It seems to be a popular pastime for people to "blame their parents" and "blame their family of origin" for things that have not gone well in their lives, or bad habits, or addictions, or any number of other things.
In most cases, it's one of those things that have been "done to death" to the point where it's mostly of little use, in terms of healing what's really the matter. Mostly, people just get down inside the whole "misery loves company" thing.
Even so, we avoid and procrastinate, pointing back to our pasts as the reasoning for while we "can't handle" getting started on things, even things that are pretty essential to our well-being.
But what are the reasons we don't do things? What are the excuses we give, and the stories we tell ourselves? And — ultimately — are we engaged in self-deception or self-protection?
Forgetting about the whole blame thing for a moment, it is pretty well documented that our experiences shape who we are and inform our subsequent actions. And sometimes, it makes total sense!
Let's say two 10-year old brothers go to the same summer camp and one has an amazing time and meets a buddy who becomes a best friend for life, and the other has a horrible experience, getting food poisoning and then getting bullied for not participating in activities with the other kids. They went to the same camp, at the same time... but when time comes to send their own kids to summer camp (or not) won't they automatically have very differing lenses of perception of the same thing?
Our experiences of life simply vary, and so do our personalities — in the sense that people process both "setbacks" and "successes" in different ways. Where one person might repeatedly and tirelessly pick themselves up and try again each time they fail at something, the next person might simply declare "this is clearly not for me!" after maybe the 2nd or 3rd failure.
The whole trauma and blame game thing only really applies in the cases where our parents directly took actions to encourage/prevent us from doing certain things... or maybe they punished our shortcomings while taking our successes for granted.
Regardless, the end result is that we end up with a whole lot of "damaged" people walking around, out there... and they end up doing damage onto others, and the cycle repeats.
After many years of soul-searching, I have come to know myself well enough to understand that my own procrastination tendencies — and sometimes outright refusal to even participate in many things — are heavily tied to a feeling that there's "no point" in doing many things because "it'll just end badly."
The surface story I told myself (and the world) for many years was simply that I was lazy, and I even used the term "creative slacker" to define myself.
The deeper story is that I was so often "the scapegoat," getting blamed for all manners of things that went wrong, regardless of whether or not I did them, in the first place. My defense mechanism on the active side was perfectionism, on the passive side the claim of laziness.
After all, what's the point of putting effort into something if you're most likely going to be blamed for anything going wrong?
Procrastination is a surprisingly difficult habit to shake, particularly if it has been ingrained into your being over decades. Ironically, the "way out" comes through successfully gutting up off your duff and doing something.
One of the keys to rewire your brain is to pick things that are small/limited enough that success is virtually guaranteed... chew off too much, and you just end up reinforcing the reasons why you developed the habit in the first place!
In a world that's filled with stuff "we're supposed to handle," that can be challenging!
One foot in front of the other, breathe in, breathe out...
(This post largely inspired by the fact that downsizing ahead of a move seems like an impossibly daunting task).
Thanks for coming to visit, and have a great Friday!
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Created at 2025.07.24 20:30 PDT
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