Which Comes First – the Chicken or the Egg?
If you can answer this question, you will understand who is responsible for the way you feel and react when communication with another person becomes difficult.
And if you do not know the correct answer, here is my proposal: you are responsible. If you understand this—not only intellectually, but with every cell of your body—an enormous power will flow into your communication with others. If you fail to do so, you will continue to feel and behave like a victim, incapable of changing your life and relationships for the better.
Thanks to systemic psychotherapy, the paradigm shift in the field of mental health and the treatment of psychological problems has led us into new territories of understanding human behavior.
This shift concerns the transition from the causal “cause–effect” model to another causal model—that of circular relationships. What characterizes the latter is that cause and effect constantly exchange places; in other words, the effect can in turn become the cause of what appears to be its own cause. Such a shift in meta-theory (that is, paradigm) has far-reaching consequences for anyone interested in human behavior and in how it can be influenced. It allows us to stop searching for solutions to our psychological problems in the past (as was done for many years in classical psychoanalysis) and instead to discover them in the present—the only reality to which we have direct access and personal influence.
“For the purposes of change in the here and now, knowledge of causes in the past is a meaningless exercise; it is unnecessary… A very detailed and precise investigation of the past will lead only to the point where, at the end of that investigation, the therapist finds himself in the same hopelessness and dead end in which his patients already are.”
Paul Watzlawick, The Munchausen Plait, or Psychotherapy and Reality
Such a paradigm shift in psychotherapy has very real practical implications in the life of the ordinary person who is interested in how their behavior can change so that they no longer feel like a helpless victim of external or internal circumstances (the latter referring to experiences that arise from the body and seem beyond our personal control). When such a person begins to explore new perspectives—by reading books, attending seminars on personal development and self-knowledge, and meeting people with different views—their thinking begins to change. With the change in thinking comes a change in perception. And with the change in perception comes a change in the way they respond to the very same things. Their reactions to external stimuli are no longer the same. They step out of the “stimulus–response” model, in which they feel like a victim of circumstances beyond their control, and begin to use their creative power to influence the external world.
You might say that this idea is nothing new under the sun. This very website already contains dozens of articles devoted to how the intermediate event “that takes place in our mind” determines how we choose to respond to events from our external or internal world. Why, then, if this is not new at all, and if we are so aware that our reactions in life are shaped by the meanings we assign to triggering events, do we continue to react in the same way when communicating with “difficult” people? Why is it so hard for us to find the creative solution that would help us avoid the typical communication errors—either attacking or withdrawing into silence—when “the conversation becomes crucial”? Why do we enter so-called “endless games,” as systemic psychotherapists call the communication patterns in which we attempt to solve a problem by doing the same thing over and over again, only to arrive at a dead end each time? Why do we fail to take advantage of the freedom that the circular nature of human communication offers us—to become the cause of our own cause—and instead get stuck in a repetitive and highly predictable series of interactions?
I do not know how you would answer these questions, but I believe that at their core there is one single reason: lack of awareness. We cannot change something if we are not aware of what is happening. And I mean truly aware—not merely thinking that we know. I mean actually knowing. Because when we know, we step out of the vicious circle of repetitive and ineffective interactions. And we do something different. Something creative. Something that expresses our capacity not only to react to our environment, but also to become a factor of influence and change within that very environment.
And here we arrive at another well-known truth: that change in the world begins within ourselves. This is not only Gandhi’s message; it is the message of many great minds who have understood that we cannot change the external world unless we first change ourselves. This is why Stephen Covey, in his brilliant book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, says that private victories precede public victories. If we return to our theme of responsibility, mental health, and their connection to meaningful communication, it becomes clear that if we want to influence others, we must first see whether we are capable of influencing ourselves.
Because the world around us is full of people who desperately try to find ways to make others do what they want—or what they believe others should do—while being unable to make themselves do far smaller things.
The circular model of communication, which changes the paradigm of scientific thinking in psychotherapy, tells us exactly this: when it comes to responsibility, it refers only to our own part of the interaction. It refers to us and to our reactions. We can influence the other only to the extent to which we have influence over our own responses. It is simple—and at the same time extremely difficult in practice. Because at its core, responsibility is a child of freedom. Only an aware person can take responsibility for the choices they make.
The presence of crises in our lives that we cannot resolve—and that therefore draw us into vicious circles of pathological interactions—lays bare how deeply unaware we are. We begin to realize that our thinking is nothing more than a vast amount of conditioning by the surrounding environment, richly garnished with prejudices, biases, and other forms of limiting beliefs. How can we be free if we do not subject these belief systems, which distort our perception, to reflection? Only then can we step out of the victim mentality and make a conscious choice.
Eckhart Tolle expressed this most clearly:
“If you do not take responsibility for the state of your consciousness, you do not take responsibility for your life.”
I can only agree with him.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
Note: The quotations are translated from Bulgarian and are not presented as verbatim citations.
