Freedom from the Blame Game
Freedom From the Blame Game
Blaming is a very human behavior. However, it is not a Spiritually aware one. Blaming is an extremely dis-empowering behavior which denies us growth possibilities. Some of the characteristics of personal growth include self-awareness, self-assessment, self-correction and self-direction. However, when we indulge in blame behavior, we avoid the first, and one of the most, crucial steps of personal evolution, self-assessment.
What happens when we blame someone for something that has happened to us? We have, in effect, given our personal power away to that person(s) or event. In the very act of blaming, we come to believe that our circumstances do not belong to ourselves but are caused by someone or something else. Hence we do not need to take any action except continue to blame. In this mode of blaming, we can begin to view ourselves as a victim, as if the whole world is against us or determined to make our lives miserable.
Why do we blame?
It is easy to take responsibility for the “good” things in our lives. We have a nice house and car because we worked hard; we have great abs because we work out at the gym 6 days a week. However, for those things which aren’t so “good” in our life, where do we place the responsibility? If things aren’t going well at work or we are not getting along with our next door neighbor, do we take responsibility for those things or do we blame our boss who seems to have it in for us, or our scheming co-workers who try to make us look bad? Is our next door neighbor purposely harming us when he runs over our flowers as he backed out of his driveway this morning? Finally, if there is no human in sight to place the blame, there is always our go-to Supreme Being.
What are some of the reasons we blame?
- It is easy and safe. We don’t have to do anything at all but continue to blame. Nothing needs to change about our behavior.
- It is a defense mechanism that seemingly protects our self-esteem in an automatic, knee-jerk maneuver. If it is someone else’s fault, we don’t need to feel bad about anything.
- It keeps us in control. If things are not going well, we can feel overwhelmed and confused. However, if we blame someone or something else, we can restore an illusory sense of control. We can take refuge by believing that responsibility for our circumstances is outside of ourselves.
- We learned how to do it. Blaming is an earthly behavior, a game we all play which we learn from a very early age. It is ingrained in our collective psyche. Adam pointed the finger at Eve, and fingers have been pointing in all directions ever since. Yet, we must remember that, even though blaming is inherent in the mass consciousness of this planet, it is not a part of our true Spiritual nature.
What Does Blaming Do?
Blaming keeps us stuck; stuck in our ideas, behaviors, habits, and patterns. We will never move forward by looking for an answer to a spiritual dilemma outside of ourselves. We will never get unstuck and make responsible changes if everything is someone else’s fault.
Blaming also greatly oversimplifies a situation. It assigns a distinct right and wrong and frees us from any personal responsibility, we are nothing more than a victim. The energetics which we expend on any situation and our personal responsibilities in regard to those energetics go unexamined. By blaming, we miss priceless personal growth opportunities.
If we blame often and long enough, we can morph from the unhealthy feeling of being a victim to even more unhealthy martyrdom, where we wear our “victimness” as badge of honor and seek sympathy for our plight from all who will listen. Yet, this fervent seeking of attention and sympathy for our situation makes us fully entrenched in the inability to evolve, to change, to act, to take responsibility. It becomes almost impossible to step out of the victim or martyrdom pattern which our thinking and beliefs have created.
Spiritual Considerations and Healing the Blame Game
In order to understand the blame game a bit better, it helps to understand the ABCs of Creation Mechanics and Manifestation. Source creates all things, and we are a spark of Source. Since we are a spark of Source, we were not created with things such as anger, bigotry, hate and blame. These things are not natural to our Spiritual makeup, our original design. As a spark of Source with free will, we have the ability to create and we do so every minute of the day. We create by thought and our free will choices. Each thought and choice that we make manifests what we experience and how we experience it.
How did non-Source-like attributes of bigotry, hate and blame become so much a part of our planetary and individual expressions? Eons of free will choices outside of the nature of Source which have permeated the mass consciousness have created distorted thought patterns in us. Source allows all things, and all things exist in Source, but not all things are the balanced nature of Source. For instance, we may have a virus existing in our body causing a cold, but it is not a part of our natural state of healthy being. The cold is a distortion within us and it is something the body needs to address and heal.
Throughout human history, our non-Source-like choices such as blaming have created a distortion both in our collective conscious and in our individual templates. Like most non-Source behaviors, blame does not allow us to expand and grow, but keeps us mired in its distorted patterns and belief structures. It keeps our attention focused outside of ourselves. Thus, we give away the very thing that can heal us, our personal focused power!
However, we are creative beings who can release the entrenched blame pattern which has wormed its way into our behaviors. We have the ability to choose differently and heal the distortion within us. As we heal the distortion within us we are also assisting to heal it within the planetary system. As Ghandi so brilliantly stated, “be the change you want to see in the world”.
We can begin to heal by understanding and owning our creative power. We can begin to understand that we are responsible for how we experience our reality. Our understanding of these truths will produce a huge leap in the evolution of consciousness. When we can remember that everything we have ever experienced and will ever experience is our responsibility, we then begin to realize that “no one can ever do anything to us, or make us feel anything, unless we allow them to“; that truth is the essence of self-empowerment. By not allowing other’s choices to have an effect on us, we stop feeding this inner distortion. We can change our own behavior and realize that we can’t change what anyone else is doing. We have the right to attempt to heal only ourselves because all life forms have Free Will Choice, the freedom to choose to be exactly as a person desires. Yet, we must remember that we do have free will choice to not allow the choices of other life forms to have an impact on us.
It can be challenging to recognize how we get caught up in the Blame Game within our lives, to become aware of patterns we have and how they impact our lives and those around us. However, once we do, it becomes easier to choose to stop playing the blame game.
Playing this game is truly a “choice”, and thus we can always make different choices. In each moment of our lives in which we encounter events, other people, or emotions, we can quickly bring to mind a new choice, one which avoids becoming ensnared in blame game struggles.
When we allow ourselves to become caught up in the Blame Game cycle, it requires using our personal energy to do so. Most of us have no clue of the power we have over these choices. Further, we don’t realize what these choices are actually doing to our personal energy in our lives. That is why many times events or exchanges with people can leave us feeling exhausted, worried or filled with fear. We can compare positive choice experiences such as laughing, loving, sharing and helping others, all of which allow us to feel good about ourselves and others.
Compare positive experiences and emotions with events and interactions with people in which we or others are playing the Blame Game and we can clearly see that the positive choice experiences actually assist to increase the energy in our body which allows us to feel better about ourselves, others around us and our environment. They are much more balanced types of experiences and they do not drain our energy from our body as the Blame Game choice experiences do.
We are Spiritual Energy life forms and that means our energy supply comes from some Divine Presence within ourselves. This is our true Source of energy which allows us to be the person we are and to feel the things we do. Some choose to call that Source of energy God; others use different names; we at Freedom Through Choice simply call it Source. When we engage with and have experiences that allow us to feel good about ourselves, our lives, and those around us, we are actually able to bring into our bodies more of the energy from Source, which allows our inner energy level to increase. This is why those types of experiences allow us to “feel good”.
When we engage in things such as the Blame Game, those types of experiences do not allow us to bring more energy into our body from Source, simply because Source does not create those types of energies. So, when we engage in blaming, we are using the stored energy in our bodies and by doing so, we don’t renew our energy level but instead use and often deplete energy that is stored within us. We feel exhausted and drained from such experiences. Until we can allow ourselves to feel more in balance we will continue to feel exhausted and drained. But we have free will choice, and so can choose if that is the way we desire to feel.
Once we can become aware of how such an unnatural game occurs and what is really prompting us to think and behave in this way, we can then begin working on ourselves and our own awareness to stop playing the game. This, in turn, will allow us to experience more balance, joy, love and happiness in our lives.
The first important part in the process of healing the blame game is becoming aware that we are doing it. Paying attention to our thoughts and feelings often gives us a clue that we might begin to play the blame game. If we feel hurt, threatened, angry or tired, we are more likely to look outside of ourselves to find someone responsible for our discomfort. It takes a bit of practice to monitor and examine our thoughts and feelings, but the practice has huge pay offs. The daily exercises and meditations which the FTCF offers are designed to assist individuals become aware and then shift their attention from blame to ownership and empowered thinking.
Blame and Accountability
The interesting thing about blame is it can be a two-way street. While we are blaming others, others are blaming us. It becomes part of a dis-empowering, no-win situation for everyone. Accepting responsibility for our own actions is definitely an empowering behavior, allowing someone else to paint us as the victimizer who is totally responsible for our actions is not. Each situation where blame is involved requires honest self-assessment and ownership of responsibility by all involved in the situation.
It is at this point in the discussion where Accountability enters the picture. Empowered beings hold themselves accountable for their thoughts, feelings, and actions. Empowered beings own their mistakes, learn lessons from them and then endeavor to not repeat them. When empowered beings are placed in a managerial position over others, they assist others in viewing mistakes as learning lessons, and lessons to avoid repeating. They don’t equate accountability with punishment, shame and blame. Instead, the lessons and gifts found in “mistakes” are embraced and used as tremendous growth and learning opportunities.
We teach our children “how” to play the blame game by asking questions, “who is to blame for this”, “are you responsible for this” and if you remember being a child the fear of punishment was much stronger than considering taking responsibility for one’s moments of learning. Therefore, learning to blame others is rooted in learning what fear is.
Moving Beyond the Blame Game
The way to get the whole blame game behind us is to fully embrace some very fundamental concepts.
- No one can make us feel anything except ourselves, simply because our feelings occur within our own body and no one else can know what is going on within our own body.
- We are totally responsible for how we experience each moment because we have the ability to control our thoughts which generate our actions and experiences within our body.
- If we screw up, we own it and we then attempt to create a win-win scenario. It is important to be aware that there really are no mistakes, just learning opportunities. When negative choices are made via lack of knowledge and then continue to be repeated it then becomes a choice to express imbalanced actions.
- We have, at any given moment, several choices that we can make. Make empowering choices!
The Freedom Through Choice Foundation wholeheartedly recommends Dr. Neil Farber’s book “The Blame Game: The Complete Guide to Blaming: How to Play and How to Quit”. With wit and humor, Dr. Farber examines the Blame Game in all aspects of our lives; our relationships, our careers, our health and our well being. Several of our daily exercises to overcome the Blame Game are inspired by this very empowering book.
The FTCF offers a workbook to assist your efforts in healing and step outside of the Blame Game by becoming aware of the subtle ways in which we can step into it. You can download the workbook by right clicking and saving the PDF File Here.
Only you can choose to re-create your life the way that you desire to bring more balance, happiness and joy into your life experience and the FTCF is behind your efforts every step of the way.
