Impact and Artifact, continued

Kathy wrote in response to the prior post:

I agree with the message.

I also know that in relationships of intimacy, it’s very difficult to sort through internally what is an artifact from what is a present impact….particularly when the other person has no interest or capacity to help examine the dynamics. 

An easier way for me to think about it is, only I can be responsible for my emotions.  I can’t be responsible for yours…..any more than I can be responsible for your thirst or heart beat.  But if I fully know and acknowledge mine objectively, and decide how I’ll act on them….it helps the relationship move over “bumps.”

Thank you for these comments, Kathy.  I am preparing for a class tomorrow morning about “how to repair a damaged relationship” and one of my topics is the distinction between impact and artifact.  Your comments help to focus my thinking.

I agree with much of what you say.  Specifically:

The line between impact and artifact is often fuzzy and is especially important in our most intimate relationships.  The line is much clearer when the relationship is one in which the issues can be clearly and honestly addressed.  When the other can’t or won’t address the issues with us, it becomes much more difficult to know what we are responsible for…and thus what we can do something about.

I also agree that it is a good default position that my sensations, emotions, thoughts, and wishes are all my own.  To the degree to which they derive from the choices of others, they are artifacts of those choices.  I am the one who can address them creatively.

Still, if I am looking at the choices I am making, there are some ways those choices are likely to impact others.  If I were to speak to you in a tone of voice that implied anger, and told you what a sorry excuse for a human being you are using terms that were demeaning and derogatory, I could reasonably expect that you would get hurt feelings. If I were to then brush off those feelings as just artifacts that are for you to address, I would be abandoning my responsibility for the harm I have done to our relationship.  I would be failing to be accountable.

If I were then to come to you and express clear remorse and commit to what I was going to do to be sure that I never treated you that way again, you might find that you could clean up the remaining artifacts successfully.  But if I were to repeat that behavior again and again you would likely begin to find that you couldn’t clean up the mess on your own.  You might decide to address me about how my behavior is impacting you.  Or you might just choose to have nothing to do with me.

It is easy to choose to have nothing to do with people when they are not important to us.  But some relationships have such history and are so connected to others with whom we want to maintain attachments that we can’t walk away from them.  We have to address them.

At this point my response to your response explodes into a much bigger essay about how we might act to create what we need when we are not confident that the other is committed to our welfare… or to their own.  Rather than going there let me just make one other point.

From my point of view in this hypothetical case as one who is chronically abusing you (which I certainly never wish to do but which is a perspective I know from my work with men who do), I can see that I am harming you by how you respond to me.  I may think you are over-reacting.  That what I said wasn’t that bad and you should know that I love you so why don’t you just get over it already.  Still, I can see that I am upsetting you.  Is that what I want?

Is what I am doing in my relationships having the impact I am looking for?  Do I even know what I am trying to create?  From the point of view of an actor, as one who is choosing actions, do I know my own motivation?  This is the central question.  Do I want to know how my behavior is impacting those around me?  Is it the effect I am looking for?  If not, am I interested in changing what I am doing?

Impact and Artifact: distinguishing responsibility

We had some freezing rain overnight. I went out this morning to toss some melting salt on the slick sidewalk and steps. On my way back over the path I had traveled I could see that the salt was already starting to work. Little holes had formed in the slush and ice where a piece of salt had fallen. The little hole was an artifact of the action I had taken in throwing out the salt in the first place.

Whenever we make a choice we have an impact. Even the choice to refrain from acting has an impact. If we are to be fully accountable for our choices we must acknowledge our responsibility for all of our choices and the impact of those choices on the world around us. Because of a wish to be accountable for the wellbeing of my neighbors as they traverse the sidewalk on the easement to my property, I choose to throw down melting salt.

There are limits to what I can do. I can throw salt. I can’t melt ice. The salt does that. The melting ice and snow is an artifact of the choice I made.

Also this morning I got an email from a client whose wife is very upset with him. She is frantic that he keeps doing things that she experiences as being inconsiderate in the extreme. He realizes that there are things he does that “trigger” her. But, as he also points out, she is very easily triggered and her reactions seem to be out of proportion to his misstep. He insists he is not fully responsible for the impact his choices have on her.

If we want to have deeply accountable relationships we have to be able to distinguish between what we are responsible for and what we are not responsible for. When I deny that I made a choice or insist that my choice didn’t have the impact that it did, I am then denying my accountability. At the same time, if I try to take responsibility for the artifacts of my choices—if I try to be responsible for the choices of another agent—then I am distorting reality and damaging accountability.

In the case of my client, he really is doing things that are inconsiderate and a violation of what his wife believes she has a right to expect in their marriage. His choices have an impact on her. The fact that she has been treated this way, not only earlier in this marriage but in a prior marriage and in her own childhood, exacerbates the intensity of her feelings. Some of the emotion that arises for her in the present is an artifact of choices others made or that he made some time ago.

For them to have a deeply accountable relationship they will both have to work on being more responsive to what is arising in the present. For his part, he will have to notice what he is doing that is triggering for her, decide if those are things he wants to continue doing, and let her know clearly what she can expect from him. For her part, she will have to look at the degree to which his current choices are impacting her and the degree to which they are bringing to the surface emotions that are artifacts of events from the past that she has not yet fully worked through. That he does what triggers her is his responsibility. That she is so overwhelmed when he does those things is her responsibility.

None of us likes to see our beloved upset. We are especially concerned when the source of the upset is our own behavior. We want to be careful to be acceptable to others and especially to those we love and those we want to have love us. Therefore we try to fix the feelings of our beloved by doing what they want and not doing what they don’t want.

This works well when we are addressing the impact of our behavior on the beloved. But it doesn’t work at all when we are trying to address the artifacts of this behavior. When we try to adapt our behavior to repair the damage done by past choices, even when those choices were our own, but especially when they were not, then we are trying to change something we cannot change. When we say to the other, “I will be responsible for your distress by being who you want me to be,” we will fail to be who they want us to be and we will relieve them of the responsibility to effect their own healing.

It is just this point that makes it so crucial that we become able to distinguish the impact from the artifact. We must be fully responsible for the choices we make and the impact of those choices on others. And we must invite others to be responsible for the artifacts by not trying to fix their feelings by abandoning our own integrity. Similarly we must address the impact that other’s choices have on us and address the artifacts we continue to carry in our own feelings.

We all project onto the behavior of others the meaning that behavior has for us. This meaning is an artifact of our past experience. This meaning may or may not reveal truths about the choices of the other.

My daughter mentioned to me at lunch last week that she had observed herself being distressed that her husband doesn’t look for ways to facilitate getting her day started. He is absorbed with what he has to do for himself and seems unaware of what is going on with her.

This came up when I was talking about what I do in the morning to help my wife, who teaches high school, to get her lunch and bags out to the car in the morning as she is racing to get to school on time. My daughter observed that she had learned from me that one of the things husbands do to show love to wives is to help them in the morning. When her husband didn’t do those things it meant he didn’t love her.

Once she allowed this meaning to come to conscious attention she could easily and quickly see that it was not accurate… that it was a distortion based on circumstances that, while similar in form, were very different in content. Had her husband decided to try to be more solicitous in the morning so she was more content, she may have never discovered the distortion and he may have become resentful.

In the case of my client, he is concerned that he not be expected to be responsible for the artifacts that have built up in his wife over a lifetime of being ill-considered. He doesn’t want to be expected to repair something he can’t fix. But in trying to not be to blame for something he didn’t cause, he is denying the impact of current choices. When he denies his responsibility, he makes himself unable to respond in ways that will genuinely create what he needs.

We must be fully responsible for the things we can change and not take on responsibility for the things we cannot change.

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.