Why we do what we do?

Why do people continue in behavior that is notorious for the misery it brings on them? Why does the addict return to the addiction that is destroying him? Why do the abused remain in abusive relationships? Why can’t depressed people break their cycles of depression?

In severely dysfunctional cultures, where homes are splintered and fathers have been absent for generations, there are usually complex reasons behind destructive behavior. God ordained the home for human good. When people abandon God’s provision, the consequences are pervasive.

Another reason for the complexity of human behavior is that we are complex integrated beings. We are multidimensional with physical, psychological, social and spiritual parts to our lives. Any one of these dimensions can profoundly effect the others and each one must be considered when understanding human behavior.

Those with extreme emotional challenges like depression, excessive anxiety or unmanageable anger should at least consider physical causes for their behavior (particularly neurological). Those who battle impulsivity might also consider physical sources. There are some very helpful medicines that positively assist people who are dealing with life debilitating challenges.

There should be no shame in using medicinal aids for neurological needs. The brain is the most complicated organ of the human body. If we approve medicines for other organs, we should also support them for brain related needs. Sometimes these medicines are needed until other areas of life become healthy.   

Tracing sources behind behavior is a helpful exercise unless it leads to wrong and damaging responses. If you know, for example, that your current difficulties are due in part to deprivations or abuses from your upbringing and you respond with self-pity, anger, resentment, bitterness or despair, you doubles the loss by extending the evil through your own heart. And to use one’s past to justify self-destructive responses is a form of self-deception that allows an extension of the original wrong done to you.

Consider adults who had been wrongfully treated as children and significantly deprived of certain elements of nurture during childhood.

“When one observes the rifts and scars of children whose parents took turns slapping, deriding, ignoring, bullying, or, sometimes worse, simply abandoning them; when one observes the wholesale life mismanagement of grown-ups who have lived for years in the shadow of their bereft childhood and who have attempted with one addictor after another to fill up those empty places where love should have settled, only to discover that their addictor keeps enlarging the very void it was meant to fill — when one knows people of this kind and observes their largely predictable character pathology, one hesitates to call all this chaos sin. The label sounds smug and impertinent. In such cases, we want to appeal to some broader category, perhaps the category of tragedy.” 

‘Tragedy,” however, “implies the fall of someone who is responsible and significant. It refers to someone whose significance has been compromised and crushed by a mix of forces, including personal agency, that work together for evil in a way that seems simultaneously surprising and predictable, preventable and inevitable. A tragic figure is, in some intricate combination, both weak and willful, both foolish and guilty” (Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be).

It’s important, in most cases, to start with people as if they have a full line of moral credit; as those who can accept and pay for their debts.

“In general we ought to pay evildoers, including ourselves, the ‘intolerable compliment’ of taking them seriously as moral agents, of holding them accountable for their wrongdoing.”

“This is a mark of our respect for their dignity and weight as human beings. After all, what could be more arrogant than treating other persons as if they were no more responsible than tiny children or the mentally maimed? What could be more patronizing than the refusal to blame people for their wrongdoing and to praise them for their right doing and to ground this refusal in our assumption that these people have not caused their own acts or had a hand in forming their own character?” (Plantinga).

When helping people understand their behavior, it’s important to consider all dimensions of life. Exploring a person’s past might provide a better understanding of her present behavior. But we must remember that the only thing we can change about the past is how we allow it to affect us in the future. No matter how precisely one labels behavior, taking full responsibility for the effects of it is the only path toward freedom. 

“Remarkably enough, at the end of the day, it might not matter very much how we classify damaging behavior. Whether these behaviors amount to sin or symptom, the prescription for dealing with them may turn out to be just about the same. Nobody, for example, is more insistent than Alcoholics Anonymous that alcoholism is a disease; nobody is more insistent than A.A. on the need for the alcoholic to take full responsibility for his disease and deal with it in brutal candor” (Plantinga, Ibid.).

The spiritual dimension of life is too often ignored or confused. This is sad because of how liberating it is to know that God has made provision for forgiveness of sins through Jesus Christ and invited all of us to confess our sins to him and be forgiven.

Those who refuse to confess their sins and be forgiven are more likely to allow excuses for their behavior and less likely to accept responsibility. More importantly, we are comforted to know that God forgives those who confess their sins. Scripture says, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (I John 1:9).

Our first need is to be forgiven by our Creator and restored to fellowship with him (see: Isaiah 53:6; I Timothy 2:3-6). This is the starting point for breaking cycles of destructive behavior.

Steve Cornell