If You Want to Change Your Life, Stop Blaming Others

We all experience circumstances that make us want to blame others, some sort of god, life, or whatever—anyone but ourselves.

We have a difficult relationship and it’s their fault if we are not able to connect with them. Life throws a bad punch at us and it’s bad karma. The queue at the counter is annoyingly long and we blame the staff for not being efficient enough. Our last Instagram post gets fewer likes, so they must have changed the algorithm again.

Hold Yourself Accountable

Although it’s important to go easy on yourself and simply accept the fact that things sometimes just don’t work out the way you expected, you also need to hold yourself accountable and take responsibility for your own life.

You are responsible for your relationships, for your “bad karma”, for letting a long queue annoy you, for not getting the social media engagement you’d like.

Because if you are not responsible, you are not going to take care of your problems. And if you are not, then who?

Once you fully understand this, you can decide to take action to fix what needs to be fixed or let go and move on, not from a place of anger, but from a place of humility.

Sometimes there isn’t much you can do to change your circumstances, but what you can do is change the way you perceive things and your feelings towards them.

No matter what, you can always decide your attitude toward life. So in a way, you are always in control.

Being stuck is never your fault, but getting unstuck is always your responsibility.

Why We Blame Others

Blame is a very common device to escape responsibility and protect ourselves from pain by pointing the finger to other people.

But the relief we may feel it’s only temporary, as doing so prevents us from actively finding solutions to our problems.

As the Buddhist monk Ajahn Chah once said, “Blaming someone else for your suffering is like having a hitch on your head and scratching your bottom. So now you have two hitches for the price of one.”

And there we are again, scratching around the same old hole, blaming someone who wronged us, some greater force, or society in general, if things don’t turn out the way we wanted, when all it takes is a tiny switch in our mindset.

How We Take Responsibility

Blaming doesn’t work. It leads to inevitable suffering.

By projecting responsibilities outward, we leave ourselves feeling powerless. If we never feel responsible, we don’t take action to change the things that are within our control.

So the unwanted circumstances persist and the cycle of frustration continues.

When we realize that pointing the finger doesn’t help, it’s natural to turn the blame to ourselves. However, this just makes us feel incompetent and damages our self-esteem in the long run. It’s not sustainable and it’s not healthy.

The idea here is to simply let go of the word blame, to release any negativity in it, and to just take hold of our responsibility and accept the situation as it is. This gives us the strength to move forward.

By taking honest, humble responsibility, we break the cycle of blame and realize that only we can change the situation because it is our situation.

Next time you are stuck into uncertainty, remember that you are a powerful force of nature and that it will pass as long as you take full responsibility for it.

Because this is how you grow stronger and move forward: by taking full responsibility for your own life.

Being stuck is never your fault, but getting unstuck is always your responsibility.