Brain Food #803: Your problems are your own
Accepting misery is a choice
Thoughts of the day
As the year draws to a close, inviting us to look back, the act of self-reflection will surface not only all the good things that happened but also everything that did not go as expected.
In his poem, This Be the Verse, Philip Larkin wrote the infamous lines, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.” The poem touches upon one of psychology’s most popular and well-established theories, that issues are handed off from one generation to the next, in a chain of inevitability.
But this manner of thinking might also be an easy, even lazy way to absolve oneself of any responsibility for how their life is today. Researchers who followed pairs of twins who grew up in the same household found significant differences in their personalities and behaviours that could not be attributed to environmental factors, and therefore, not to their parents.
Albert Ellis, psychologist and founder of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, asks us to focus on personal responsibility and ownership:
“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.”
In most cases, our problems are the direct result of our thinking and perspective. Perhaps a better approach might then be to understand that problems will exist, but looking for the cause externally while playing the role of the victim will lead to nowhere. We cannot control what happens to us, but we can still control how we respond to it. We can focus on how to own our problems, and subsequently own our lives.
Mum and dad made mistakes, and so will we. Larkin continues, “Man hands on misery to man.” But whether we accept that misery or not is still our choice.
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