Function of Personal Responsibility
The psychological guiding process, which one focuses on as one’s own, and which one establishes externally and with the other party, can be dealt with functionally or dysfunctionally by the psychological system. Those processing forms which are viewed as functional are those which leave the responsibility for one’s own experience, one’s own explanations about events and one’s own evaluation of oneself in one’s own hand, and which allows the unalterable to be set aside, in a relaxed manner, as a part of the world. Processing forms are considered as dysfunctional when one plays the role of the victim or the powerless, although one would have possibilities of influence. “I cannot, because you…!“, “You have to get angry about that!”, “This is totally unacceptable!”, “I will never get over that!”, “That is unfair and must not be!”, “Why always me?” – all these are sentences (from thousands of possible ones) which reflect that someone is dealing with his personal responsibility in such a way that others or circumstances are responsible for how he is feeling. This form of processing is dysfunctional, because it dramatically limits the possibilities of influencing an improvement of the situation. Therefore, in any consultancy work, an understanding is required about how one can support people in discovering how they can, once more, experience their projections as their own, and how they can perceive introjections (foreign things which are regarded as their own) as something alien once more. Coaching which supports the client in how to manipulate the environment more effectively, so that they achieve good feelings and avoid bad feelings, imprisons the client firmly in their own frame of reference and is, therefore, wrong.