We have all been hurt before but what do you do with the hurt is more important than the hurt itself. Would you prefer to get back to an active LIVER of life? Or would you prefer to ruminate endlessly about the past and something that cannot be changed? Or will you continue to just blame others for how you are feeling?
The problem with blaming others is that it can often leave you powerless. Now, all your feelings are legitimate but it is important to feel them fully and then to move on. If you do not practice forgiveness you might be the one who pays most dearly. By embracing forgiveness, you can also embrace peace, hope, gratitude and joy.
Why you must stop being the victim and blaming others
In every moment, you have that choice – to continue to feel bad about another person‘s actions or to start feeling good. You need to take responsibility for your own happiness and not put such power into the hands of another person.
By blaming others you excuse yourself for that same negative behavior. If something goes wrong, then someone other than yourself must be blamed for causing the situation. That is the rule of the blame game. You have a hard time accepting what you cannot command. Many events are beyond your control. Accidents are incidents that happened unexpectedly and unintentionally. The blame game is one-sided, irrational and creates biases which give you the right to defend yourself.
So why do we play the bank game? Here several reasons why we do this:
- We project our emotions. Blaming is a distraction and it helps us to avoid doing some deeper soul-searching. By projecting bad feelings at others we set them up as bad so we can look good.
- We expect life to be fair. Life is not neither fair nor unfair, life just is. We have a broken idea of fairness. Rather than accepting that something bad happened tous, we opt to blame others.
- We want to feel safe. We blame others because they are bad. That is what we like to believe. Being bad is a label. It helps distance ourselves from those who are evil so we feel safe.
You must forgive them – and yourself. Forgiveness is a way of tangibly letting something go. Forgiveness is not a sign of weakness. Instead, it is simply saying, “I am a good person. You are a good person. You did something that hurt me but I want to move forward in my life and welcome joy back into it.” You cannot do this fully until you let the thing that hurt you and the person that hurt you, go. Sometimes we get stuck in our pain, in our stubbornness and we cannot even imagine forgiveness. Forgiveness is not saying I agree with what you did, instead it is saying “I do not agree with what you did but I forgive you anyway.”
This is very important to remember because what forgiving other people is saying is you refuse to hold onto this grudge that is holding you back. It is also saying that you refuse to allow this grudge to take you down the road of misery any longer than it already has. Finally, it is saying that the other person does not deserve your forgiveness but you are willing to forgive him or her anyway so you can move forward in your life. Forgiveness is a commitment to a personalize process of change, which moves you from suffering to forgiveness which also helps you to improve your life, acknowledge your emotions about the harm done to you and how they affect your behavior and work to release them as well as choosing to forgive the person who has offended you which moves you away from the role as a victim and releases the control and power the offending person and situation has over your life.
As you forgive and let go of the grudges you’ll no longer define your life by how you have been hurt.
Being hurt never feels good but each of us has had this experience a time or two. So, how do you move on from playing the victim and continuous blame game?
Need help moving on from playing the victim? Let’s chat over a free 30 minute coaching conversation. My mission is to decrease the divorce rate while simultaneously increasing the marriage rate one coaching conversation at a time. Ready to join the mission so you can become a part of the top 1% of couples that have extraordinary relationships? Click the link.
All the best!
Marshaun Olaniyan
Life & Relationship Strategist www.marshauno.com
This was a great and resonate read! I loved this part the most, [ Forgiveness is not saying I agree with what you did, instead it is saying “I do not agree with what you did but I forgive you anyway.” ]. Thank you for sharing.
I love what your doing in keeping couples together. At this point I’m ready to file for divorce after 17 yrs . I should have left several years but I was trying to make it work. Unfortunately my husband didn’t want to go to counseling. He is always playing the victim. I took responsibility on my part for allowing the behavior and normalizing it. So I decided to work on me and that’s when I discovered I normalized his narssacitic behavior. Going up and down with verbal & emotionally abuse . So with that said I pray for couples and wish them the best on their individual journey. I will say I used to ask myself how oh how did I get here? Slowly peeling the layers discovered my Why? Did you hear the story about the frog in the boiling water and the cold? Now that was an interesting analogy in understanding why people stay as long as they do. I wish I could share the details but I’ve text much.
Blessings,
Ada