We need to stop blaming others and be responsible for our own reactions

WHEN agony aunt Sally Brampton started her Sunday Times column eight years ago, she got a lot of people’s backs up with her suggestion that we are responsible for our own behaviour.

Readers wrote in. They said, ‘how dare you say that’. They said the reality of their lives and emotions was not their fault.

“That premise [about owning responsibility] upset quite a number of people. They were terrified of taking responsibility because it meant a ruthless degree of self-honesty and facing themselves Resposilin the mirror,” says Brampton, pictured below, whose mission was to get people to see ‘I didn’t deserve what happened to me but I’m culpable too’.