How Blaming Others Gives Away Your Power

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I get it, things aren’t going well and you are looking for someone to blame. Someone ran into your car, your partner said something to make you feel bad about yourself, a co-worker or boss stole your idea. All of these situations involve someone else behaving in ways that have a negative impact on you and your feelings at the moment. It’s true, you didn’t choose these things so the situation feels out of your control. So it’s justified to blame someone else. We spend our precious energy looking for ways to change things by yelling or getting angry, or finding ways to punish the other person and attempt to gain control by influencing their behaviour. This is actually the worst thing we can do for ourselves.

Why? Because no matter how much we try, we will never control the thoughts, decisions or behaviour of another person. We can attempt to influence, but at the end of the day, we all have full agency over these things. The better option is to manage what is in our control - our response! When we blame others, we give our power to them to change the situation. We look to them to make different choices when really, we can only change our experience by changing our own choices. If someone says something to us and we feel hurt, we are choosing at that moment to feel hurt. If someone steals something from us and we feel betrayed, we are choosing betrayal as a response to them. A good question to ask ourselves is, why am I choosing this response? What is it about this situation that is triggering my emotions? Perhaps we feel deep down that what our partner said to us is true? What if we feel deep down that we aren’t worthy of success so we fear that others will take our ideas too, making success something that continues to slip through our fingers?

I like to think of these moments as gifts. This is the universe offering us a window into what is holding us back in our life. The gift is the opportunity to ask the question “why do I feel this way?”, so we can begin to see the limiting beliefs we hold that get in the way of the life we want. The gift is also to be able to take back our power in the moment and respond with a more empowering action.

What if, in these moments, we chose something else? What if we chose to tell our partner that their words triggered hurt in us and we want to understand the true intention behind them?

We are owning our response and opening a window of compassionate understanding.

This allows us to direct the conversation so we can gather more information that might help us see how we might be sabotaging ourselves and the relationship. What if we chose to call out our boss or colleague in a way that lets them know we see their actions and don’t want to assume they were intentional. This again, allows us to direct the conversation so we can uncover any assumptions we might have around what happened. This may not prevent future offences but it certainly sends a powerful message that we are willing to speak up for ourselves. We show our power when we are willing to address actions that thrive in the shadows.

We enter the situation with our power intact, which has a vibration others can sense, and we can influence the outcome by holding this power confidently. This power holds a higher vibration which the other person wants to meet, because higher vibrations align with more positive emotions. Shame might cause them to respond in defence and deflect any accountability for their actions, but that is not our concern. Our concern is to hold our center, which holds our core values, and allows us to avoid the suffering that comes with blame.