Let’s go back to accountability. I touched upon it in Beige, and Purple but it is here in Red where it gets real. Let’s approach accountability this time with a warrior’s mindset. When a warrior wants to get something done, they don’t get bogged down in all the excuses of why its other peoples fault. A warrior knows how to step into their power.
But most of us, most of the time are not in our power. Instead we are giving it away to someone else. Personally, I realized that it was not a question of if I was giving my power away but to who in that moment. I was always giving away my power — my boss, my partner, my family — I was always giving it away. This is the Victim mindset. And what the Victim likes to do best is to recruit Rescuers to rally against the Perpetrator.
The victim mindset is very seductive. Very. Why? Because it gets us off the hook. If we are the helpless victim then we don’t have to do the hard, scary work of really looking at ourself. We don’t have to change — other people do. Let me give you a recent personal example. My relationship with my partner deteriorated to the point where we both were wondering if it made sense to stay in relationship. To make it worse this all blew up while she was in another country so we couldn’t even really talk about it. This is where I would try to recruit you as a Rescuer — god knows I’ve been trying to do that with other people. But that leaves me the helpless victim. Each night I startled awake at 3am in a panic, and started to think in outrage and pain on how she needs to have a conversation with me, this instant!
It took me awhile but eventually I realized this had nothing to do with her. Yes there were problems we needed to address, but this level of upset going on for me? It was all about my abandonment fears. It brought up the familiar belief that I’m not worthy of love. But that is not something she can do for me. She is not responsible for me finding my worth? I alone am responsible for that. The even bigger problem is me not taking responsibility for letting our relationship get to the point that we are in this crisis. This is not all on her, I played an equal role in all of that. And when I stepped back into accountability and stopped making it all about her, I’ve had some amazing, life changing realizations. I won’t go into all of it here, but amongst other things I realized how I kind of collapse into a relationship without keeping my own boundaries distinct. And I started to see the many, many ways I had given up my power.
It was painful to admit all of that to myself, but the advantage is now I’m in a position to do something about it. When I step into an accountability mindset I don’t just have to fear that every relationship will collapse at some point, because now I see how I helped contributed to that, and how I can chose another path. It is a very powerful, warrior way to look at the world. With everything that happens I question; how did I attract that? What different choices might I make next time.
OK, that is my own personal story, but let’s step back into the bigger picture. What is it that we want for this world? More people in accountability. More people out of Victim. More people stepping into power. But the thing about stepping into your power? When you become more powerful, your bullshit becomes more powerful too. For most of my life I’ve shied away from stepping into my power because I did not want to become one of those “powerful” white men that hurt people. No thank you, I will at the very least not actively make the world worse.
This is a real fear. I once took a leadership course and my small group leader, who was ironically a woman, modeled all the hard ass, dominant, stereotypical traits of what a “leader” looked like. And she caused real damage to our small group. We fell apart, and I dropped out of the class. If leadership is the strong person shouting the loudest, I want nothing to do with it. But it doesn’t have to be. What that woman was modeling was not leadership, but dominance. That is a very different thing, but people get really confused on this.
We want people stepping into their power, yes, maybe at times even in a Red dominant way, but we want that power harnessed and serving the greater good. It is so easy to slip into victim. I catch myself at it all the time. And it is also so easy to slip into only really paying attention to myself and not my impact on others. I also do that all the time. So how do we work with that? Mindfulness. Time to spiral back to that.