FROM BLAME TO SELF-RESPONSIBILITY
I saw too many people give away their last morsel
of food, their last sip of water to others in need
to know that no one can take away the last of
our human freedoms—the freedom to choose our
own way, in whatever the circumstances.
—DR. VIKTOR FRANKL, MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING, ON HIS EXPERIENCES IN NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMPS
In the mid-1980s, I helped facilitate a series of conferences between top Soviet and American policy advisers on the question of how to prevent a nuclear war. The times were tense and the accusations were flying back and forth between the two superpowers. Each time we held a meeting, the first session began with a long laundry list of attacks and defensive arguments. It poisoned the atmosphere and took up a lot of valuable time. By the third or fourth such conference, my colleagues and I tried a different tack. On the printed agenda, we labeled the subject of the first meeting “Mutual Accusations” and scheduled it before breakfast for anyone who wanted to show up. Everyone got the point.
The blame game is the core pattern of almost every destructive conflict I have ever witnessed. The husband blames the wife and vice versa. Management blames the union and vice versa. One political enemy blames the other and vice versa. Blaming usually triggers feelings of anger or shame in the other, which provokes counterblame. And on it goes.
It is so tempting to blame those with whom we are in conflict. Who started the argument, after all, if it wasn’t the other person? Blaming makes us feel innocent. We are the ones who were wronged. We get to feel righteous and even superior. And blaming also nicely deflects any residual guilt we might feel. The emotional benefits are clear.
But, as I have witnessed in countless conflicts over the years, the costs of the blame game are huge. It escalates disputes needlessly and prevents us from resolving them. It poisons relationships and wastes valuable time and energy. Perhaps most insidiously, it undermines our power: when we blame others for what is wrong in the relationship—whether it is a marital dispute, an office spat, or a superpower clash—we are dwelling on their power and our victimhood. We are overlooking whatever part we may have played in the conflict and are ignoring our freedom to choose how to respond. We are giving our power away.
If we want to get to yes with others, particularly in the more difficult situations we face every day, we need to find a way to get past the blame game. We need to reclaim our power to change the situation for the better. While I was working on the problem of preventing nuclear crises between the United States and the Soviet Union, I studied crisis management in other areas of life such as business. At the time, the most striking example of a successful response to a dire situation was the way the pharmaceutical company Johnson and Johnson responded to the Tylenol crisis in 1982. Today, Johnson and Johnson’s response has become a classic case study, but back when it took place, the company’s approach was truly eye-opening. The top news story in the nation day after day, week after week, was the deaths by poisoning of six adults and one child who had ingested Tylenol laced with cyanide in the Chicago area. No one knew who had taken the capsules and injected them with poison. CEO James Burke was faced with the dilemma of how to respond. Tylenol was the company’s most profitable product, commanding 37 percent of the market in over-the-counter painkillers.
Many experts cautioned against a nationwide recall, arguing that the incidents were limited to the Chicago area and that the poisoning was not the fault of Johnson and Johnson. But Burke and his colleagues chose not to take the easy way out by placing the responsibility for their customers’ safety elsewhere. Instead, they assumed full responsibility, ordered the product withdrawn from the shelves of drugstores across the country, and offered to exchange all the existing Tylenol capsules in people’s homes for Tylenol tablets. This one decision, made almost immediately after the deaths were reported, cost the company an estimated hundred million dollars.
The result? Contrary to conventional wisdom at the time, which held that there was no way the Tylenol brand could possibly recover from such a widely publicized disaster, Tylenol was relaunched within months under the same name in a new tamper-resistant bottle and went on to achieve an astonishing recovery in sales and market share. What could easily have turned into a devastating crisis in public confidence became a confirmation in the public’s eyes of Johnson and Johnson’s integrity and credibility.
The opposite of the blame game is to take responsibility. By responsibility, I mean “response-ability”—the ability to respond constructively to a situation facing us, treating it as ours to handle. That is what James Burke and his colleagues at Johnson and Johnson did. No matter how challenging or costly it might be, taking responsibility, they knew, lies at the heart of genuine leadership. And the rewards were great: taking responsibility made it possible to get to a yes in the form of restored confidence with doctors, nurses, patients, and other stakeholders.
Once you get past the blame game and take responsibility, it becomes much easier for you to get to yes with others. The real work starts from within. Taking responsibility means taking responsibility for your life and your relationships. And, perhaps most important, it means making an unconditional commitment to take care of your needs.
It seems like a simple question—Who is really responsible for our lives?—but somehow the answer eludes us more frequently than we would like. Even though intellectually we know that we are responsible for our words, our actions, and even our reactions, we often look at our lives, wondering how we got where we are and typically find the answer in external factors: “I’m not where I want to be in my career because my boss hates me and has blocked my advancement.” “I can’t travel because I don’t have the money.” “I live here instead of the city where I really want to live because my family pressured me to stay.” In other words, it was not our decision; someone else or some external circumstance is to blame.
I recall the story of Sam, a young friend of mine who kept getting into car accidents. First, he destroyed the family van beyond repair . . . then the family jeep . . . then his own car. Thankfully, he was not injured nor was anyone else. Each time, he would get angry and blame the accident on circumstances beyond his control—the other driver, the conditions on the road, a poorly lit sign. He was not responsible, that was very clear to him. The string of accidents combined with his lack of responsibility alarmed Sam’s parents and led to tension and conflict in the family.
Finally, after a process of observing himself closely and listening to his underlying feelings, Sam came to the realization that the repetitive pattern of accidents might be related to his aggressive driving. Probing more deeply, he came to understand how this aggressive tendency arose from suppressed feelings of insecurity and anger. He came to accept those feelings, which led him to take full responsibility for his driving as well as for the accidents, even those that seemed like genuine ones. Perhaps most important, he finally understood that he—and he alone—was responsible for his life and what happened in it. Once he was able to get to yes with himself in this way, he was able to get to yes with his parents. And, perhaps not surprisingly, the pattern of automobile accidents utterly ceased.
That is the power of self-responsibility when twinned with self-understanding. Self-understanding without self-responsibility runs the risk of dissolving into self-pity. Self-responsibility without self-understanding can deteriorate into self-blame. To get to yes with yourself, you need both. As Sam’s story makes clear, the work of putting yourself in your shoes gives you the understanding to then take responsibility for your life and your actions.
Taking responsibility for your life means owning your failures and faults as well as your successes and strengths. It takes honesty and courage to do so, but only then will you be able to say that you have put yourself genuinely in your own shoes. You can then occupy your shoes fully—holes and all. Whereas self-responsibility is often confused with self-blame, it is, in fact, quite the opposite. Self-blame looks backward, judging what is past: “What a failure I have been at work!” Self-responsibility looks essentially forward, figuring out how to address the problem. “What can I do to make my work successful?”
If our life is a play, we may not be the playwright, but we can choose to be the director. We can interpret the play as we choose, able to portray ourselves either as victims of destiny or as the captains of our fate. Whether what happens to us is pure accident or not, we are the decisive factor in our life: we may not always be able to choose our circumstances, but we are able to choose our responses to them.
When my friend Jerry White was a college student studying abroad in Jerusalem, he went on a camping trip in the Golan Heights and stepped on a land mine left behind from the Six-Day War. He lost his leg—and almost his life. As he lay in bed in a hospital for months on end, with alternating feelings of grief, anger, bitterness, and self-pity, a soldier lying in a bed next to him said: “Jerry, this will be the worst thing that ever happened to you or the best thing. You decide.”
Jerry took the soldier’s advice and chose not to settle into the role of a victim blaming others and life itself for his difficulties. Instead Jerry chose to take responsibility for his life and to change his circumstances. “I didn’t like that image of myself—bitter, whiny Jerry who let a bad thing take over the rest of his life,” Jerry wrote in his inspiring book I Will Not Be Broken. “There is a life to be lived—my life—and if I had to hop, roll, or whatever, I was going to get back to it.” In effect, Jerry said yes to himself and his life.
It was not always easy for him, of course, but Jerry responded to his accident by giving his life to service. Eventually he cofounded Survivor Corps, a global network of land-mine survivors who help victims of war and terror, which played a leading role in the Nobel Prize–winning International Campaign to Ban Landmines. From there, Jerry went into public service, working on resolving conflicts around the world. Getting to yes with himself helped him get to yes with others—and indeed his lifework turned to helping entire societies get to yes.
Jerry shifted how he saw himself in the play—from the role of powerless victim to the role of leader. Like Jerry, each of us has the ability to reframe the guiding question from “Who is to blame?” to “What do we have to learn?” When faced with adversity, we can either blame others or life for our current circumstances or we can become curious and ask ourselves what lesson life is bringing us. Instead of resisting our current circumstances we can take responsibility for our lives as they are right now. Even if we would prefer not to face a particular challenge, we can choose the challenge anyway simply because it is what is in front of us. Instead of lamenting our fate, we can, like Jerry, choose to embrace it.
Even if, objectively speaking, we are only partly in control of our circumstances, we still have considerable control over our experiences. Like Jerry, we can choose how we interpret what happens to us, no matter how bad, which will directly influence how we continue to feel about it and how we respond. If a business deal turns sour, we can choose to blame others and stew in our resentment and anger, or we can choose to see it as an occasion to learn and move on to a new deal. If a spouse or partner leaves, we can blame him or her and let that decision define our experience, or we can listen to our feelings, accept them, take ownership of our lives, and move forward.
Perhaps no one has expressed the truth of our power to choose more vividly than Dr. Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, his wrenching and poignant account of his own experiences as an inmate for three years in Auschwitz, Dachau, and other Nazi concentration camps. As he learned in the hardest way, even when we are utterly deprived of freedom, we remain free in the end to give our experience the meaning that we choose. In the midst of unimaginable suffering, he chose to take responsibility for his life and his experience. He reached out and helped people in need, giving them solace and whatever little nourishment he could spare. In a situation where seemingly he had no power, he reclaimed the power to govern his own life.
Taking responsibility for our lives may seem heavy at times, but in fact it can be liberating. It can free up enormous energies that have long been trapped in the drama of blaming others as well as ourselves. It is the blame game, the absence of responsibility, which keeps us imprisoned as victims. The moment we recognize that we are in a prison of our own making, the walls begin to crumble and we are free. By owning our lives, we can start living them to the full.
If the blame game lies at the root of most of the conflicts I have ever witnessed, taking responsibility for the relationship lies at the root of most of the truly successful resolutions I have ever seen.
Think of your relationship with someone at home, at work, or in the community that has been problematic for you. Have you ever felt tempted to blame the other person and to cast yourself in the role of victim? It is all too common to blame others for negative aspects of a relationship with them. But, as we all know, every relationship—and every conflict—has at least two parties.
In his insightful book Passionate Marriage, psychologist Dr. David Schnarch presents the case of a client named Susan, a woman with a strong need for communicating and connecting with others, who was unhappily married to Frank. As she saw it, she and Frank rarely, if ever, really talked. For years, Susan had criticized and nagged Frank into talking with her but, the more she did, the more he retreated into his shell. She felt it was his fault that they couldn’t move forward on this challenge in their relationship. She was angry and frustrated because she could not get to the yes she wanted with her husband.
With the help of her therapist, Susan was able to put herself in her own shoes and learned to understand and accept herself as she was—someone who wanted to connect deeply with others by talking and sharing feelings. Then she learned to understand her husband—someone who did not like talking and sharing feelings. She finally realized how she contributed to their negative dynamic, recognizing that her nagging only accentuated Frank’s withdrawal. Frank had suffered a lot of trauma in his childhood, so he did not feel safe opening up. In fact, the more Susan criticized him, the less safe he felt and the more he would clam up.
In the end, others’ shortcomings must be considered their problem, not yours. Your challenge is how to respond. You can choose to acknowledge your contribution to the problematic relationship, as Susan did. Even if your contribution seems relatively small in your eyes, especially when compared to the other person’s, it is still a contribution. And if you look truly honestly at the situation, as Susan was able to do, you may see that your contribution is not so small after all. There is an old saying that when you point your finger at someone, three fingers point back at you. It is not about blaming yourself, but simply realizing that you have a part in the relationship and the problem. Rather than get lost in the blame game, it is more useful to realize that it takes two to create the mess—and only one to begin to transform the relationship. By taking responsibility for your relationship, you reclaim your power to change it.
Taking responsibility for the state of your relationship also means recognizing when your words or actions have caused harm or distress. In my work as a mediator in conflicts ranging from business battles to ethnic wars, I have seen the power of a sincere apology to help heal a rift in the relationship. I recall one occasion when I was facilitating a confidential meeting in Europe between Turkish and Kurdish opinion leaders at a time when a civil war was raging in Turkey. A retired Turkish general asked to speak: “As a former leader of the armed forces of Turkey, I want to acknowledge the suffering of countless Kurdish villagers during the course of this terrible war. I know that many innocents have died and been injured. And, personally, I want to say that I am profoundly sorry.” The tension in the meetings had been great but this one sincere statement dramatically changed the atmosphere and opened the way for an eventual agreement to work together to end the war. What makes an apology successful is the invisible work beforehand, in this case, the general coming to own his actions and the role he played in the conflict before offering the apology. The success of the apology depends critically on the work inside.
In Getting to Yes, Roger Fisher and I argued that your greatest source of power in a negotiation is your BATNA—your Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. Your BATNA is your best course of action for satisfying your interests if you cannot reach agreement with the other side. If you are negotiating a new job offer, for example, your best alternative might be to seek another job offer. In the case of a contractual dispute, your best alternative to negotiation might be to resort to a mediator or take the matter to court. If you cannot agree on a price with one car dealer, you can find another dealer. Your BATNA gives you the confidence that, no matter what happens in the negotiation, you have a good alternative. It makes you less dependent on the other side to satisfy your needs. It gives you a sense of freedom as well as power and confidence.
For thirty-five years, I have been teaching people to identify and develop their BATNAs. Yet, as I have seen, it is often challenging for people as they discover that their alternatives are not at all obvious or are quite unattractive: “I can’t find another job.” “Going to court will cost a lot of time and money.” Faced with a negotiating counterpart who appears more powerful, many people struggle to equalize the power balance.
We can, however, increase our power from within in a way that is always available to us, no matter what our outer situations might be. In a negotiation or conflict, well before we develop an external alternative to a negotiated agreement, we can create an internal alternative to a negotiated agreement. We can make a strong unconditional commitment to ourselves to take care of our deepest needs, no matter what other people do or don’t do. That commitment is our inner BATNA. Genuine power starts inside of us.
In the example of a job offer negotiation, while your outer BATNA might be to seek and accept another job offer, your inner BATNA is your commitment to yourself that, regardless of whether you successfully negotiate this job offer (or another job offer, for that matter), you will take care of your needs for satisfaction and fulfillment in your work no matter what.
The key phrase is no matter what. Your inner BATNA is your commitment to stop blaming yourself, others, and life itself for your dissatisfactions no matter what. It is your commitment to remove the responsibility for meeting your true needs from the other person’s shoulders—and to assume it yourself no matter what. This unconditional commitment gives you the motivation and the power to change your circumstances, especially in a difficult situation or conflict. Your inner BATNA is, in effect, the foundation for your outer BATNA.
In Susan’s case, which I described in the previous section, she realized that she was choosing to stay in this deeply unsatisfying relationship and that she could choose to leave. Leaving was a last resort, of course, something she very much preferred not to do. Leaving was, in negotiation terms, her outer BATNA, her best course of action for satisfying her needs if she could not reach agreement with her husband, Frank. Having taken responsibility for her role in the dynamics of the relationship, Susan took responsibility for her needs. She developed her inner BATNA, making an unconditional commitment to herself to take care of her needs no matter what. She was thus able to approach her husband in an entirely new way. She calmly informed Frank:
I’m no longer willing to accept how rarely we talk, and I’m no longer willing to push you to do it. But don’t assume I’m accepting things the way they are because I won’t be nagging or criticizing you anymore. For myself, I don’t want to be pathetically grateful just because my partner talks to me. . . . And for you, I don’t want you feeling pressured all the time by a screeching wife. I’ll interpret what you do from here on as indicating your decision about how you really want to live. I’ll make my decision about my life accordingly.
Susan gave up trying to control her husband’s behavior, which was having the opposite effect she intended. Instead, she took responsibility for her needs and chose how she would act. She committed herself to living a more connected and satisfying way of life, regardless of how Frank continued to behave. She showed respect to Frank, allowing him to make his own decisions, and at the same time, she showed respect to herself, reclaiming her autonomy.
Although on the surface, Susan’s approach might appear to have threatened her marriage, it actually had the opposite effect. Assuming responsibility for her actions and her future enabled Susan to stop her destructive habit of criticizing Frank. And when the criticism stopped, Frank felt safe and was willing to open up and talk more about his feelings and needs. Their marriage was not only saved, but transformed. Susan got to yes—with herself and with Frank.
The more we need another person to satisfy our needs, the more power that individual has over us, the more dependent and needy we are likely to behave. Taking responsibility for our needs not only helps us, but can also, as Susan’s story illustrates, facilitate the process of getting to yes with the other person. Whereas our outer BATNA is subject to change, our inner BATNA, that commitment to take care of ourselves, is always there and can never be taken from us. In my years of teaching about negotiation, what I have come to realize is that the best BATNA of all, the one that can give us the most confidence and power in a conflict situation, is the one that starts inside. It is a missing key to success in negotiation.
In life, we are destined to deal with many difficult situations. A domineering boss insists we work nights and weekends; we acquiesce, telling ourselves we need the job. An ornery client constantly demands last-minute changes and concessions; we give in, telling ourselves we need that business. A teenage daughter refuses to listen to our admonitions and disrespects us; we ignore her behavior, telling ourselves we need her love. In these difficult situations, we may see no alternative but to accept ill treatment from others. It is all too easy to fall into the trap of making ourselves emotional prisoners of others.
In the end, each of us must answer the question “Who is responsible for meeting my core psychological needs?” If we answer, “someone else,” we will give our power away to them. But, if we answer, “ourselves,” we can reclaim the power to change our life and our future.
I learned the lesson of self-responsibility in perhaps the most personally challenging situation and set of negotiations I have ever had to face, which was with the doctors and nurses on whom the life and health of my daughter, Gabriela, depended. Gabi, as we call her, was born with a series of congenital anomalies called VATER syndrome that affected her spine, her spinal cord, her feet, and some of her organs. She required urgent medical attention from the day she was born and over the years went through fourteen major surgeries. It was not clear in the beginning whether she would ever walk or even live. What was hardest, naturally, for my wife, Lizanne, and me was to watch her suffer. We feared for her life, her health, and her well-being.
We were tempted to find something to blame for Gabi’s suffering and the ordeal we were going through—ourselves, unresponsive or insensitive doctors, or even life itself. But, as we learned, there was no use in blaming anyone or anything. The only healthy way forward was to take responsibility for our life just as it was, for our relationships with doctors and nurses, and for our own psychological needs.
With the help of a friend who was a therapist, we first learned to put ourselves in our shoes. Both Lizanne and I have a tendency to act strong and to skirt the places of inner pain. But, as we went first to the balcony and then listened to ourselves, we let ourselves feel our emotions of fear, dread, anxiety, guilt, shame, and anger, emotions that I at least had numbed. We learned to give ourselves and each other empathy and compassion, especially when facing a difficult and dangerous surgery. We found that by deliberately facing our pain, imagining our worst fears of losing Gabi, entering the fear rather than steering around it, we were able to go through it and ultimately experience emotional relief and healing. Although every protective instinct urged us to go around the pain, the key lesson we learned is that the way forward is through.
The work of self-understanding helped us to take responsibility for our circumstances. We learned to accept life the way it was, not to resist it or to lose time and energy wishing it were different. We took response-ability and sought to do the best we could to help Gabi, the family, and ourselves. We looked for every occasion to lead a normal, healthy family life with lots of laughter and love. We treated Gabi like her brothers and encouraged her to live life as fully as possible, going out for sports she liked, even if they were more challenging for her given her physical condition. Here Gabi was our best teacher since she never saw herself as a victim, never indulged in self-pity, but sought to make each day fun for herself. Although we would never have voluntarily chosen such an ordeal for Gabi and for us, we said yes to the situation rather than no. In this way, we took back our life, our initiative, and our power to change the situation for the better.
We also learned to take responsibility for our relationships with doctors and nurses. Even if medical specialists were insensitive, we learned not to blame them but to take the initiative to address the problem. Just before Gabi’s spinal cord surgery, for example, one doctor casually announced to his students in front of Lizanne, who was cradling five-month-old Gabi in her arms: “I’ve seen many kids go into this surgery and come out paraplegic.” We were shocked by his callousness. Not long thereafter, we were referred to this same doctor as the most skilled surgeon in town for another of Gabi’s surgeries. Although we might easily have dismissed him because of our first encounter with him, we went to the balcony and focused on what was best for Gabi. In the end, we created a good relationship with him and he eventually became a friend, offering us hours and hours of free consultation about numerous surgeries, and taking close care of Gabi.
What helped us conduct these critical relationships was our commitment to ourselves to take care of our own psychological needs. Doing so allowed us to control our levels of anxiety around Gabi’s surgeries. The less anxious we were, the more trusting, calm, and confident Gabi also became since she was very much relying on us to see whether she should be afraid or not and whether she should trust or not. The less anxious Gabi and we became, the easier we found it to deal nonreactively with doctors and nurses who were sometimes brusque and unresponsive.
It was a big lesson for us. We had thought we were wholly dependent on the medical system, but the more responsibility we took and the more confidence we developed in ourselves and in life, the more relaxed we could be and therefore the more effectively we could serve as Gabi’s advocates. Everyone benefited. Getting to yes with ourselves helped us get to yes with the people on whom Gabi’s life depended.
As Lizanne and I learned, taking responsibility for meeting your needs is fundamentally about self-leadership. All too often, the inner judge, the constant critic, tries to take charge, using fear and blame, guilt and shame as instruments of control. Taking responsibility allows you to carry out an inner revolution of sorts. You can displace the judge and assume your rightful place as leader of your own life.
The key lesson is that responsibility equals power, power to meet your deepest needs. In the end, each of us is faced with a basic choice of attitude. If blaming essentially means giving away your power and thus saying no to yourself, taking responsibility means reclaiming your power and thus saying yes to yourself. By giving up the blame game and assuming responsibility for your relationships and your needs, you can go right to the root of conflict and take the lead in transforming your negotiations and your life.
This brings us to the next challenge in getting to yes with ourselves. While we can choose to take responsibility for our needs, the question remains: Where can we find a source of satisfaction to meet our deepest needs for connection and protection? For that, we turn to the next major attitudinal shift: to say yes to the life that sustains us. Having said yes to ourselves, we are now ready to say yes to life.