BLAME
At the first sight blame is an escape that is easy to choose in the short term.
He did that to me
She made me feel this way
It’s my bosses fault that I’m not earning more money
Even if it feels good in the moment to put the blame on someone else, it is a disempowering choice. You put all your power to feel better in the hands of the person you are blaming. This is most likely the last person you wish to be in control over how you feel. When we refuse to take responsibility for our experience, we pay the high price of not being able to change it.
How do you know if you are using blame? You feel out of control to change the situation.
You take the control back by accepting 100% responsibility for how you feel and how you respond to a situation. The word responsibility means the ability to respond.
Everyone is free to behave however they want. Their actions are their responsibility. How people treat you is their karma. How you react is yours. You might not like the fact that everyone is free to behave however they want, maybe you even try to control how people around you behave.
Sometimes we attach our feelings to the event. We think; ''if he does this I will be happy or if he doesn’t do that I will be unhappy”. When we point to the circumstances to be the effect of how we feel, we try to control what is outside of our control. We try to control what other people do or say and people don’t like it when you try to control them, trust me I have tried!
If you can allow others to behave the way they want to behave and take full responsibility for how you respond to the situation, you will both be empowered and in control of the situation. The way you respond is YOUR CHOICE and does not depend on someone else’s behaviour. You get to pick the meaning you assign to the situation.
Say for example that your friend did not call you on the evening you decided to chat. You can either make it mean that your friend doesn't love you, that you are not a priority for her and that she doesn't care about you. You could also give it a neutral meaning like; she had to stay late at work, or that her child took longer to put to bed than usual or that she just forgot to call because she is a human bean.
Both meanings are made up but one generates a feeling of not feeling important and the other one generates a feeling of compassion. Remember you are the one to feel the feelings so choose a meaning that generates the feeling you want in your body.
Can you see how it’s not the situation in itself that is causing you to feel in a certain way but the thoughts you have around it. You get to choose the thoughts you think and the meaning you assign to any situation. You are 100% responsible for your actions and feelings.
So your feelings are connected to the meaning you give to certain events. Let’s say that your spouse comes home 45 min after dinner time and you have prepared dinner which is now cold. This event in itself is neutral and only becomes negative or positive with the meaning we give it.
The number of meanings you can give this event is up to your imagination, below are some samples:
Disempowering meanings:
My spouse doesn’t respect me.
I’m not a priority for my spouse.
My spouse doesn’t care about me.
Empowering meanings:
I’m grateful that my spouse is working hard for our family.
I’m grateful that I’m flexible.
I get to have some extra minutes to invest time in myself.
The meaning, the story we attach to the event is what’s causing us to feel certain emotions. You are in control of which meaning you choose to apply to an event. If you don’t like the way an ‘event makes you feel’, change your story around the event.
We tend to waste time trying to change the circumstances around us. As Byron Katie says, when we argue with the reality of what is, we always lose but only 100% of the time. You can not control what happens but you can control how you think about it which will affect your response.
Next time you blame someone else for how you feel, take 100% responsibility over your own feelings and response. Remember, it’s not what happens that causes you to feel but the meaning you attach to the event. You are the one choosing the meaning. You are the ONLY ONE responsible for how you feel and act.
Exercise
Identify a situation which upsets you.
Write down your current thoughts about it.
Give the situation a neutral meaning.
Start practicing the neutral meaning.
i.e my partner always throws his coat on the sofa even though I have asked him to hang it.
Disempowering meaning:
He don’t care about me
He don’t respect me
He is lazy
Neutral meaning:
I can more about hanging coats than my partner
As hanging coats are more important to me, I will take responsibility to hang the coat (not to collect points or to make my partner wrong but because I want the result of an organised home).
