Making The Distinction Between Blame And Responsibility

There is a distinction between blaming ourselves for the conditions of our lives, and instead, being responsible for everything in our lives, that when made, makes all the difference in the world. A difference that shows up in our lives as how we feel about just about everything. The sticky part of this distinction, the part that keeps most people stuck not making it, is that in our thinking, blame and responsibility customarily refer to the same circumstance. But just because two very different causal triggers are used to refer to the same event, doesn't mean that the effect of being in one condition or the other, isn't strikingly dramatic, because in the case of blame and responsibility, this is exactly the case. And know too that just because you are now being responsible for the conditions around you, doesn’t necessarily mean that you created them, but what it does definitely mean is that you are certainly now being responsible for how you react to them. In the blame game, our reaction hurts us. In the responsibility game, our reaction strengthens us. Therein lay the distinction that serves us. The conditions may or may not be able to be changed, yet we can always shift our relationship to them. In this way, no matter what happens, out of our reaction to it, we always have the choice to either hurt or heal ourselves.

What's strikingly dramatic when you compare the two internal states of being, blame, and responsibility, is that they both feel so incredibly different. When we blame ourselves for what happens in our lives, we feel bad. There is an element of punishment associated with blame. A very pronounced element, by the way. We beat ourselves up in our heads with words of negativity and remorse, we punish ourselves through all manner of hurtful actions, whether psychological or outright disease, even down to banging our fingers with a hammer and then wondering "why the hell did I do that?" Sometimes you just missed the nail, and at others, probably most other times, you are blaming yourself for something. People even create themselves having cancer from holding onto anger over time, and then having their anger finally manifest in their bodies. The good news is, whatever we do create, regardless of what it is, we then automatically also have it within our power to discreate it!

Ever notice how so many things "go wrong" after a huge fight with your partner? Stuff just seems to jump off the table and crashes to the floor, and that's when the hammer just seems to have a mind of its own, and heads right toward our vulnerable fingers. That's also when we get into car accidents, manage to create cancer for ourselves, and the phone bill that comes in the mail that would not have been a problem yesterday, now seems like a looming sword of Damocles hanging over our heads! It would be nice if these circumstances were an exaggeration of how we relate to our own self-anger, and punishing ourselves for being angry in the first place, or for not communicating in a way that relieves that anger, but these are no hyperboles. There are even entire books devoted to the explanation of what particular emotion or feeling, or even specific circumstance, causes physical pain in our bodies. Lower back pain? You are not being supported. Hurt yourself? You're taking out your anger on your own body. It goes on, because we do.

Ever notice that when we resolve our conflicts, then everything else in our world seems to start working out as if by magic? Suddenly contracts come in the mail, and that long lost cousin finally mails you the fifty bucks he owes you, even when you weren't even thinking about it! That's when relationships go smoother, and maybe you finally find that ring that for the last four years you thought you had lost. And now here it is! That's also when the bills don't seem so large, and the checks you were expecting, actually come in the mail. That, or they're directly handed to you by the person who owed you the money! You'd think that with such positive results, human beings would bust their hump to step up to the plate and declare themselves responsible for everything in their lives, so that they can then get into the states of clarity and power, just so they could enjoy the good stuff that comes out of doing so! Sometimes we do, but most times we don't. That's because in the blame/ responsibility game, it's so much easier to accept responsibility for the good stuff that happens in our lives, or at the least, not blame anyone for it, and so much harder to simply do what works overall the best, and that would be to accept responsibility for it all. Our resistance is learned behavior, and some more good news is, if you have learned something that no longer works for you, you can always learn how to automatically do something else. It's never too late, and it's always worth it.

What does to accept responsibility for it all, look like? It looks like saying to yourself, actually using the words out loud to yourself, that "Yes, I did that!" And to do this, regardless of what the event, emotion, feeling, circumstance, or situation is, bar none. The sheer feeling of freedom alone that comes from doing so is worth it. But more than that simple feeling comes from being this responsible. What also comes is a practice of your power. Your power to create the circumstances and events in your life that really matter to you, working out in a way that you desire them to work out. Because if you truly take the stand to be responsible for it all, even if you don't now, nor ever will, understand how this could be possible in so many cases, regardless, you will still be happier. What does being happier do? It puts you in the most powerful state of being we can muster, for the manifestation of all the good we desire in our lives. Being happy even puts a spin on our reactions, so that when things that we do not like, and we may never like, happen, though they may or may not change, what we do change in the situation is how we relate to them. We can either blame ourselves for them, feel bad, and so stay stuck mired in those circumstances, or, we can take the literal stand to be responsible for those circumstances, out loud with our words, and inside with our feelings, and so actually shift the effect those circumstances have on our lives!

I used to blame myself for the fact that my writing career wasn't working out in the way the pictures in my head demanded that it work out in order for me to feel good about it. Punishment took the form of angst, anger, and all manner of internal feelings of frustration and despondency. The bad feelings associated with such resignation were legion, and they used to occur for me all the time. That's when the rejection slips piled up, the anger seethed, and no matter how well I wrote, still, not many influential people were taking notice of my work. Blame, blame, blame. Feel bad, feel worse, and all the time. Make up excuses for why what was happening was happening, and then project that blame onto the "stupid editors" who "never read my work anyway, even though I always send it to them." Wow. What a recipe for more rejection!

The moment, and I mean the literal moment, I shifted from blaming myself, and then projecting that blame onto others, was when I decided through taking a stand for being responsible for all of my life, was when I gave up the victim racket in relationship to my writing career. Did the contracts and acknowledgement then instantly show up? Hell, no! It took some time, it took some healing work, and most of all, it took a lifetime commitment on my part to give up being a victim and stop blaming everyone and everything around me, and myself as well, for "Why wasn't it working out." With that blame, what I was further requesting from the Universe, was more rejection, which is one of the more subtle ways in which we continue to play the blame game and punish ourselves. See? What I got with that blame was the explanation and results for "why it wasn't working out." And it wasn't The Universe that was generating the request for more of those negatives circumstances, it was me! The Universe was merely fulfilling my requests! Wow, again!

When the point did come when I fully made and then lived out, the distinction between blame and responsibility, was when the contracts finally did come. I had given up blame, and instead, simply focused on what might work to have things work out the way I wanted them to. I still had to send out manuscripts, maybe not quite as many as before, but the point is, there was work to do, and ironically, the same work I had been doing all along. But what had shifted when I redeployed my energy from blame to responsibility, was that the literal responses from editors and publishers, then shifted as well. Sometimes I would receive an average of one contract per month, for months on end. That may not seem like a lot to someone outside of the publishing industry, but one contract for one book, can represent a year or more of work. Paid work!

So again, how do we actually shift from blame to responsibility, so that we can live out this distinction? We shift by first acknowledging, that if we feel bad, then we are blaming someone or something, for whatever conditions we are blaming them about. Our feelings are a reliable indicator that a shift would benefit us. Not that there won't be things to feel bad about, because there will be, and that's okay. But if feeling bad is your continual mood, then something is definitely up. I felt bad about my writing career for thirty years before my shift into being responsible for it! So it's okay to feel that way. But it's not okay to think that continuing to feel that way is going to get you anywhere but where you have already been, and that's usually not where people want to direct their lives. They want breakthroughs of happiness, and manifestations that work to make them feel good. And they do! Stuff happening to the positive does make us feel good! That too, is as it should be! In my case, it may have taken me a long time to realize how important the shift from blame to responsibility is to us, but that too is something I was now being responsible for! And now, that's okay too!