Sometimes I just get really tired of the world.
Well, not the entire world but the significant segment of people within it who are so eternally busy "finding fault" with everyTHING and everyONE.
Nasturtiums in our garden
Newsflash: Identifying, pointing out and criticizing the flaws in someone/something else does NOT do anything to diminish your OWN flaws!
Most often, I observe this happening with politicians. Sometimes to such an extent that an entire election campaign is centered around an opponent's shortcomings, rather than on the candidate's own experience and skill set.
"I'm running for office because my opponent is incompetent and an idiot!"
I'm sure we'll get to see variations on that soon, here in the USA, as the US Presidential election campaigns ramp up.
Mint in bloom
But this kind of toxicity and finger pointing is not limited to politicians; far from it.
It's also pretty common in workplaces, often to such a degree that what starts out as creative BRAINstorming sessions turn into BLAMEstorming sessions.
Of course, we also resort to that same thing in families and personal relationships.
Our unhappiness, or anger, or dissatisfaction with something in our lives so readily gets attributed to someone else, rather than to our own inappropriate habits, foibles, addictions and decisions.
Sometimes I find myself wondering whether this kind of behavior is simply inherent in human nature. Consider when we were little kids and something bad happened... so often kids reach for the "It wasn't ME!" excuse when they (for example) break a window with the ball in spite of having been told 13 times not to... and then readily throw their best friend under the bus: "JOHNNY did it!"
Morning glories
So what are we really looking at here?
Backing away from personal accountability and instead blaming others strikes me as ultimately living in a state of fear of consequences.
And how does that happen?
I would submit that many of us grew up with and subsequently started living our adult lives in situation where it was UNSAFE to make mistakes. That's part one. Part two is that we have a lot of interaction with people who have expectations of us that we either can't live up to, or don't really want to live up to. The two are sort of intertwined.
For example, I have lived much of my life "biting off more than I can chew" because I was trying to live up to other people's expectations about "how good" I should be at handling something, rather than my own. Many parents are particularly "good" at this, imposing their failed hopes and dreams onto their kids, rather than allowing their kids to self-discover their level of ambition, skill or whatever.
Of course, in an ideal world we leave these tendencies behind when we grow up... but that's seldom as easy as it sounds. We humans tend to fall into that psychological bugaboo known as the "Repetition Compulsion," in which we seek the "comfort" of the familiar, even when that familiar doesn't feel good at all.
So — in an overly simplistic sense — if we grew up with blame, fault-finding and finger pointing, there's a good chance we'll continue the pattern, unless we do a lot of personal work to understand our compulsions and toxic patterns.
It can be a hard lesson to learn... and it calls for both mindfulness and self-awareness to notice when we start looking to blame others for our feelings, anger or something else. And then to go through the challenging process of self-inquiry to unearth why we are really looking to blame someone for our state of being.
Thanks for reading, and stay safe out there!
How about YOU? When something bad happens in your life, do you automatically look around for someone to blame? Is it REALLY their fault, or are you actually angry at yourself? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
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Created at 20200812 21:06 PDT
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