Responsibility versus Blame
From "The inwarders Podcast" serie n°17, available on all major podcast apps and providers. You can also listen via: https://www.theinwarders.com/podcast
In “Responsibility versus Blame” Annabelle shares with you the most important blockage she personally experienced on her own path toward healing or what she is also encountering with her clients.
That blockage is “Responsibility”.
When I meet with clients, and they share with me what’s annoying them, there is always something else or someone else responsible for their unhappiness.
Unfortunately, healing is only possible if we are responsible for what’s happening in our lives. Otherwise we are perpetuating the victim scenario over and over.
But all of us are reluctant to be responsible for our lives because we confuse responsibility with “fault” and “blame”.
Here is what I found:
Being responsible means being in charge
If we are not in charge of what’s happening we are victims. We will suffer what’s going on until we take responsibility. If we are not in charge, things are imposed on us. Shall we not all be in charge of what’s happening to us? It doesn’t mean we always have control over what is happening. But we can control how we react to it. If we choose to react at all.
Being responsible doesn’t mean being at fault
There is a huge difference between being responsible and carrying the fault, the wrong of what’s happening or has happened. Just take the responsibility, leave the fault aside.
There is no causality. It is difficult to accept. As it is so engraved in our beliefs. Things just happen. It doesn’t necessarily means there are causes to those things happening. They just do.
We cannot know for sure what’s causing something to happen. Because we observe two things happening simultaneously or just one after the other, doesn’t mean they are related.
We relate events together because we do not want to feel pain. It is easier to point fingers in the other direction. But there are no fingers to be pointed. Not to others, not even to ourselves.
If we cannot be sure what caused something to happen, why carrying the fault?
Take responsibility as take charge, leave the rest aside.
If you feel at fault when you are responsible, just accept this experience
In our culture, we feel we can blame managers for anything that could happen in the firm. Parents are to be blamed for anything that happen to their children even if they are not there.
If that’s your case, it means the experience of being blamed or at fault is already within you. There is no way out. This experience needs to be accepted. Than we can move forward.
Once the fault has been experienced, we can be responsible / in charge
When we are ready to go inward, we have to take responsibility for what’s happening. If we feel the blame we have to experience it. Once it is done, you are fully responsible to react accordingly, not based on patterns we are often unaware of.
If we look back at what’s originally created our unhappiness, for example, this person shouldn’t have done or said this or that….
We can switch to: when that person did or said that I thoughts, or felt, this and that…
The thoughts, feelings and body sensations we were avoiding at the first place has been identified. We can now process it. But we couldn’t process something we were not responsible for.
Very few of us can pick up someone else garbage. Right. We do it when it’s ours. When we have done this work for ourselves than it becomes possible to extend it….to others, by extending our sense of responsibility to me, my family, ma community, my country, human being, the planet, etc. But that’s already another subject.
Once we are responsible, we can start processing our resistances
To learn to process our resistances please listen to:
Serie n° 15 “We start were we resist”
Serie n°9 “Address what is there before we act”
Serie n°1 “How to address and investigate our feelings”
This process can be carried out over and over until there is nothing left to resist and what’s left is peace and contentment.
If you need help, feel free to contact Annabelle at www.theinwarders.com or Mikan at www.iammikan.com. I hope processing the blame or fault out of your responsibility will help you to go inward and move closer toward healing.