Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Live Life Without Blame
In this episode we explore what changes when you stop assigning fault for a single day and give your nervous system a kinder job....learning instead of litigating.
We look at why blame feels noble, promising justice, control, and safety, yet slowly turns into armor that becomes a prison. You’ll hear how outward accusation often rebounds as inward self-criticism, and why your brain can’t cleanly separate the tone it uses on others from the tone it uses on you. Rather than shaming yourself for blaming, we honor its positive intention: protection, meaning-making, and boundary-setting. Then we keep the wisdom and drop the weight by swapping blame for acceptance, responsibility without shame, compassion, curiosity, grief, discernment, gratitude, and tawakkul.
Try the one-day experiment: suspend blame for traffic, weather, family, colleagues—or yourself—and notice what softens first. If this conversation resonates, follow the show, share it with someone who needs gentleness today, and leave a review to help others find it.
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Welcome to Islamic Life Host School Podcast. The five tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful. Now your host, Dr. Donald Aston.
SPEAKER_01:Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you. Today I want to talk to you about the topic of blame. And what would your life be like if you didn't blame anyone, including yourself? Like somehow the blame machinery in your mind was broken, completely out of order, and suddenly there was no victim of your blaming. If up until now there's been a courtroom of blaming in your head, now it's just closed for renovation. There's no judge, no defense, no prosecutor. And I was thinking about this the other day, and it created the most fascinating opening in my mind. Because if blame truly stopped, there would be a huge opening in your mind for peace, joy, comfort. So much mental and emotional real estate would suddenly become available. Imagine how much bandwidth you'd reclaim if you stopped running the constant mental commentary. Blaming the ex-husband for how things turned out. Blaming the child for how they're pushing your limits, blaming the in-laws for constantly interfering, blaming the weather for your mood, blaming how there's low battery in your headphones and it ruined your walk. Blaming yourself for forgetting that grocery item or falling into the wrong relationship. Again, all that energy would return to you. What would you do with that much mental energy when your mind wasn't constantly trying to decide who's guilty? So in this podcast, I really want you to pause and think. And you can even pause the audio to think about this. What would it be like if you stopped blaming? Just pause and really think. What blame does is that it has a clever way of disguising itself as moral duty. As if without it you'd lose your sense of justice. It makes itself appear very noble, like it's protecting you from becoming indifferent. It says if you stop blaming, you're letting them get away with what they did. But when you really look at it closely, you realize how backward that is. Blame doesn't free you, it weighs you down, it binds you. Every time you replay the story of who hurt you and what went wrong, you strengthen that chain that binds you down. You think that you're holding on to something to hold them accountable, but you're just holding on to pain. The longer you stay in blame, the longer the misfortune lives rent-free in your mind. Yet over and over again, I see so much of this in my coaching where blame keeps convincing you that dropping it would mean that you're surrendering, that you're giving up, you're laying down weapons, and you're declaring that you've lost this battle. When in reality peace happens, not when you stop fighting the fight, but when you don't need one. You don't need to fight it. In other words, when you stop blaming, you're not approving the past. You're refusing to be imprisoned by it. So blame wears a mask of righteousness. It says that it makes you feel sharp, alert, and justified. And it does when the blame is present for a short period of time. It makes you stand guard and it makes sure that no one, including yourself, gets hurt again. And that only happens when blame stays its welcome, only for a short period of time. If the blame stays longer, it steals your power in the lame of protection. And this transition is very sneaky because it feels so reasonable even when it stays for years on end. You tell yourself, of course I'm upset. Look what they did. And for a short period of time, you are right when you are listening to blame for what it values, for what it's teaching you. But when you focus your shift on constant blaming, you stop being the author of your story and you become the character that's trapped in it. Blame says I'll feel better when they apologize, when the circumstances change, when justice is served. But what if that never truly happens? Because you cannot control anyone. And another very important point is that blame directed outwards always circles inward. Every accusation you make about or towards another person, at its root, it teaches your nervous system how to treat you. And that's happening subconsciously. When you blame others for being careless, a part of you starts fearing about your own carelessness. When you call someone selfish, you start scanning your own actions for selfishness, even under your awareness. When you judge someone else for not doing enough, you start feeling guilty for resting. The external story becomes an internal script. You are both the judge and being judged. This is why people who live in constant blame are also usually living under constant self-criticism. The issue here is that while your conscious mind is blaming, your subconscious mind cannot compartmentalize it cleanly. It generalizes it, including to yourself. And once that pattern is set, it doesn't care who the target is. So even when you think you're protecting yourself by blaming people or pointing fingers outwards, your inner dialogue absorbs the same tone and it weaponizes it against you. This is why by lifting blame, and when I say lifting, I don't mean excusing someone. By lifting blame, you are doing one of the kindest things you can do for your nervous system. And in an effort to do that, all you have to do is start by asking, what if blame had a positive intention? What would it tell me? Mostly the biggest outcome of that answer is that the blame is there for your protection. Blame tries to protect you from pain that you haven't learned yet to sit with. It's there to help you feel shielded from disappointment, shame, loss. Blame says if I can locate the cause to be out there, then maybe it won't feel so bad. At its core, blame wants to help you make sense of chaos. It wants to restore order, meaning, and fairness in otherwise a cruel looking world. Blame is like an emergency responder when something unfair happens. It says, Don't worry, I'll find the reason to be out there, I'll figure out the culprit, and then you'll be safe. It tries to turn suffering into a solvable problem by trying to control others, which is a huge thought error to begin with. Blame's underlying intention is a false sense of control. Blame tries to assign fault. It says, if I can prevent this from happening again, then your nervous system will be safe. And under this false premise, it keeps your nervous system under constant hypervigilance. While blame is your psyche's attempt towards self-respect, blame refuses to normalize what was painful or unfair. It is trying to tell you that whatever unfairness happened wasn't okay. But the problem is that it doesn't know when to lay its arms down, it doesn't know when to stop. It overfunctions, and the armor becomes the prison. So, yes, if blame had a positive intention, listen to it by all means. And that is your lesson here. Its main function is to protect you from pain, preserve your sense of justice, prevent repeated harm, help you organize chaos into meaning. But the deeper wisdom behind it comes when you have all of these intentions of safety, fairness, clarity without the constant heaviness of the blame. What you have to do is replace this armor with discernment, boundaries, compassion, trust, and divine justice specially. Like everything created by Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, blame's purpose is never wrong. But the constant method it tries to utilize by keeping you under blame is outdated. It overstays its welcome. Blame for not being able to hike a mountain like your friends. Blame for not being able to learn on the new job as fast as you think you should or as fast as your colleagues are learning. Blame for not being able to move up in your black belt training as you thought you would. Blame for not getting A's as easily in your college education as you thought. Try your life without blame just for one day. Just one day. Start leaving the blame that feels the most justified. The one that sounds like, of course I'm upset. I have every right to be upset. Try leaving the blame behind for the traffic, the spouse, the system, the world. And just notice how much blame offered you peace, but actually delivered the complete opposite. Let things be imperfect for once without you trying to assign blame or fault. You will start to see that you feel much lighter. You will stop carrying blame as the proof of your suffering. Even situations that feel very sacred and true, and blame absolutely refuses to leave. Situations like exhausting care requirements for a special needs child. Try life without blame. Don't blame the diagnosis, the circumstances, or yourself for being tired. Just see what happens when you meet reality without accusation. You might find there's pain and tenderness there that needs to be discovered and made room for. You might find room for softness that wasn't possible when blame was in the way and taking up most of the room. You might feel sadness, exhaustion, frustration, and all of that is allowed. But now all of these emotions are gonna start moving through you instead of starting to get stuck. And it all starts with you trying to live one day without blame. Okay, so I always tell you guys that it is a good idea to replace a negative instruction with a positive one. Because when your brain has been used to blame, it's gonna have a need to replace it with something, otherwise, it's not gonna know what to do with itself and it's gonna fall back into the same pattern of blame. So instead of blame, try other things. Try things like acceptance. And again, it doesn't mean that if your father wasn't as supportive as a child, and as a result of that you grew into an insecure attachment style, lifting blame for your father does not mean that you're accepting what happened was right. All you're doing is accepting reality for what it is and what it was. And then you try to handle it in a way where you can actually do something about it in a healing way. Once faced with this choice, most people do tend to heal, do tend to choose to gain new perspectives and new meanings. But it is your choice. You don't have to gain a new perspective about the same circumstances in your life if you don't want to. But like I said, once given a choice, most people choose to heal. What happens is that once you stop fighting reality, you can change it. Some of the things you can try instead of blame in order to fill your nervous system with something to do. One is acceptance, like that we talked about. Meaning it was hard and it happened. I don't have to like it, but I accept what was real. Acceptance does not erase pain, it just stops you from arguing with reality. Another thing you can try is responsibility without self-shame. What happened was not mind to carry, and this is what is mind to carry. Separating blame and responsibility from each other. So, what it's gonna sound like in your brain is given what was true, what is one small thing I can do differently. What happens with this mentality is that it converts the helplessness of blame into power. Next thing you can try is compassion. Of course I reacted that way. I was scared. Of course they did it the way they did because they're hurt themselves, they're acting from their own trauma. They didn't know better. And if this level of compassion is not available for you because it sounds like bypassing, you don't have to substitute blame with compassion just because I told you so in this podcast. Listen to what is available for you and your own unique nervous system. Next is curiosity. Why am I thinking blame is the only way? What am I protecting when I'm constantly in blame? Curiosity is gonna invite exploration instead of judgment. Next very important possibility to replace blame with is grief. Because it might be that you lost something important and you're sad about it. And grief is a totally acceptable replacement for blame. In fact, many forms of blame are unprocessed grief. Next possibility of replacement is discernment. This was wrong, but I do not have to continue to live in it. That behavior was harmful, but I choose to step out of that story. What this does is that it keeps your boundaries intact without needing the blame as proof. Next one is gratitude. Gratitude for your awareness, which is you see now what you couldn't see before, the progress, the lessons. Gratitude is what changes the same energy of blame, of accusation into awareness. That awareness is what uplifts. And of course, there is faith and belief in the Qadr of Allah. Having tawakul. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala sees it all, nothing is wasted. Your job is effort, not outcome. Blame dissolves when you believe that justice and mercy are from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and have always been accounted for. Next is witnessing. You observe your feelings without fusing with them, without becoming your feeling, without reacting to them or acting from them. This is a very high level of metacognition. And this is your highest most intelligence in action. So now I want to give you some examples how this transformation is going to flow. If your blame is towards your ex-husband for ruining your life, you're invited to replace it with things like, I accept that that was painful. I take responsibility for how I heal now. He acted from his own wounds. What can I learn about my patterns? I am sad for the years I lost. I am grateful I know what path to take from now on. This is acceptance, responsibility, compassion, curiosity, grief, and gratitude. Or let's say you're blaming your life or your child for throwing a tantrum in public. The old pattern would say, She is embarrassing me. Why can't she behave like other kids? Some of the replacements you can try is that's what's happening. It's a meltdown in front of me in public, it's unpleasant, but that's what's real. That's acceptance. Then there's responsibility. I can't take control of her emotions, but I can model calm and help her regulate. Then there's compassion. She's overwhelmed, she doesn't know how to handle her feelings yet. There's curiosity. What might have triggered this for her? Is she hungry, tired, overstimulated? Then there's grief. It hurts that small outings feel so stressful for me. I wish things were easier. Then there is gratitude. At least she feels safe enough to express her emotions with me. There's tawakul, there's faith. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala sees my patience. Then there's witnessing of yourself. I observe my own embarrassment and I can stay present despite of it. If you couldn't attend opportunities for higher education in the past and you're constantly blaming yourself for it, acceptance would say that chapter of my life unfolded differently than I expected. What happened is true. Responsibility would say, now that I see this gap, what I'm responsible for now is continued learning, formally or informally. Compassion would say, I made the best choices I could with the circumstances I had. I know what was available for me then, and I know what's available for me now. Curiosity, what values or fears shape these decisions in the past? And what's going to help me prioritize my education now? Grief. It hurt that I missed that opportunity and I feel sad. I can let this sadness turn into possibility if I want it. Then there's discernment. Not having a high degree does not define my intelligence or success. Gratitude of the awareness and saying things like I'm grateful I care about learning enough to feel this pain. It shows that I have hunger for growth and opportunity. Having faith and tawakul, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala closed that door for me then. I may not have understood the reason, but I know that He is guiding my path always, and I will come to find what serves me better now. Witnessing. I notice my mind drifting towards regret, I can see it, and I can redirect my mind towards the present. All of these are just small opportunities. All of these are invites for you to try something new. What would your life be like if you didn't blame anyone or anything, including yourself? No need to decide of who's wrong, who's right, who owes what. What if all of that energy came back to you? The energy to notice beauty, to pray with presence, to have peace and joy replacing the blame. If your mind was trained to stop needing a villain constantly, you'll start to see that your nervous system becomes a classroom rather than a courtroom. It offers you information and teaching lessons, not evidence against your life. You will realize that without blame, there's no one left to punish, only someone left to understand, and that someone is you. Without blame, your past loses its authority over your present. You might be afraid that without blame your life will turn apathic and indifferent, but it gives you your agency back. I invite you to try your life without blame. With that I pray to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, Ya Allah, release me from the habit of blaming. Soften my heart to accept what is true without resentment. Teach me to see your wisdom in every hardship and to meet every moment with compassion. Grant me peace in spaces where I otherwise seek control, and give me strength to choose understanding. Amin Yarabulami. Please keep me in your da'as. I will talk to you guys next time.