Tag: blame

The Blame Game

Sometimes (ok, make that nearly all the time) it’s just easier to blame other people for things that happen to us than to take responsibility for our own role in creating a given situation.

Even if we feel that we aren’t responsible, say, for example, if something happened in childhood, as we reach adulthood, we become responsible for cleaning up the mess, even if we didn’t make it.

The unfortunate truth is that, while blaming other people feels good (and yes, I know it does), it does little to resolve the situation.

When we step out of blame, we step into our own personal power. We claim, or reclaim, our own ability to create the future we want to live in.

But how do we get there? What propels us out of The Blame Game?

For me, it is the desire for change (and the acknowledgment that doing the same old thing doesn’t get me anywhere I really want to go). The familiar can be comfortable for a time, but eventually it becomes unbearable, stifling.

Even still, The Blame Game has its allure. Things happen – difficult, upsetting things – and I look for someone else to hold responsible. Someone else’s behavior or actions to dissect or critique.

And yet, I know that I can choose to grow into my own future by acknowledging what I learned from a disappointing experience, forgiving myself for any mistakes I made which might have contributed to it, and gracefully letting go.

Every day, we have the opportunity to make the smallest choices which can make the biggest difference.

Forgiveness

“Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.” – Mark Twain

As a follow up to the entry on freedom, I want to talk a little about forgiveness, because I think the two are closely related. Forgiveness is a tricky subject because for many people it’s closely connected to religion. But I think from a spiritual perspective forgiveness is less about religion and more about freedom. It’s less about doing than allowing: forgiveness is letting go.

Forgiveness allows you to free yourself.

When I first heard that I wasn’t sure how it was true. I thought forgiveness was freeing the other person. Letting him/her off the hook, so to speak. I didn’t like the sound of that at all. I thought of blame as a sort of punishment.

While I don’t doubt that we can direct a fair amount of energy (and therefore psychic violence) at others by holding on, I want to focus more here on the cost of such behavior to ourselves.

By pouring mental and emotional energy into our own stories (usually stories in which we are the hero and someone else the villain) we are energetically poisoning ourselves. And often, the target of our energies goes on about his or her life entirely unaware.

It’s easy to hold on to the idea of justice, of punishment and retribution. But here’s the thing about justice: it doesn’t bring back what was lost.

Establishing blame doesn’t facilitate healing or growth. It’s just a trap. Marinating in anger, bitterness, and unhappiness will change you, and not for the better.

Now, I’m not advocating martyrdom. I’m certainly not suggesting that through forgiveness we place ourselves in a position to be harmed repeatedly by the same person. Forgiveness doesn’t include amnesia. It doesn’t mean abandoning healthy boundaries.

But it does mean letting go of stories. Or rewriting them. I think it’s possible to be the hero of your own story without making someone else the villain. But maybe that means we need to re-define heroism.

It’s worth taking a few moments to consider this question: What are the qualities of a true hero? And, to take it one step further, how can you manifest those qualities to become the hero of your own story?

Hopes and Dreams, Part III

Stephen Covey, the author of The Seven Habits, defines a habit as “the overlapping of knowledge, skill, and attitude.” This means knowing what to do, how to do it, and why you are doing it. He makes an excellent point that functions as an extension of the discussion of hopes and dreams. Making hopes and dreams a reality hinges on the process of personal growth: developing real habits that will lead us in  the direction we truly want to go. In the process of personal growth Covey identifies 3 stages: dependence, independence, and inter-dependence.

Those in the first stage, dependence, play “the blame game.” They hold other people responsible for their circumstances or failures. The important thing to realize here is that establishing blame, or holding someone responsible, does nothing to actually resolve an issue. It’s like walking past trash on the ground, having seen someone someone throw it there carelessly. Then running after that other person, in the hope of shaming or berating him/her into some other action. In the meantime, there’s still garbage everywhere, and simply putting the garbage in the bin would solve the immediate problem and enhance the surroundings for all who pass by.

I will never forget the moment when someone I respect very much asked me, when I was complaining bitterly about an issue of great importance to me, and explaining how I held someone else responsible for my pain, “Do you want to be right? Or do you want to be happy?”

Now, of course there’s certain satisfaction that comes with the feeling of being right, of holding the moral high ground, so to speak. But it’s a very limited perspective. And a need to make other people “wrong” can be incredibly damaging to relationships. Now, this doesn’t mean we need to martyr ourselves by giving up our principles or making ourselves wrong. It just means that establishing blame and holding other people responsible won’t get us very far at all.

It’s possible to argue that the person who threw the trash on the ground needs to be educated, or taken to task for the behavior, etc. While I don’t dismiss this, I think an important principle applies here, which Covey would call a paradigm shift. (This idea is present is many different philosophies. Yogi Bhajan would call it a principle of the Aquarian Age.) “Everyone you meet comes from some great battle.”

Covey tells the story of a man riding the subway whose children were misbehaving. When asked by a fellow passenger to control his children, the man shared that they had just come from the hospital and their mother had died.

Yogi Bhajan would say “Recognize that the other person is you.” In other words, be willing to look past the surface differences in order to “understand with compassion.” Even though you may not know the whole story, it’s important to realize that there’s more to any behavior or action than meets the eye.