Critical and curious.
I am decidedly and by nature critical. I strive to think critically about all things, rather than simply regurgitate opinions that seem popular or acceptable. I need to read widely, to study the facts, to ask questions and feel into what actually makes sense. Criticality and curiosity, I’ve found, are essential in learning to swim in the sea of information and make decisions that feel right.
Being critical can easily veer into criticizing, which can sometimes be useful. Critique can also easily lead to blame, however, which is usually not useful. When you start dissecting what happened then or what’s happening now, it’s natural to want to blame who and what you perceive as being the source of the problem. Maybe it was your family who is in the wrong, or that mean soccer coach. Perhaps it was more broad: the greater structures that be, or some vaguely defined aspect of an ideology.
If you’re really committed to the dissection, you can trace whose “fault” it was to previous generations, and even then it’s sort of hazy, and we should probably bring in the discussion of epigenetics, and how nature, nurture, and culture shape us. The exploration of why things are the way they are is layered.
I digress.
Indeed, sometimes what is wrong clearly is the fault of someone, and what’s needed is an apology (or something). What is interesting about blaming, though, regardless of if it’s anyone’s fault or not, is that it ends the potential for growth. As soon as you blame, you can call the game over. If it’s someone else’s fault, then it’s their problem and their responsibility to take care of. Blaming can trap us in anger or despair, and prevent us from moving forward.1
Many people will never take responsibility for the shit they stir or leave behind. Most will never do or say what you personally wish they would. Demanding that someone comply or attempting to compel them into behaving a certain way does not work. For many (if not most) people, being told what to do and expected to do it feels annoying and patronizing. You cannot actually control what anyone else does, and trying to will likely get you nowhere fast.
It’s important to understand what’s causing problems in our relationships and in the systems we interact with. It’s part of the process to feel how we feel about all of it, and let those feelings transform into some kind of action (or not). And also, we’d probably get further in our missions of solving those problems if we check our blame-soaked expectations at the door.
Whose responsibility?
The conversation about who needs to take responsibility for what is complicated. One perspective is the aforementioned idea that someone else is to blame and should be responsible for whatever is not yours.
Another slightly different view (maybe the same side of the same coin) is that you’ve created everything in your life and you are therefore responsible for dealing with all of it. This is a concept that is touted in subsets of the “wellness / self-development” community. The idea is that you, with all your subconscious conditioning and past lives and thoughts, attract everything and everyone in your life. And so, it is your sole responsibility to deal with it, in order to achieve abundance and expansion and light and love.
This, of course, is wildly reductionistic and lacks essential complexity and nuance. Blaming and shaming ourselves for all of the wrong or fucked-up things that happen to us is not empowering, but in fact very much the opposite. I do not think that the idea that you attracted a horrific incident or “called in” an illness so that your soul could heal is true or constructive.2
Cult-like dogma aside — self-responsibility is incredibly valuable in learning to live a life you feel good about. These extreme statements are sneaky: they often contain threads of truth that can actually be helpful to experiment with. It can be constructive to face what was hard or painful, and to know that while it wasn’t your fault, you must be the one who now works to move past or deal with it. It is empowering to take responsibility for yourself and make different decisions to create a more satisfying life. It can be healing to recognize that some of the suffering you experience is being perpetuated by circumstances or habits that you can actually start to change. You are the only one who lives this life in your body, and you do have agency.
Yet again, a place called somewhere in between.
We all have taken responsibility for something that we didn’t need to or was not ours. It’s part of life. If you’ve picked up trash that you did not personally place on the ground, you’ve taken responsibility for what someone else did.3 Living in the world means that sometimes you end up dealing with things that you didn’t have a hand in creating. For better or worse.
Assuming responsibility for things that aren’t under our control is unlikely to be helpful. Alternatively, shirking responsibility or assigning it to others in the form of blame or expectation won’t do much good.
It is, as usual, not a matter of choosing one side or the other, but of inhabiting that good and soft nuanced ground, somewhere in between.
May we all find ways to balance our responsibilities to ourselves, to others, and to this earth.
Maggie
If blame was ever going to work to create positive transformation, then by god it should definitely have worked already.
I realize how absurd this may sound to people who haven’t come across it, but I’m also sure it mustn’t be too much of a stretch to believe that this rhetoric exists. The dark side of “manifestation culture,” if you will.
What about doing all the work for a group project, or wiping a table someone left crumbs all over? Moving a worm to the side of the road?