Blaming

    One sure indicator a person is a pain carrier is their need to find some place to put the blame for the stress in their lives. How good it is to find someone else to blame. It is much easier to find someone to blame than it is to accept the responsibility for our own actions. How good it feels to say “It’s not my fault.” The only problem with saying it is not my fault is that more times than not it’s a lie.

     Blame is like a snowfall, it lands everywhere. There’s always enough to cover not only the front yard, but the back yard too. It’s up and down the street, on the roads, in the fields, in the woods and it even has a way of getting tracked into the protected areas.

    In any given person’s life there is ample blame to be passed around. Students of pain processing are taught to avoid blame altogether. Avoid it completely. That goes for self-blame as well. Self-blame may be commendable on the surface, but it rapidly erodes self-esteem. Just don’t go there. Blame is a thinking error which has no productive place in processing emotional pain. Who did what is not nearly as important as how do I learn to remove the events that hurt me.

    Every parent, not just some or most, but every parent engages in unintentional emotional damage to their children. So do grandparents, relatives, neighbors, friends, authority figures, and even strangers. Parents do not get up on any given day and discuss just how they can damage their child’s life. It’s unintentional damage. One cannot teach what they have not been taught. Most of us learn to raise our children through trial and error. Blame is not only a thinking error that breeds weak justifications, it is also non-productive. Pain processers do not engage in blaming.

"I had a problem with blame, why would I not? I was a well trained pain carrier with many years of experience in using thinking errors. I was not into blaming others but I had blaming myself down patand developed into a fine art form.  Self-blame is a thinking error just like blaming others is a thinking error. It fed my depression, added to my stress build-up and devastated my self-esteem.  How good it is to live without the desperate need to find some place to put the blame. I make mistakes, I even mess up big time, but I’m not getting back into blame. I find it far more productive to use my time to process emotional pain than to find a place for the blame."

 Ron Wilkins

Removing Emotional Pain