THE BLAME GAME

There are very few statements I make with absolute certainty, and this is one of them: You will never find happiness from the perspective of blaming yourself or another.  Blame in any form is a soul killer. Trust me - I've tried it for much of my life. The key is to shift away from an "at-fault" mentality and really come to understand that blame leaves you powerless. That thing you are blaming halts your ability to move forward. When you focus on blame instead of growth you quite literally give your soul energy away to something you will never be able to change or control. It's madness and it's also built into the fabric of our relationships. But there is a way out of the cycle.  And it's simpler than you think. 

Let's get into it. 

Transcript

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Hey everybody, it's Christopher. Welcome to another episode of Uncided the Podcast. Um, I don't know why I say Unsided the Podcast. Clearly, it's a podcast. You're listening to it right now, and I don't have any other form of this show. So welcome to Uncited. I I want to talk today about blame. And I'm gonna have to give you a little history of my life uh before we get into this, because I think it will help you understand. So I was molested uh from about the age of three, three and a half, four, somewhere in there, until I was just before I was a teenager. And that's a lot to have to deal with. I was molested by a man in my family, and um it was so I was born in 1974, so this was up until you know the mid-80s. And with that um violation, it came a big sense of uh unworthiness, of lack of safety, of confusion. And for those of you who haven't been through something like that very young, and I I pray that most of you have not, but I know there are a large amount of people who have, and for men, I do believe it's exceedingly difficult in a very different way than it is for a woman. Mind you, I'm not a woman, I cannot say for sure, but I can tell you in my own experience, there is so much shame around being molested or any sort of sexual assault being perpetrated against a man. Because it, I don't know, it it it feels as though it lessened my value in the world because I was a man and I should have been strong and I should have been able to resist. And on top of that, it was it's so insidious when you are when someone takes away your safety, particularly as a child, before you've even had the opportunity to understand what it means to be in a safe environment. So, my the entire beginning of my childhood was me being in a place where I was not safe. That was my only point of reference. So I looked at the world as a threat. Everything was a threat. Was I going to be able to sleep through the night? Was somebody gonna walk through my door? Was anybody gonna protect me if I told them? And again, this was in the 70s and early 80s when there was not a lot of conversation around this. There certainly wasn't the internet for me to just go out and do some research or hear other people's stories. There was no one to identify with. I was very alone. And I tell you this not for you to pity me at all, but to give you a foundation. So as I moved through my life, it would have become very easy. And I think for a while, it did become very easy to blame this man who had hurt me and to blame the people around me who had not helped me. In fact, I really sunk deep into that self-pity and blame, especially through college. In my early 20s, I experimented experimented with drugs and sex. I fucked up a lot of different relationships. I went to therapy eventually. Um, in the middle of a drug crisis, I started taking prescription medications so that I could numb myself because one day somebody gave me this little combo of a pain pill and a and a benzo and said, Hey, here's your this is a happy combo. And and I took it and it made me not feel anything. Well, we all know how that goes. You mask anything long enough, especially with a substance, and it's gonna come back and bite you in the ass. And it did. So I started to get my shit together and I went to therapy. And uh if any of you have been to therapy, you know sometimes, or at least in my experience, it became more difficult before it became better because I started to uncover and unpack all of the emotions. And one of the biggest things that I began to unpack, which really hit me when I was 30 years old, after I had downed a bottle of codeine cough syrup, still trying to get past this, or maybe I wasn't 30, maybe I was 29. It doesn't matter. But I was in my late 20s, uh early 30s, and I was with my mom at Christmas, and I had had a chest infection, and I was also feeling really um worthless, which has been kind of a theme throughout my life. Feeling worthless, because that's what happens when someone takes away your safety and your worth and values you only as a being to abuse. Um that's what happens. That's what happened to me. So I downed this bottle of codeine and my mother saw me whacked out of my mind, and she left before Christmas, and I was I dropped her off at the airport and I laid down on my couch on a rainy day in Los Angeles, and I had this moment where I thought, you know what, Christopher? You can blame everybody else for everything that is happening in your life, but they are not here right now. You can do that, and you can live your life in this place of blame or you can realize that you are a grown-ass man, and everything that happens to you from this point on is your responsibility. There is nobody left to blame. And it was such an aha moment for me. And I'm not saying that in that moment everything was fixed, that in that moment I understood everything about how to move forward with that. But it is a moment I will never forget because I became keenly aware of personal responsibility. And you cannot be in a position of blaming others and being personally responsible at the same time. I am not saying that the man who molested me was right. I am not saying that he shouldn't have been punished, which by the way, he never was, because our system continuously fails people who have been abused because it is very hard to prove, states have ridiculous statutes of limitations, and then some people actually abuse the system by calling out people who were not actually abusive simply because they have some sort of anger, whatever it may be, false accusations, right? So there's everything mixed up in this. The system didn't support me, nothing was done to him, right? But I could continue to blame him for that, blame the system, blame everyone for failing me, or I could realize that in that moment or in the present moment, wherever I am, especially as an adult, I am personally responsible for everything that is happening to me. Let me say that again. In your present moment, no matter what has happened to you in the past, no matter what someone has perpetrated against you in the past, in your present moment, even if you're still in the middle of the abuse or the unsafe situation, you can take personal responsibility for your life moving forward. Now, let me be clear. I understand that there are people who are gonna listen to this who are currently in abusive situations or know someone who is, and you can't get out. There are things that are tying you down. I am not challenging that. I am not telling you that you are to blame or that you are at fault. What I am saying is that blame is a very shallow feeling. You can do nothing with blame. It completely removes your power. Because when we blame something or someone for the circumstances or content of our lives, the only people who can change that, the only thing that can change that, the only people or thing or system that can take away that blame is outside of you. Right? So I realized in that moment, wait a minute, I have all these feelings, I have all this stuff that happened to me, I had these horrible people who did crazy shit to me, but every decision I make moving forward is my own. So, what did that lead me to? It led me over a period of studying uh various religions, um, studying, and by the way, I was raised in a Christian community. Uh, more on that later, but let's just say I ran away from that because what I did not like about the the church that I was in was that it was also about blame. Whether it was, you know, the the parable of, and I I say parable for a reason of Adam and Eve and blaming the woman for biting the apple or or this original sin that means that you're born into sin. So you blame that that came before you. None of that is empowering. In fact, all of that within the particular church I went to was meant to take away my power so that I would have to give my power and give the authority to something outside of me to take that blame away, to take the pain away. Again, a lack of personal responsibility. I am not making a commentary on spirituality or religion. I'm telling you how I felt about it. And so here I am in my early 30s. I am I am working to free myself of this idea that someone else is to blame for the circumstances of my life. And then I fell in love and I got married, and I really thought I had my wits about me, but what I didn't understand was that I was entering a marriage where I would repeat this same cycle but in reverse. So I, it was a 16-year marriage. And within that 16-year marriage, what did I want to do? I want to prove that I could create the best life for my wife, that I could create the best life for my children, that I could be a much better husband and partner than anybody in my family who I had ever seen, that I could be exactly the opposite of what I had been raised around, which were essentially people who were absent, who were not taking responsibility for my safety. But I set myself up unknowingly in my relationship to be blamed and to blame myself for all of the shortcomings that I would have in the relationship, or for the perceived shortcomings that I had in the relationship. And I chose a partner who was keen and excited to blame me for everything that went wrong in the relationship and in their life. Now, I'm not going to talk more about that divorce, but I will tell you that it was a or that marriage and the divorce, but it has been a great awakening for me. Because now I have looked at what it means to blame other people and I have felt what it feels like to be blamed. And let me tell you, both are powerless. Both are powerless. If you are in a relationship with someone, or if you have have been in a relationship with someone and you feel like they are responsible for your happiness and they are to blame for your unhappiness, you will never heal. You will never move forward. Ever. And again, I know there are extreme situations where it's hard to remove yourself. But even in the middle of the chaos, you know, I'm still going through this divorce and it's chaotic. Even in the middle of the chaos, as insults and lies are being hurled at me, I can either choose to sit in a place of feeling blamed, or I can choose to blame the other person for what's happening, or I can take personal responsibility for the fact that I entered into that relationship, for the fact that I made choices in that relationship, for the fact that I allowed certain things to unfold the way that they did, or I can sit in a place of blame and anger. The same is true of what happened to me as a child. I learned that I could either sit in a place where I blamed this man and all the people around me for everything that happened to me, and that is a completely powerless feeling, or I can say, wait, maybe he was my greatest teacher. Maybe the woman I was married to was my greatest teacher. Maybe, and I believe, I'm gonna get a little woo-woo on you for a second, but I believe in soul contracts. It is what works for me, it is what makes sense to me. I do not believe in coincidence or randomness. I absolutely have come to understand through my own meditation and spiritual practice that for me, it makes sense to believe that there are soul contracts with people, that before we enter this incarnation or whatever the whatever you want to call it, before we are here, we agree with people. Hey, I'm gonna play this role in your life so that you can learn something about yourself, so that your soul can expand. And I believe in this life, one of the agreements that I made with several people was to put me in a position of powerlessness, to put me in a position where they hurt me or where it's perceived that I hurt them or where I hurt them, and figure out how I'm going to define myself in the middle of that. Am I going to be a victim? Am I going to blame? Am I going to allow someone else's opinion of me to shape my own opinion of myself? Or am I going to see them as players in my life and take personal responsibility for growing, for my actions, for my words, for my happiness. You see, my stepfather, yes, it was my stepfather, I think I said as a member of my family, but let's just say, let's just be honest, it was my stepfather. My stepfather took something from me, but he doesn't, he doesn't own that. I'm almost 50 years old. He doesn't own that part of me. He took something from me so that I could find it, so that I could find that strength and self-worth within myself. Do I wish that it hadn't happened? Absolutely. But I have to believe that there was some agreement made that that was going to be the course of my life so that I could learn and I could grow. And when I believe that, then I can honor him as a teacher. I can forgive him for myself, and I can own my own personal responsibility in creating my happiness. You see, that abuse ended at about 12 years old. I'm 50. So I have 38 years of creating my own happiness, of taking personal responsibility for my happiness. And it has not always been easy, and sometimes it's been nearly life-ending. But the moment that I decided I would take personal responsibility for my happiness, the freedom began. And in this latest challenge in my life going through this divorce, I can either look at what happened in the relationship, look at everything that's happening now and cast all sorts of blame, or take on all sorts of personal responsibility for other people's inability to get their life together. Or I can look at the decisions that I made, the choices that I made, honor them, and move forward with integrity, knowing that I am personally responsible for my growth, for my own happiness, and for being the best version of myself so that everyone else around me can benefit from that. You know, it's so easy in this world to, especially with social media, in this current world, to look at social media, to look at the internet and be in a place of blame. And I talk about this a lot. I think it's going to be a running theme throughout the podcast, but there is no one to blame but yourself for the current mental state in your life. And again, I am not dismissing mental illness. I'm not dismissing problems that are outside the norm, if you will. But there are a lot of people who are looking outside of themselves, including myself at many times in my life, for a sense of worth. They're looking outside of themselves for someone to blame, for a political party to blame, for a religion to blame, for the economy to blame, whatever the case may be. But we wake up with ourselves every day, wherever you wake up, however you wake up, and your thoughts are what are going to dictate your choices. And if those thoughts are about blame and being a victim, then you are going to make choices that reflect that. You are going to choose relationships that reflect that. You are going to choose words that reflect that. You are going to choose actions that reflect that. And you can only get back more of that. You cannot create peace and stability and happiness in your life if you are walking through life blaming everyone else or blaming yourself entirely for what is happening. You see, personal responsibility doesn't mean you blame yourself for everything that's happening. Personal responsibility, in my opinion, means you take a look at everything as objectively as you can and you think, okay, these are the choices that I made, these are the choices that they made, but here I am now. And in the now, I can make a different choice. I can make a choice to start looking at myself worth. I can make a choice to improve my mind. I can make a choice to improve my body, I can make a choice to forgive the other person. Especially going through the divorce and talking to a lot of people around me going through a divorce. We have this idea in society that it, if a marriage or a relationship ends or a friendship ends, or a business relationship ends, that we can go immediately to the place if they were horrible, they did that to me. How could they? Well, maybe they were horrible. Maybe they did do some things to you. But how you react to that, how you move forward, whether or not you choose to let go of that blame and that victim mentality, that's going to measure, that's going to be the measure of how much happiness you find in your life. And by happiness I mean contentment. I mean being in the place where you can really look around you and say, okay, I'm in control of this now. And I dare say that, you know, back in my childhood when I could not leave the situation, like I know many of you can't leave a situation in family or work where it feels abusive. You can find a way to go inside of yourself and not pay it forward in a negative way, not pass on the negativity that's being given to you. And I don't just mean pass on to other people, I mean pass it back to yourself. Right? You don't you don't have to take the things that are being said to you, the things that are being done to you, and let them define you. And you certainly don't have to take them and put them on to other people. It's very hard to take personal responsibility for your happiness. It takes a lot of bravery. You have to look in the mirror and own the good, the bad, and the ugly. You have to own all of it. Because you are the captain of your ship, the master of your fate. All the things that we hear all the time. It is the truth. Nobody is responsible for your life and your happiness as an adult but you. Not your partner, not your business partner, not your friend, not your parents, not your children, nobody. If you're blaming anybody, including yourself, for the current state of your life, you are living in a state of powerlessness. I tell you from personal experience. So you gotta go into that open-hearted place, you gotta breathe deep, you gotta look in the mirror, you gotta own it all, including owning the goodness of who you are. Because sometimes it's easy to own the bad, but not so easy to own the good. And you gotta make a decision. Every day, every moment moving forward, I am personally responsible. I blame nobody. I am no one's victim. And everything that happens in my life is an opportunity to learn and grow and get closer to my own happiness, to my own contentment. I'm gonna leave you with that today. And I hope wherever you are, if this triggered you, if this frustrated you, if you identify whatever the case may be, I hope that you find something in it that makes you think maybe just a little differently. And if you're really shut down right now, that's a sign too. Maybe this message isn't for you, or maybe you need to look even deeper. Okay, until next time. Take care.