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Of course change begins with you and that's all good and great, but on a deeper level, where did this distorted perception of right and wrong come from?
Can you elaborate further?
You know what I mean. At some point, someone plays a role in early cognitive development. Sometimes, depending on the influence, this can distort what is perceived as right and wrong - or what is and isn't abuse.
For example, just recently, I was wondering why my ex-husband used to keep me up a night, all the time. Then, out of nowhere, I remember my mother used to do the same thing to me, from a very, very young age, for very bizarre reasons -usually in relation to something I did or didn't do - same as him. Just conditioning, but I didn't chose to recreate this relationship on a conscious level, but it seemed fairly normal at the time.
Sky Dancer, an interesting and complex question on a number of levels. We certainly do not raise our children as situational ethicists but life and what happens in it is often complex and tied to all other things that often go un-thought of. So to answer in something other than mundane rantings, I will post a Robert Haas poem which gives a sense of the problem in a extreme and complex personal dilemma.
'The World as Will and Representation'
"When I was a child my father every morning --
Some mornings, for a time, when I was ten or so,
My father gave my mother a drug called antabuse.
It makes you sick if you drink alcohol.
They were little yellow pills. He ground them
In a glass, dissolved them in water, handed her
The glass and watched her closely while she drank.
It was the late nineteen-forties, a time,
A social world, in which the men got up
And went to work, leaving the women with the children.
His wink at me was a nineteen-forties wink.
He watched her closely so she couldn't "pull
A fast one" or "put anything over" on a pair
As shrewd as the two of us. I hear those phrases
In old movies and my mind begins to drift.
The reason he ground the medications fine
Was that the pills could be hidden under the tongue
And spit out later. The reason that this ritual
Occurred so early in the morning -- I was told,
And knew it to be true -- was that she could,
If she wanted, induce herself to vomit,
So she had to be watched until her system had
Absorbed the drug. Hard to render, in these lines,
The rhythm of the act. He ground two of them
To powder in a glass, filled it with water,
Handed it to her, and watched her drink.
In my memory, he's wearing a suit, gray,
Herringbone, a white shirt she had ironed.
Some mornings, as in the comics we read
When Dagwood went off early to placate
Mr. Dithers, leaving Blondie with crusts
Of toast and yellow rivulets of egg yolk
To be cleared before she went shopping --
On what the comic called a shopping spree --
With Trixie, the next-door neighbor, my father
Would catch an early bus and leave the task
Of vigilance to me. "Keep an eye on Mama, pardner."
You know the passage in the Aeneid? The man
Who leaves the burning city with his father
On his shoulders, holding his young son's hand,
Means to do well among the flaming arras
And the falling columns while the blind prophet,
Arms upraised, howls from the inner chamber,
"Great Troy is fallen. Great Troy is no more."
Slumped in a bathrobe, penitent and biddable,
My mother at the kitchen table gagged and drank,
Drank and gagged. We get our first moral idea
About the world—about justice and power,
Gender and the order of things—from somewhere."
OK... this is where you lose me. I think blame is as much of our lives as breathing air. If you get in your car to go down to the grocery store for milk and bread, and while you're sitting at a stop sign, some drunk comes speeding up behind you without hitting his brakes and plows into the back of your car totally it and snapping your neck. You wind up in a wheel chair as a quadriplegic. Fault NEEDS to be assigned to the drunk that plowed into you. I could give more examples from now until midnight, but I don't think I need to. Blame MUST be assigned in certain instances. There's no getting around it.
The drunk driver is responsible for his actions. I completely agree he should do jail time, have fines, lose his license etc.
But is he to blame? IMO. No. They are two different things.
In the case of the meth addict. He is responsible for his actions. If he commits a crime in pursuit of his addiction, then he has to face the consequences. Using meth is illegal. Selling it is illegal.
Is he really to blame? He's addicted. He's sick. The nature of addiction and compulsive behavior is a lack of control.
Can you see the distinction?
It's tricky because our entire criminal penal system is based on shame and blame--rather than just looking at the truth of how things are, and addressing the consequences of behavior.
Shame and blame are heavy. Responsibility literally means the ability to respond. It's much easier to address addiction without adding shame and blame to the equation.
I dunno...if your using something to self-medicate you pretty much realize you're fucked up.In the case of the meth addict. He is responsible for his actions. If he commits a crime in pursuit of his addiction, then he has to face the consequences. Using meth is illegal. Selling it is illegal.
Is he really to blame? He's addicted. He's sick. The nature of addiction and compulsive behavior is a lack of control.
Can you see the distinction?
It's tricky because our entire criminal penal system is based on shame and blame--rather than just looking at the truth of how things are, and addressing the consequences of behavior.
Shame and blame are heavy. Responsibility literally means the ability to respond. It's much easier to address addiction without adding shame and blame to the equation.
Aha! Now I get it. Thanks. Yeah, I'm with you on this one Sky Dancer.
The other extreme is one to who takes too much responsibility without - how to put this - assigning responsibility to others who may also be responsible. For example, a child is raised by a mother who invalidates everything the child says or its behaviors. They live in an abusive household where the mother enables the abusive husband. As the child develops into an adolescent, s/he doesn't believe that s/he lives in an abusive home, but that s/he is over-reacting to a situation which isn't really as bad as it seems. Then the adolescent becomes an adult and doesn't realize that the coping mechanisms s/he developed during their formative years doesn't work anymore because they believe that they had a normal childhood and don't realize there is anything wrong. Instead they begin to use alcohol or drugs to self-medicate instead of coping in a healthy manner. They doubt everything including themselves, because they've never learned that how they think and feel is valid. Failure is only logical and natural for a person with this perspective. S/he won't realize that the coping method s/he developed in reaction to the environment in which s/he was raised has resulted in his/her current unhealthy behavior; and that environment was cultivated, whether consciously or not, by the parents. So the parents share in the responsibility of that person's unhealthy behavior. Yes, the person/subject is 100% responsible, but, so are the parents also 100% responsible.
And no one is to blame. But everyone is at fault. Right?