ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the important concept of responsibility and its relation to psychotherapy. It also discusses: responsibility and thinking; responsibility, feelings and attitudes; responsibility and decision-making; responsibility, action tendencies and behaviour; responsibility and the consequences of behaviour; and responsibility, blame, victimhood and self-blame. A client’s emotions largely depend on their attitudes towards an adversity. The events that a client faces, particularly adversities, do restrict their choice of what attitudes to take towards such negative events, but they rarely cause the attitudes the client adopts. One of the tasks of the therapist is to address a common misconception held by many clients that their feelings are caused by the negative events in their lives. Blaming other people and external events for what the client is really responsible for is a hallmark of poor mental health.
