Are You Ready to Give up The Blame Game?

I know what it feels like to truly believe that the unhappiness you’re experiencing is someone else’s fault. Maybe they’ve offended you, hurt you, betrayed you, or possibly even blamed you for their misery.

But you know it’s not you!

You know that you’re a good person.

You know that you’re not making excuses.

You’re not being a victim, even though you’re certain that if they would start treating you better, your life would be better.
Besides, you actually hate that word: Victim!
Ugh! Being a victim is so undesirable.

You’re simply reacting to the situation. And the situation is horrible and overwhelming.
I get it!

Believe me, I get it!

And yet here you are, pointing your finger out there, positive that it’s not your fault: “Look at what she is doing to me!”

The trouble is as long as we are blaming someone else for our situation, we are powerless to change it.

The bottom line is if that person has the ability to rob you of your joy, dignity, dreams, health, wealth, success, or whatever it may be then you have, unwittingly, become a victim. You have given away your power. You have dimmed your own light. You’re letting them win.

As long as we point our finger out there, we are powerless to change.
Blame is a built-in mechanism of our Wounded Self—our ego.
Blame becomes an excuse for staying stuck. It holds us back. It makes others responsible for our future. We don’t consciously do this. We don’t want to be a victim. And yet our brilliant little brain—our Wounded Self—thinks it’s easier to blame others than to be accountable for our own life.

Not only does it make us right, it makes them wrong. We become self-righteous and indignant as we shame them.

We all do it. We’ve all done it.

And then my Real Self reminds me of the extraordinary quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (I slightly tweaked it years ago): “I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his or her own eyes. What matters not is what I think of them; it is what they think of themselves. To undermine a person’s self-respect is a sin.”

And look at what it’s costing us…

We waste hours complaining, speculating, assuming. We get so caught up in the story that we miss the opportunities that are here—in the present. The internal dialogue plays over and over in our mind, reminding us to stay angry. Stay wounded. Stay broken.

We become sick, exhausted, sleepless, and scared. Our weight climbs, our bills mount, our relationships suffer, all the while, we’ve convinced ourselves that since we didn’t “do this” to ourselves, we can’t fix it.
And so we wait. And wait. And wait. Powerless. Frustrated. Hurt. Stuck.

Are You Ready to Give up The Blame Game?

If you’re ready to look at your life and honestly decide that regardless of how you got into this predicament, you are going to save yourself, I have some simple yet significant steps for you to follow. You are going to channel your blame into your gain:

1. Give yourself one full day to acknowledge your wounds. Write a letter to every single person who has hurt you. Express it from the voice of your pain—your Wounded Self. Be as dramatic, emotional and/or neurotic as you feel you need to be. There is no censoring in these letters! Don’t worry about grammar, spelling or skill.

2. Share your letters with someone you trust BUT NOT THE PERSON WHO WOUNDED YOU!

3. Give yourself a day to grieve your past pain. Put on sad music and have a full-blown self-pity party!

4. Next, light a fire and burn your letters. If you don’t have a wood-burning stove, fireplace, or BBQ, burn your letters in a lasagna pan outside.
5. Make a new list of what your blame has cost you. What has it stopped you from doing? Being? Becoming?

6. Then, ask yourself what you’re really afraid of? And write a new list filling in the blank: “If I weren’t afraid, I would ______________.” Be completely honest.

7. Write yourself a Letter of Commitment, promising to never let anyone take your power again. Promise to listen to yourself, trust yourself, honor yourself, and love yourself.

8. Finally, make a Plan of Action. List all the steps you’d need to take to step into your power, create a great life, and overcome your fears. (This is NOT a vendetta list but a powerful “To Do” list.)

9. Prioritize your list in order of least scary to scariest.

10. Start at number one and each day check off one thing on your list. Before you know it, you’ll love the life you’ve created.

Catch yourself each time you start to tell that old, familiar, worn-out story. It’s old news now. Forget about it. You aren’t a victim to that story any longer. You are a powerful manifestor who is creating a magnificent present!