Responsibility vs Blame

When someone tells us we should take responsibility for something, we usually react as though we are being told to take the blame. But this is not necessarily true at all, though, granted, it does depend on the intention of the person who is saying it!

If you asked me what is the most powerful thing I have done in the last 10 years, it would have to be “taking responsibility...for my life”. When we think it is other people, circumstances or events that are responsible for making our life other than “is should be”, we are not taking responsibility, we are being victims; victims of those other people, circumstances and events. If we do that, we are lost: there is no hope for recovery until we can see why and how we are responsible.

”Are you telling me that when I got the sack, it was my fault?!” No! But I am saying that you are responsible for your life and for the things you attract into it (by the now quite famous “law of attraction”). It means our fears and negative expectations or doubts act like a beacon and bring them to us. So, if you fear being unemployed or redundant, you make it much likelier to happen.

Taking responsibility, on the other hand, doesn’t let someone who has wronged us off the hook. So if that feared dismissal was unfair and you happen to live in a country that had laws against such things, maybe you will be entitled to compensation. But you are still responsible. The complaining and wriggling that it is otherwise will simply draw a similar lesson to you until it is well learnt.

As a man whose first forty-five years largely involved denying his worst fear of worthlessness and ending up insolvent (though luckily not bankrupt), I brought about my worst fear by the law of attraction, thus, in a way proving myself “right”: I was indeed worthless and very painful it was indeed!

If I were to bore you with the entire story, I am sure that if I wasn’t accepting responsibility I could easily tell you a whole tale of woes, of wrongdoings and inadequacies of other people and some of it might be true but nothing will detract from the fact that I am responsible for what happened because I caused it by my fears. A person who ends up being beaten by their spouse may be be “to blame”, the spouse definitely having something to be responsible for themselves, but that person created it by how s/he was being in life and/or by attracting people who do that sort of thing.