SELF BLAMING - Dead inside

I was sitting and thinking, and I don’t exactly remember what I was actually doing. It was yesterday night almost an hour before midnight and I had to go downstairs to wish my grandma for her birthday. My friend called and started discussing some issues. I am sometimes unable to counsel my friends and consider if I am the reason they will be more stressed (ironically, I am “self-blaming” myself), when I connected to one of my closest people and made her talk to him. And the next thing I knew because of him was, I would pen this down.

Self-blaming - the most used and most toxic psychological tool for emotional abuse and mental breakdown. You know, when I was listening to all the conversation that happened between them, somewhere I was self-blaming myself while knowing that this is absolutely wrong. When we self-blame, it has sameness with counting your inadequacies, whether they are real or imagined, existing or fantasies, and they paralyze us and freeze us even before we think of moving forward.

Lord Buddha said, “You, yourself, as much as anyone, else in this entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”

Somewhere at the back of my mind, when I think about this quote, I perceive what sense and value it holds to love yourself. When you know, you can do it and you are beautiful, externally and internally, you have the confidence to win the world and the confidence and aspiration to give optimism to everyone around you. Is it lack of realization that we are HUMAN beings that we usually self-blame ourselves? I personally feel that we very often forget that we were made to embrace our flaws and be what we are. But we forget that and dwell in the illusion of perfectionism, which is far and may be impossible to attain. And that urge for perfection makes us blame ourselves for cognitive stress that other people face.



When we fail to meet this standard we have set, the illusory standard of perfectionism, we take the blame for the fault that is actually not our. The very first rhyming word that comes to my mind when I hear the word blame is ‘shame’. And self-blaming is self-shaming and self-shaming is devaluing yourself. It takes you to the core of self-demoralizing, self-demotivation and that is what paralyzes you and you stand at the starting point of your long way to your aspirations and you stop, right there, frozen, harder than the ice itself. The key to self-acceptance, the spine to becoming a complete man (as Raymond calls it) or a whole human is in forbidding self-blame and removing it out of you. Usually, there are comments like, “I am not the one for him”, “I mess up things too soon.”, “I cannot make him/her smile.”, “It is because of me that he is so.”, and that is when you know you are stopping yourself from going ahead and running in a race.

The self-acceptance is one way to reassure yourself that you are perfect just the way you are and that perfection is stunningly imperfect. When you come to a point that you admire your imperfections with glory, that is when you realize that you were abusing yourself when you blame yourself back then and you would have saved a lot of time and efforts just by not doing so. And when we know, we are not perfect, and we are not going to get it right every time, and then we enter- either relationship or commitments, we know we have that spark to learn and and understand perspectives rather than interjecting others. And when you synonym blame and responsibility- you don’t know that blame is abject negativity for you while responsibility makes you proudly own something, even your mistakes. And in responsibility, even when you are wrong, you're so with dignity , authenticity and a sense of ethnicity.