Throwing Away Your Crutches of Blame, And Learning How to Take Accountability for Your Actions

People blame others for their pain and despair on a regular basis. We all do it; whether or not we admit it is an entirely different procedure. People blame for their own selfish reasons, to avoid the feelings of helplessness or frustrated.

People by nature need to have an understanding of what causes their pain or discomfort. To relieve the pain a target is needed to release their pain upon. So what makes an ideal target? An ideal target can be anyone or anything that willingly obliges. This can range from people to inanimate objects. Some people will go as far as to blame their problems on astrology or bad advice given to them. It is much easier to blame other people for most of us than to take the accountability required to owning up to our mistakes.

There are however things that we can do to ease the tendency of blaming others. Instead of becoming defensive and blaming, we should take the time to seek out why we feel the need to blame others. Analyzing yourself and why you feel the need to blame others for your problems is not a difficult task. You can simply analyze the situation, the people involved and of course the outcome. Here are a few things to look at if you choose to analyze why you are blaming others.

Identify your role in the scenario

Identify other people's roles in the scenario

Analyze your emotions and reactions

Identify how you are responsible for your actions

Examine what you may have done differently

More often times than not people do not want to take accountability for their actions. It's understandable why this is true, it is far easier to point the finger than to accept responsibility for our actions. When we proclaim that we are blameless and label ourselves to be victims we damage our well being. When we allow for ourselves to be labeled as a victim, we become a victim of circumstance as well as our own misdeeds. We would sooner be labeled as victims than what we really are people who blame and even worse, point the finger of blame. According to the book titled People Reading by Beier and Valens, we are "blamers".

We will actually go as far as to insist that it must be someone else's fault that this has occurred or happened to us. It starts from a young age when we hear the adults and those around us blaming other people and things for their misfortunes. I can still hear my grandma blaming the sidewalk for hurting me. It had nothing to do with the fact that I was a clumsy child; it must have been the sidewalk that jumped up and scuffed my leg. Of course we do not think about this, it seems normal and it's ingrained into our belief and value system.

It is because we are ingrained with these ideals that we tend to blame others, we blame our parents for the way we turned out, or the lack of a better education which somehow must be someone else's fault and the list goes on and on. The longer we continue to blame and make excuses for ourselves, the easier it becomes.

The use of blaming is a form of passive aggression. When we blame others, we are essentially justifying the situation or actions. By justifying the blaming we may use facts or allegations to get our point across. At times we may try to protect our self interests by not accepting responsibility, we may view admitting fault as a flaw or a blow to our ego.

Most of us are guilty of blaming others in our lives, it happens with politics, families the government and even destiny. It can also be detrimental to blame yourself in excess. Its one thing to take accountability for your actions, but to blame yourself excessively is not better. When we blame ourselves as opposed to taking accountability we are ingraining into our minds that we are bad and deserve to be punished for what we have done. It is very difficult to learn from this type of behavior. With accountability we can take the lesson learned and move forward with a positive attitude. There needs to be a balance of accountability and of course identifying the responsible party, whether it is us or another.

So for those who do want to change their blaming behavior, we must first step back and identify what is causing us to feel the need to blame others. We must understand that we can continue to blame others or take the responsibility to lead our lives in the direction we choose, not the direction we are being led by our negativity caused by blaming.