“Who is this man blaming right now, himself, or her?”
When your relationship goes bad…
When you meet a woman and she turns you down…
When you think you’ve found a great guy and he turns out to be a jerk…
When your marriage falls apart after only a few years…
When your girlfriend begins to stray and lose interest in you…
When your boyfriend wants to see other women…
Who do you blame more?
Do you blame yourself and look closely inside? Scrutinizing your every behavior.
Do you blame others?
Is your energy focused outside yourself?
Do you take a little of the blame on yourself, and then give a little blame to the other person?
Maybe you go back and forth. One minute it’s you , the next minute it’s them. Driving yourself crazy trying to figure out what really went wrong.
I have found that both men and women tend to blame others verbally. But I believe inside their minds, they are blaming themselves over a certain failure in a relationship, or a meeting.
Think back to a failure of yours and ask yourself this question:
Am I blaming someone else for being who they are?
In other words let’s say a woman meets this guy she is attracted to. She is not sure who he is because he is kind of a jerk. But he’s not such a jerk where it would be enough to scare most people away. He shows a little interest in her and even though he’s a little rude about it, she finds herself wondering who he is. Is he really this asshole or is there more to him?
So they go out and begin to date each other exclusively. She finds him quite nice. Sure he’s a little rough around the edges but there’s something about him she can’t resist, and then when they are alone, he’s the sweetest guy in the world to her.
Several weeks or months go by and suddenly she finds his sweetness is becoming more rare with each passing day. It gets worse and worse until he starts to blatantly treat her primarily bad. But then suddenly, out the blue, he’s nice again.
For a while….
The ups and downs are driving her crazy but she still finds her attraction growing. She just can’t get enough. She begins to thrive off the bad energy hoping and waiting for the good energy.
When the emotional ride turns to nothing but bad, he’s a prick to her with no good at all, the new relationship falls apart. She eventually decides to leave him. She gathers the courage and although it may take several weeks, but eventually she decides to never see him again.
She confides in her friends about the affair and the conversations begins to sound like,
“All men are jerks. Why do I continually fall for the asshole? I really thought this guy was different. He was so sweet to me when we were first starting going out.”
So part of her blames him for acting like himself, and that was, A JERK!
Even though it was very clear in the beginning that he was this jerk. And when entering this relationship with him, she assumed him being a jerk, was an act, or not really who he was. or whatever the reasoning was going on inside her mind she did not allow herself to see the big picture.
She had tunnel vision because her attraction negated her common sense.
Then a part of her blames herself for falling for the asshole AGAIN!
She questions her choices and in a way that demeans herself for making a bad choice.
This is a terrible cycle created and whereas I don’t feel immune to this myself, after all we all tend have this so-called blame mechanism inside us. It is our minds trying to rationalize and explain an outcome.
Let’s take a look at this blame process from a nice guy’s point of view. I’m going right to the source.
Me.
I met this woman online. We flirted a little and even though in our she claimed that I was a little rude to her. The negative energy she associated with me turned positive when I uttered these words to her,
“Listen. You must know that I am joking with you. I going to bet they if we were in the same room and had this conversation, you would be smacking me on the arm with your mouth wide open. “
She replied,
“Yes. I would.”
What I did there was dispel a belief she held that I was a jerk, when it reality I was just playing with her. I was flirting. So the relationship began. She was obviously attracted to me. Giving me attention and great laughs.
In fact she gave me so much attention I began to rely on it heavily.
It never occurred to me, because I could not see the big picture that when we first met, she didn’t understand me or what I was saying. She misinterpreted our first interaction. She flew easily off the handle. She was shy, withdrawn, demanded much of my time, and constantly argued with her family.
But I still trudged on with the relationship. After all, despite all her flaws she was amazing.
You see first I noticed she was a little jealous but over time this jealousy went away. She began to not care what I did with other women. She withdrew further from caring about me and this turned into her just seeing me as friend but she never bothered letting me know.
But of course she never told me about this because she was a shy withdrawn woman who rarely wanted to discuss her feelings.
She then called me up one day and said,
“Fuck Pete. I slept with this guy last night and we didn’t use a condom. I’m afraid of getting pregnant. And the worse part is I’m just committed to an old boyfriend of mine and I probably fucked it up already.”
It wasn’t until that point did I realize that she was through with me long before that phone call.
And I struggled with it.
It hurt like a mother fucker.
My feelings were torn between showing outright anger towards her or wallowing in my disparity.
I struggled in determining where the blame should go. Should I blame myself for allowing this to happen then try to figure out how to avoid it from happening again? Or do I blame her for being exactly what she was when we met?
You see this whole blame game is just not good for the growth of ourselves.
- You shouldn’t blame someone else for being who they are. They are who they are and that is all.
- You shouldn’t blame yourself for making a mistake and seeing the whole picture because that is who you are.
I refused to see the situation in reality because when it came to getting a hot young woman as a girlfriend, I did not see past the attention I was getting from her. I had the same tunnel vision the woman earlier did. My feelings of attraction were clouding my judgement to see the big picture.
So by blaming myself for being exactly what I was no different from blaming someone else for being what they were.
Granted the person I was, needed to change and in looking deeply at the root of how and why I acted that way, allowed me to better myself. I broke down exactly what I was feeling each step of the way and then instead of just reveling in my epiphany, I began to act on my new-found ideas of who I wanted to be.
Blame is absolutely useless and it doesn’t nothing for our growth as humans. The whole “cause and it’s effect on the outcome” is merely just an event leading up to another event.
You can’t blame yourself for acting as who YOU ARE.
And you can’t blame someone else for acting in a way that is consistent with who THEY ARE.
When a woman falls sexually for a jerk and then calls him a jerk when the relationship turns bad, what does that really say about who she is?
When me, as a man, fails to see the obvious flaws in a woman because of the way she looks, what does that really say about me?
And that is the key to real growth.
It’s not blaming others.
It’s not blaming ourselves.
It is seeing how our actions are nothing more than an extension of who we are. And once we see how our actions connect this way we can then begin to change for the better and avoid the mistakes of our past.
Remember this important fact about attraction I learned from David DeAngelo directly but described here in my own words:
Attraction does not care who you are. And It is not a rational thinking being. It is an instinctual emotion of which you have no control over whatsoever. It also makes no sense to blame that emotion or how we act on our attraction. We must learn to not act on that emotion blindly. This leads directly to the blame game and a never-ending circle of “who is at fault?”
It’s a waste of energy. It’s a waste of time. And time and energy are finite things in which we should never waste.
So the next time you find your attraction towards someone else is enticing you to play its blame game, step back and consciously decide if this person is really right for you. Take the few seconds to ask yourself these questions,
“Will I end up blaming this person for just being who they are?”, and
“Will I end up blaming myself for being who I really am?”
Those few seconds of thought can save so much of your valuable time in the end.
In others words, as taken from an interview of Scot McKay talking to Marie Forleo, use your gut or your intuition. It’s right most of the time. When you go against that initial feeling of something is wrong, you will eventually realize your gut was right in the first place.
Photo Credit:
Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
