Can Blame Actually be a GOOD Thing?
We’ve heard all the adages about how wrong it is to blame others for events in our lives. I can often hear myself telling my kids not to blame others for their problems.
Yet, how often do we revert to blame when things are going wrong in our lives? We blame our parents. We blame our partner. We blame that idiot driver. We blame the government. We blame the weather. We blame our hairdresser.
Sometimes we blame all of them at once. Sometimes we’re so full of blame that everyone that comes into our awareness gets a piece of it.
What if this blame isn’t so bad after all? What if all this blame actually plays an important role? Maybe its time to stop demonizing blame and use it as a tool for our well-being.
As we go through our days, we move through a wide range of emotions from joy to despair. We want to be happy. We want to experience joy and laughter and passion. Unfortunately, sometimes life happens to us and throws us down into despair, guilt, or unworthiness.
Those are the worst-feeling emotions you can experience because they are completely disempowering. When you are in despair, you don’t see the possibility for improvement. When you are in guilt, you are paralyzed by what you did wrong. When you are in unworthiness, you lose the ability to make change.
These disempowering emotions sap your energy and your happiness. They make you want to curl up under the covers and binge watch 90–Day Fiance. This is not the life you were meant to live. This is not the way you want to feel.
Imagine yourself in that place of despair for a moment. Now imagine yourself instantly feeling better. Full of joy and love and appreciation. It’s hard to do, right? You can’t go from despair to joy at the drop of a hat.
The way you move out of these disempowering emotions and back into the joy you are meant to feel is through a gradual process of feeling better. Not a huge leap. Feeling better bit by bit until your joy and love of life returns.
This gradual movement take us through a wide range of emotions. One of these is blame. Blame actually feels better than despair. Blame can actually feel good sometimes. It can energize you. It can start to empower you. It moves you out of the depths of despair.
Obviously, you don’t want to get stuck in blame and make it your default setting in life. (We ALL know people who’ve done that.) But when you are in a difficult situation, allow yourself to feel blame. Blame whoever you want, heck you can even blame yourself for feeling blame if you want.
Recognize the blame for what it is. You are looking for a way back to joy, and the blame is one step on that journey. It doesn’t feel like joy, but it will move you closer to it.
Once you’ve allowed yourself to fully experience this, then look for the next step on your journey to feeling better. For me, this is a restless, pessimistic feeling. I still don’t feel great, but I’m no longer angry and pointing fingers at people. A restless feeling is better than blame. From here, I usually find a place of peace and contentment, which is my default setting.
So many of us were taught to deny our negative emotions, but the problem with this is that denying them actually feeds the fire. If you’re feeling blame and you feel guilty about feeling blame, now you’ve created a mess for yourself. Allow yourself to feel what you’re feeling, even if it is blame, and use that as a path back to where you truly want to be.