STOP BEING A VICTIM BY DECIDING IT’S YOUR FAULT
When something unexpected happens to us, we blame the outside world for our problems. We do this because we believe the situation we fell into was something out of our control. So what happens then? We become a victim. We look for things to blame because we cannot see how it is our fault to begin with.
We say things like:
“They hurt me”
“They lied to me”
“They abused me”
“They abandoned me”
“It’s their fault”
Notice something?
“They this, they that.” It’s all about them and what THEY did wrong.
That’s so disempowering, not only for the people we’re blaming, but also for ourselves. The problem with this dialogue is that you are giving all your power away to the ‘effect’, meanwhile you blind yourself from all the possibilities of how you were part of the ’cause’. There’s no responsibility for what you did or could have done to avoid that from happening.
When you try to heal from something that felt ‘out of your control’, yet you still can’t move past it… it’s because you’re framing the situation as if they’re the bad guy and you’re the victim. Your healing then becomes dependent on whether the ‘bad guy’ turns around on their actions or words to validate you. All what that does is delay your healing more. It’s so much harder to heal when your focus is in that helpless victim mentality of waiting for closure on why another did something to you, because you might never receive that closure. We can only really heal until we come to the conclusion of the role we played.
So what if you didn’t have to conclude yourself as a victim in order to heal? How can you really move on after being hurt so unexpectedly?
Simple. Take ownership and decide for how it’s your fault.
When you decide it’s your fault instead of theirs, you have nothing to blame or complain about because now you’re in control of the situation. Now you’re the reason things happened, you made the mistake, and now you have the power to accept radical responsibility and learn your lessons. You come to the acceptance that people were just playing their role in the reality you helped create.
How liberating is it to know that everything that happened to me was all my creation! It’s so freeing to know that all I need to do to heal is to decide how it’s all my fault!
Someone got angry at what I said?
My fault. I could have said it differently.
A client never showed up for our session?
My fault. I should have made them book by paying in advance.
A friend who decided to dump our friendship?
My fault. I let our friendship fall apart.
Someone said something that triggered me?
My fault. I have an unhealed dynamic I need to resolve.
It feels so good to know that everything was all my fault!
Now it may not be so simple to do at first. Depending on how triggering the situation is, we may not always come to the conclusion of how it’s our fault right off the bat. It’s a part of our human condition to blame things we believe is out of our control.
If you’re stuck in a situation where you’re in that pattern of blaming the outside world, the easiest way to get out is to write a ‘blame list’. This is where you write as many things as you possibly can to blame. It may sound counter-intuitive, but hear me out on this one.
If I were to challenge you to write a list by blaming as many people and things as you can for your situation, your list would get so long that eventually you’ll run out of things to blame.
When that happens, you will come across a couple realizations:
First, you’ll realize how dumb it sounds the more you continue blaming the outside world for your problems.
Second, you’ll realize how it was never anybody else’s fault except for your own and that in the grand perspective, it was a reality that you helped create.
When you’re truly ready to take responsibility for your healing, you’ll know it because it will just hit you. The narrative begins to shift as soon as you see how you could have fixed everything and that it was all your fault to begin with.
I can’t wait for the day to come when we stop arguing to prove why it’s the other person’s fault, and we evolve our arguments for why it’s our fault from the very start!