally, each makes a very different impact on the psychological well-being of others, be it at home or work. Assuming that Mark has four people in his immediate family and there are thirty people for whom he has responsibility at work, there may be at least thirty-four people whose lives are being diminished through his problems. Correspondingly, Peter benefits the lives of many. Although these distinctions are overstated, Peter is enabling, encouraging, helping and strengthening others. Mark is disabling, discouraging, harming and weakening them.

If asked, both Mark and Peter would probably say they were behaving responsibly. However, there are a number of recurring choice points in each of their lives where Mark would decide one way, or with a certain emphasis, and Peter would decide the other. Thus, though both may have the self-image of behaving responsibly - and it would be a very hard thing to admit otherwise in our culture - the reality seems to be that Peter is much more effective in taking responsibility for his life than is Mark.

Defining personal responsibility

Since much of this book represents an attempt to get a fuller understanding of the concept of personal responsibility, a simple definition is not offered here. Rather some elements of the concept that recur are mentioned.

First, personal responsibility is a process rather than a fixed state. In fact, it is more a collection of subprocesses which, at varying times and in varying degrees, make up the overall process. Regarding this process, a useful distinction can be drawn between responsibility to and responsibility for, though they are not discrete categories. In responsibility to, the source of authority is more external and the emphasis is likely to be on meeting others’ demands.

However, responsibility for is a positive concept which emphasizes internal authority and people’s responsibility for making the most of their own lives. The distinction is reminiscent of that suggested by Fromm between the concepts of freedom from and freedom to, the former implying absence of negative restrictions and the latter presence of positive potential (Fromm: 1942).

Second, a key part of the process of personal responsibility is that of choosing. People during their waking hours are in a continuing process of choosing. Maslow wrote about the continuing process of self-actualizing. To him life was a series of two-sided choices. One side represented safety, defence, being afraid and regression: the other progression or growth. Self-actualizing involved making the daily smaller choices correctly, not just the big choices. ‘To make the growth choice instead of the fear choice a dozen times a day is to move a dozen times a day towards self-actualisation’ (Maslow: 1971).

Third, personal responsibility is an inner process in which people work from ‘inside to outside’. This asserts more than that personal responsibility starts at home: also, that it is unhelpful to continually focus on others’ shortcomings. The process of personal responsibility starts with people’s thoughts and feelings rather than with their external actions. Furthermore, especially as people grow older, many if not most of significant barriers to effective action are internal. However, this is less likely to be the case where there is marked economic and social deprivation. Thus when talking about personal responsibility, as well as an assumption of presence of desirable thoughts and feelings there is an assumption of absence of dysfunctional thoughts and feelings which act as internal barriers to people being able to meet their physiological and psychological needs. The exact nature of these self-defeating thoughts and feelings will become clearer as the book progresses.

Fourth, the issue of self-definition is at the heart of the process of personal responsibility. People are not only in a continuing process of choosing: by their choices they define and create themselves; by their choices they take or avoid responsibility for making their lives. This idea is especially emphasized by existentialist philosophers, psychiatrists and psychologists.

Focusing on personal responsibility

There are many reasons why a focus on personal responsibility is desirable. Western societies assume, to a large degree, that people have responsibility for their own lives. A contrast may be made between the Western way of life, based on individual freedom and responsibility, and that of the Eastern bloc countries, where there is a lack of political freedom and, hence, possibly of individual responsibility. However, much of people’s lives in both Eastern and Western blocs is spent on the personal rather than the public level. In both societies people have the inner struggle to gain the freedom to take responsibility for their personal relations and private lives. Most people live in a state of diminished freedom in this regard.

Another reason why a focus on personal responsibility is desirable is that problems of identity seem much more common than previously. The rate of technological change, the decline of religious belief represented in the statement ‘God is dead’, the increasing sophistication of communications so that people come up against different life-styles, and many other factors have led people to feel there is less structure in their lives than before. Psychological problems and theories are related to the epochs and cultures in which people live. As Yalom points out, Freudian psychology was derived against the background of sexual repression in fin de siècle Vienna rather than the compulsive permissiveness of much of contemporary American, especially Californian, culture (Yalom: 1980). Now not only do people have problems generated by too much structure, but problems generated by too little and by the clash of traditional with emergent and freer values (Spindler: 1963). As values outside the self collapse, there is more need to rely on the self as a source of values. One way of dealing with the lack of structure is by a flight into conformity or what might be viewed as an ‘other-directed’ solution. The ‘inner-directed’ solution is to hold fast to tradition despite external changes. Only a minority become genuinely autonomous choosers of how they live (Riesman et al.: 1950). There is a need for psychological theorizing about the problems of choice and identity of contemporary people for whom it is harder than it was for their forebears to go through life relying on convention - or somewhat asleep!

Three of the many areas in which people have been changing their definitions of themselves and of each other are the sexual revolution, the women’s movement and gay liberation. Regarding the sexual revolution, modern methods of contraception have increased the degree of choice over what people do with their bodies. The women’s movement, which aims to diminish if not abolish genderstereotyped feeling, thinking and behaviour, has vast implications for the nature and degree of choice in the lives of both women and men. Furthermore, the implications for choice of gay liberation may be much more extensive than is currently realized given the extent of bisexuality in the population (Kinsey et al.: 1948; 1953)

Thus, the problems we are considering are not confined to a small proportion of society. Additionally, there are grounds for thinking that many of ‘the men and women on the street’ are less happy and fulfilled than they would like to be. For instance, in 1975, there were over 380,000 marriages, 140,000 petitions filed for divorce and 120,000 absolute divorce decrees in England and Wales. Furthermore, the impact of divorce is not restricted to marital partners, as evidenced by the 120,522 couples in England and Wales who were granted a decree absolute in 1975 having 202,475 children, of whom 145,096 were under 16 years old (Working Party on Marriage Guidance: 1979). Writing in 1982, Rayner estimated that there were around 150,000 marriages in Britain ending in divorce each year with almost three out of four divorcing couples having children, mostly aged under 16 (Rayner: 1982). Additionally, in the United States it is reckoned that one in five children are stepchildren, one in two marriages end in divorce and that between 40 and 60 percent of remarriages fail (Jenkins: 1983). These statistics indicate considerable marital and family unhappiness, especially since the data include neither those separated but not filing for divorce nor those who are unhappily still living together. Further indications that problems of living are widespread may be found in the high demand by suicidal and despairing people for help from organizations like the British Samaritans, the huge amounts of tranquillizers and sedatives prescribed by doctors, and the burgeoning literature and interest in stress problems. Not without reason the American psychologist Maslow used the term ‘psychopathology of the average’ to describe most people’s level of functioning (Maslow: 1970).

Possibly in the next century psychological services will be more concerned with improving the majority than on remedying the psychological problems of the more seriously disturbed minority. This represents a move toward a psychology of health - what has been termed ‘full humanness’, rather than a psychology of sickness or ‘human diminution’ (Maslow: 1971).

An additional reason for focusing on personal responsibility is that virtually every psychological theory either explicitly or implicitly attests to its importance. Some theoretical positions, for example the existential therapies and reality therapy, use the word ‘responsibility’. In other theories, personal responsibility is implicit in such terms as ‘personal power’, ‘ego strength’ and ‘self-control’. However, there are differences between theories depending on which aspects of personal responsibility they focus. Another insight into the importance of personal responsibility comes from psychological research, especially that focused on the ways in which people attribute cause for events in their lives.

Clients in counselling and psychotherapy also find that personal responsibility is important. Yalom observes that one of the aspects of psychotherapy that they have found particularly useful is the discovery and assumption of personal responsibility. For instance, in one study, group therapy clients were asked to sort sixty cards reflecting ‘mechanisms of change’ in therapy into seven categories ranging from ‘most helpful’ to ‘least helpful’. Of the sixty items, the item ranked fifth was ‘Learning that I must take ultimate responsibility for the way I live my life no matter how much guidance and support I get from others’ (Yalom: 1980). Though Yalom’s finding says nothing about how effectively patients then behaved in their outside lives, it suggests the importance of learning about the assumption of personal responsibility. Another indication that clients find learning personal responsibility useful is the large literature on assertiveness (Bower and Bower: 1976; Butler: 1981). Although more from a counsellor’s or therapist’s viewpoint, Maslow highlights the importance of personal responsibility for clients when he writes:

Clients are not honest much of the time. They are playing games and posing.... Looking within oneself for many of the answers implies taking responsibility.... In psychotherapy, one can see it, can feel it, can know the moment of responsibility. Then there is a clear notion of what it feels like. This is one of the great steps. Each time one takes responsibility, this is an actualising of the self(Maslow: 1971).

Yet, despite the recognized importance of the concept of personal responsibility there is little on the subject in the psychological literature. Maslow’s tongue-in-cheek comment about this lack was: ‘This matter of responsibility has been little studied. It doesn’t turn up in textbooks, for who can investigate responsibility in white rats?’ (Maslow: 1971). What literature there is tends sometimes to be vague, incomplete, and often implicit rather than explicit. This gets highlighted in the following two chapters.

A final reason for focusing on personal responsibility is that it expresses a central psychological concept in a language which means something to nonpsychologists. It is more comprehensible and likely to stimulate the interest of the layperson than such psychological terms as ‘ego strength’. It is free of medical assumptions like sickness and the need for medical attention. Furthermore, it has desirable connotations of self-help rather than reliance on others for a cure. If one accepts the assertion that psychological problems are widespread, then it follows that there are unlikely to be sufficient professional psychologists and helpers to cater for all needs. Increasingly people will have to develop self-help skills. This is more likely to happen if they use psychological concepts that have meaning for them. Also, those in the helping professions may find their own behaviour easier to explore and, if necessary, to change if they conceptualize it in simple language.

Some qualifications and limitations

Perhaps it is as well to state what focusing on personal responsibility does not mean. First, it is not meant to engender guilt induced either by oneself or by others. There is no assumption that the world is divided into two groups, the responsible and irresponsible, and that, therefore, therapists and counsellors are basically different from their clients. Where differences exist, they tend to be ones of degree. Also, although it is often helpful to be aware of personal deficiencies, this awareness is only us...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Why focus on personal responsibility?
• Chapter 2 Background: humanistic and existential approaches
• Chapter 3 Background: cognitive, behavioural and cognitive-behavioural approaches
• Chapter 4 Toward a theory: assumptions and acquisition
• Chapter 5 Toward a theory: perpetuation and change
• Chapter 6 Considerations for practice
• Chapter 7 Responsiveness: experiencing feelings
• Chapter 8 Realism: thinking, language and inner speech
• Chapter 9 Relatedness: self-definition and communication
• Chapter 10 Rewarding activity: meaning in occupation
• Summary
• Appendix List of theoretical propositions
• References
• Index of names
• Index of subjects