“I will blame no one else for anything that happened, for I have learned in Al-Anon that I am not a judge of others.” (ODAT, 1 December)
There are chains of responsibility extending back from every event to its causes. I take a different approach with myself than with others. With myself: the buck stops with me. With others, I recognise that their behaviour is attributable to a thousand upstream factors. This is not inconsistent; I am the way I am because of a thousand upstream factors, but one of those factors is my agency. If change is to take place there must be an intervention in what I believe, think, and do. To me, my agency is my concern. To me, their agency is not my concern but theirs, so it is subsumed, in my considerations, in the thousand other causes. I can no more alter it than the weather.
Others must be excused and forgiven. I must excuse and forgive myself but not stop at that: I must invoke God’s help to change, and the first thing God does is ask me to ferret out my own responsibility from the mass of causal factors for the ill of my life—hence the differential approach.
The attitude towards others is therefore maximally charitable, and the attitude towards myself is maximally pragmatic.