the heart as it is | courage • grief • beauty

Today’s prompt from Onsite is “What would you find if you were to analyze your experiences with blame? Have you used it to avoid responsibility and keep yourself safe? What impact do you think this had on you and those on whom you levied blame?”

From first glance of this question, my mind immediately went to “self-blame”, so you can see the level of shame I have there. But let’s answer the question – if I were to analyze experiences with me blaming others, I think I would feel like I had no agency, that people are terrible and don’t change, and that I have no control over anything in my life. I think the me ten years ago totally would have thought this way. One moment that comes to mind though is after a falling out of a relationship about half a decade ago.

The most comforting thought to me at that time was that how people treated me was also how people viewed God (which I still think is true to an extent). But as I continued to think about it, I realized that I was the common denominator in receiving these people into my life, so I tried my best to begin working on myself. And then when the next relationship fell out after that, I swung to the other side of the pendulum and then had a lot of shaming self-talk and self-blame. I can view all those experiences with more compassion now.

But continuing on with the rest of the question, when I used to blame more than look inward, I definitely used that to avoid responsibility and keep myself safe. Granted, I didn’t know I was trying to avoid responsibility, and I actually think keeping myself safe was important at that time, as I didn’t have the people in my life that I could be vulnerable with yet still loved. The impact that it had on me was that I was blinded by patterns that I didn’t know even know I was following, and there was so much lack of self-worthiness. To the people I levied blame on, I definitely think more hurt and confusion was probably inflicted, as hurt people hurt people.

Forgiveness does not always mean reconnection though, and although I believe I have healed my connection to those people, it doesn’t mean that those connections have been reestablished (and neither do I think they should be). It doesn’t mean I’m doing this out of spite, it just means I literally don’t have the emotional nor relational capacity to re-invite them back in any way.