What if I'm the one to blame for my own difficult circumstances?
That could be pretty hard to accept if you are one who was hit by the drunken driver, harder still if you look at the circumstances of someone who was abused at the hands of a stronger person, one who clearly lacked the ability to defend themselves at the time.
So, let's shift the question from blaming someone else for my circumstances, to:
Who's to blame for how I experience my circumstances?
Now, this one could be really interesting, especially for those of you who like to keep raising the red herring of "blaming the victim."
Anyone who has ever worked with victims of various tragedies will know that there is a great deal of difference between what happened and how the person responds to what happened. You may not have chosen the circumstances, but sooner or later you are going to have to accept responsibility for your responses and choices that come after the fact.
(An important caveat here: I am definitely not addressing those who may have been truly incapable of choosing or responding differently. For example, I am not addressing those who have become brain injured. However, I am addressing those who continue to bemoan their fate rather than get on with what's left.)
There are thousands of examples around us every day of people who have gone through hell and chosen to rise above what has happened to them. Some will say these are superheroes, and, I suppose they are in a way. What makes them super, however, has precious little to do with gifted abilities; it does have to do with the mindful awareness and courage to accept that if anyone is going to do anything about my problems, it's probably going to start with me.
My favorite example is Mitchell, as he prefers to be called. Mitchell was horribly disfigured in a fiery motorcycle crash many years ago; after many surgeries and a lengthy recovery, he then found himself paralyzed as a result of a small airplane crash. As he is fond of saying,
"Before I was paralyzed there were 10,000 things I could do. Now there are 9,000. I can either dwell on the 1,000 I've lost or focus on the 9,000 I have left."
Read his book, It's Not What Happens To You, It's What You Do About It, and see for yourself what could happen if you truly do choose to accept responsibility for your next steps.
Can Acceptance Be The Key To Lasting Change?
This opens an important question in terms of creating life in a more fulfilling and uplifting way - the role of acceptance.
Acceptance may be one of those mandatory preconditions not only improving your life experience, but also for discovering your source of Inspiration and Aspiration.
(If you want to follow the larger context, here's a link to my free archive of Huff Post articles. You can either start with the July 20, 2009 post which started this series on inspiration and aspiration, or you may prefer to go all the way back to my first post on July 15, 2008. There's no way I know of to impart a complete answer in a single post, so if some of this seems to be hanging out there a bit, you may find it useful to read some of the earlier posts and connect the dots.)
If someone chooses to live in a state of denial, it's pretty hard to help them make any improvement. Talk to anyone counsels people in difficult circumstances, ranging from addiction and cancer to divorce and bankruptcy, and most will tell you that a critical step on the path to recovery is acceptance.
Acceptance does not mean "liking it." You don't have to like your circumstance, you just have to acknowledge the reality and accept that the circumstance is what it is. Mitchell couldn't do anything to change the disfigurement or paralysis yet neither did he have to dwell on some kind of self-pity or bemoan his fate. While it might be understandable that one would indulge in a few rounds of self-pity, sooner or later acceptance has to show up if you are going to move forward.
Shortly after my father died, the insurance company denied both health and death benefits, and our family was forced into a third bankruptcy, I wound up living in my beater of a car. Sure, not the same level as Mitchell, but tough enough for an 18 year old.
I received some great counsel from an early mentor, Ernie Gourdine. Ernie turned me on to Fritz Perls (considered the "father of Gestalt therapy"). Fritz was big on awareness with a constant suggestion that simple awareness can often be curative. Awareness is a precursor to acceptance - hard to accept what you don't notice.
I found myself blaming my family, blaming the hospital, blaming the insurance company, and just about anything or anyone around. Then I noticed that no matter how much I blamed something or someone, I still had my circumstances to deal with. Once I accepted the reality - a beater car, a few clothes, $6.35 in the bank, and not much else - I was then able to start making choices about how to improve my situation.
To be sure, there were numerous challenges, but the only choice I had was to choose or to collapse and decry my fate.
So, take a look at your circumstances. Can you accept that they just are what they are? Even if it seems you have been dealt a raw hand, it's still the hand you are left to play. If you are going to improve upon the current reality, the very first thing you have to do is accept what you have. You don't have to like it, want it or anything close; you just have to accept that what's present, is what's so. From there, you can begin to make choices about how to make things a bit better.
You can blame the banks, the politicians, the greedy powers that be, and just about anyone else. I know from my own experience, that after you get done blaming, you are still going to be left with your life, your circumstances, and your next choices.
So, consider carefully how you choose. Each choice leads you somewhere. Are you choosing a direction your truly prefer?
More on this notion to come, including some thoughts about progress vs. perfection, and what to do if the next choice you make doesn't work out quite the way you hoped.
As always, please do share your thoughts, comments and suggestions, either via the comments section below, or by emailing me directly.
Russell Bishop is an Educational Psychologist, professional life coach and management consultant, based in Santa Barbara California. You can find out more about Russell at http://www.lessonsinthekeyoflife.com. Contact Russell by email at: Russell (at) lessonsinthekeyoflife.com
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It's all very well to learn some techniques for feeling better about yourself and your world, but as someone who has participated in just about every New Age-y thing known to mankind, I am struck by the very, very high level of navel-gazing that goes on in that universe. Supporting narcissism isn't particularly useful for the future of our planet or, in the long term, for our sense of ourselves as giving and loving human beings.
Rather than coaching executives on how to make more money, I'd be a hell of a lot more impressed if your description said something about "committed to coaching activists in the areas of health care, the environment, world peace" -- something like that. Or that you were an advocate for rape victims. Or something other than feeling good about yourself.
Thank you for an important posting, especially in these trying times. Making lemonade out of lemons can be a lost art when it seems like there's so much to be worried about. I suggest being thankful for small things - even saying thank you out loud, especially as we head to the thanksgiving season. I practice saying thank you with my 13 month old daughter every morning. We walk out into our backyard and actually say thank you to each of the fruit trees for giving us fruit to eat (and we even thank the barren loquat tree for standing up tall). This simple act works to set both my daughter and I straight each morning. She calms down when she touches the acorns on the ancient oaks and smells the lemon flowers. I calm down too when I remember that nature doesn't care about making monthly bill payments or coping with family challenges. Even though it's a small step, starting the mornings with thank yous is a small but powerful step in setting the tone for the day. Your blog has given another thing for me to be thankful for this morning.
Be well.
"Suck it up and quit bellyaching Eeyore."
Seriously, the choose your response idea is such a basic, yet crucial concept, that makes all the difference in the world.
Great piece.
During the course of my recovery I learned a lot. I learned that even if you work for a medical center and are diagnosed by your employer with an on-the-job injury, you may still be denied a safe work environment and treatment for the injury. I learned that unfortunately, co-workers who witness the abuse will not necessarily report it.
The author rightfully points out that there are "thousands of examples around us every day of people who have gone through hell and chosen to rise above what has happened to them." There are also thousands of people around us who have gone through hell and have been permanently injured by the experience, as the example he gave of Mitchell.
In my own experience concerning workplace bullying I've noted that many people including medical professionals and senior management still take a "let's bury our heads in the sand and pretend the problem doesn't exist" attitude. That makes the problem worst and creates a road block for injured people who are trying to move on. Unfortunately a lot of people just don't want to talk about it.
To read more check my blog "The Cambium Level" under the heading "Workplace Psychological Abuse" at www.leonardnolt.blogspot.com
Sincerely
Leonard Nolt
The one's supposed to aid you are sometimes the ones that hurt you.
It's a world where there are sharks, and sometimes sharks bite you when you didn't ask for it.
Being a victim of a situation you never asked for is horrible. Ultimately though you need to learn to accept things, and go on with what you do have. Life is a lesson we bring into the next realm.
And sometimes it is not your fault.
Sometimes it's appropriate to blame some people so it doesn't happen again.
Some Buddhist-like philosophies were created to help people live in unjust societies without making a fuss.
I agree that with PTSD you are not in control of the flashbacks and triggers, it just happens. Real victims often hear about how they should be over it now. No one wants to hear about the tedious hellish process of recovery and healing, until it's done and there is a nice ending.
It's really hard to turn a crap situation into something great and I admire those who do. And those who aren't yet able to I know how hard it can be.
But I've lived through he/ls since then - and, ironically, they were much compounded by my sense of failure/weakness to not accept where I was. To see "blaming the victim" called a red herring in this article, is one of the most stunning things I've seen of late. I don't know what to even say, other than to tell any people who are reading this and may need to hear it, it was not your fault.
Accurate causal relationships represent understanding. Yes, some times, for some things, the banks or the politicians are to blame. Furthermore, why is the only choice you see either blaming others OR moving forward. For a very large number of us, moving forward can only begin when we realize that there is someone to blame, and it's not us. If you think ACCEPTANCE is good, you should really try to work up the courage to get a taste of I'M NOT GOING TO ACCEPT THAT - it's like seeing in colour after a life of black and white.
For me, what works is any version of the Serenity Prayer (even if you don't pray) because it is a balance of concepts.
G-d grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
We were given the power to use judgment and make decisions for a reason.
And yeah... I don't understand what he meant by calling "blaming the victim" a red herring either.
What kind of crap is that!
Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Did you even read the article?
This article is designed for people like you.
Please read it again, the writer does make a lot of sense.
And stop going through life with, what my friend refers to as, "the why bothers".
You are more powerful than you think.
I've been through all of the work hard and it will come crap, only to be jerked over for most of the last 35 years by managements of crooks, liars, incompetents and sociopaths. The business world is full of people who will go to church every Sunday and make immoral decisions the rest of their working life.
Self-improvement is one thing you should always strive for, but you can't always make enough to eat and raise a family based on what you prefer to do. Many of the people who wanted a career based on something they love to do often find out that they can't make enough money to survive in this world.
Many of the Christian mystics as well as Buddhists and Hindu speak of cultivating detachment as a way of moving through life and all circumstances. You can only observe and have simple awareness when you detach from what is happenning.
Maybe this society has been set up to equate "pursuit of happiness" with nothing going wrong. I think it is possible to hold both suffering and joy at the same time.