THE BLAME GAME
Who would continuously play a game where all parties lose.Æevery time, without exception? You’d imagine the answer to be no one, and yet, many of us play this game daily. We play the game like this; let’s say we’re looking for a document we need for a meeting, but we can’t find it. The longer we look for it, the more frustrated we get. Finally, we go into blaming and lash out at our partner and yell, “Where did you put that paper I need for the meeting? You’re always moving everything so I can’t find it!” Just then, we find the paper under our laptop, the safe place we put it so it wouldn’t get lost. Oops.
In the blame game, any issue at all can be used as material and we can blame anyone and anything. For instance, we somehow believe it is the fault of our partners, our parents, the boss, the traffic, and even the weather for our unhappiness or current challenges. Such unhappiness or challenges range from weight gain to financial problems to a nail in the car tire. Sometimes we blame ourselves, God, or even life itself.
We blame someone or something else because it is too painful for us to take responsibility for ourselves. Why? Most of us are living with a mind-created story of incapability and unworthiness that leads to beliefs of being a failure or not good enough. Someone who already believes they are deficient or defective can’t afford to blame themselves for anything going wrong in their lives. Doing that is nothing but validation for the beliefs, the untrue beliefs, we have about ourselves in the first place.
So, blame is a tactic of projection or denial that keeps us from believing we are worse than we already think we are. It is far easier to pin our unhappiness on someone or something else so we don’t have to look within and figure out where this belief of inadequacy is really coming from.Æwithin us, not outside of us. If we did look within, we might have to make changes and many of us don’t like change even when doing so would solve our issues and joy would naturally return to our lives.
Blaming God is a silly way to deal with life challenges because this makes us powerless, as does all blame. This is a victim point of view that creates hopelessness and more unhappiness. We must ask ourselves one important question: Why would a loving, giving Creator be responsible for us forgetting our umbrella on a rainy day? Sometimes it seems as if we are on auto-pilot reacting with nonsense here and there without really questioning what we believe, think, say, or do. If we did, and we were truly honest with ourselves, we would see that no one is to blame for anything, not even us. Life is just happening and it is up to us to move through the challenges with the grace of the Universal Creator within us, not against us.
Just as the Creator isn’t to blame, life can’t truly be blamed for our misperceived shortcomings and unhappiness either. The truth is, life is just happening as neutral events. It is we who often interpret life through our pain and unhappiness which makes it appear as though life is out to get us. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s when we stop blaming people, places, and things that we see this. And seeing this is powerful, indeed.
LOVE MORE AND LIVE MORE
Blaming is used in many different ways. For instance, it is often used as a counter attack mechanism as we attempt to hurt our partners like they have hurt us. We might tell our partner that our life has gone downhill since the day we met them, as if they are responsible for everything we think is bad in our life. This is a blow to our loved one, and it is meant to be just that. Additionally, blaming another person for our unhappiness says to them that they are horrible people and, for a moment, we seem a little better than they are. Ah, a reprieve from our own mind-created hell. Finally, blame is used to flat out lie to others when we blame someone for something we know full well that we did. This is another defense mechanism meant to relieve ourselves from the pain of believing we are unworthy.
The thing that struck me when I realized I was playing the blame game and had uncovered all its tactics and unhappy outcomes, was that there is no love in blaming. The blamer doesn’t express or experience love and the one who is blamed doesn’t experience love. On top of that, blame isn’t really necessary in life because nothing is truly to blame for anything happening. It is only the belief that we are not good enough that is driving this pain relief tactic. Once we realize the origin of our pain, blame becomes useless to us in truth.
When I stopped blaming people and life for my difficult or unwanted situations, and I didn’t blame myself any longer, which was huge for me, I could easily see the origin of my pain.Æa belief that I was unworthy of love. What I was able to finally see was that I am worthy, capable and complete. This automatically allowed me to experience love for myself that I hadn’t experienced before and the love for others grew exponentially, too.
When we no longer blame anyone or anything, the true source of our unhappiness is shown to us. When we see this, we can’t ignore the truth for long. Eventually, we realize blame is a habit that can be broken. The lesson we learn from blame is that we have been taught a lie that we have believed in and have concocted a way to try to overcome the pain this lie brings us-blaming. But blaming never works as it’s supposed to. As such, blame is useless as a pain reliever because the only way to truly get relief is to stop believing in the lie. This is our responsibility as adults-to remember who we truly are-to remember there is nothing wrong with any of us. Now we can just love. Now we can just live.
