People Who Think Everyone Else Is Always Responsible For Their Problems

There are a lot of people who are incapable of accepting responsibility for their actions. The thing is that when you’re unable to accept that you are actually the person directing your life, making choices, and acting, it’ll be hard for you to take the initiative and grab the steering wheel of your life. In these scenarios there’s always someone to blame for things that happen. And of course it’s not you.

It’s my boyfriend, my mother, that person I met… There’s a huge range, as big as we want it to be. The biggest blindness is when we’re unable to accept the part we play, the part that’s thankfully ours and not someone else’s — or fate’s. It’s absolute denial and stubborn conviction that says the person “to blame” for my problems is always someone else.

They project responsibility outwards so that they don’t have to accept it

Some people are true artists at tickling reality into justifying what they tell themselves: that they aren’t responsible for what happened to them. They’re fine with their self-deception, partly because they’re so used to it that it’s somewhat unconscious. But self-deception is still a big limitation that blurs our reality. It becomes more chaotic, more hostile.

We lose our north star when we put our responsibility onto everyone else’s shoulders. When we act impulsively. When we get frustrated because the other person won’t respond the way we’d like. They can’t or don’t want to. But that’s not our fight. The other person can act however they like. We’re the ones who have to act accordingly.

These people waste a lot of time complaining. Nothing is ever enough. They could complain about even the most insignificant thing. And t hey are completely unable to channel their frustration. They turn into tyrants in their own little kingdom. The worst part of it all is that it ends up hurting them and everyone around them.

Other people won’t always be able to satisfy my needs

This has a lot to do with not knowing yourself, not reflecting. Knowing yourself and accepting who you are right now is the first step to changing yourself. If you don’t know what your needs and impulses are, where your actions come from, it’ll be hard for you to find a solution. 

If someone isn’t paying attention to us, we’ll throw a tantrum like a child to get their attention. There’s almost no method that isn’t fair game in this kind of war. But when the other person doesn’t give us what we need, we get enraged. We curse them and blame them for our frustration. We make them responsible so we don’t disappoint ourselves.

If anyone doesn’t give us what we want and do everything possible to satisfy our needs, we get frustrated. On the other hand, sometimes people around us fix everything so fast that we don’t even realize we’ve asked for help and that they’ve given it to us.

But when we do realize it’s not unusual for us to feel like we don’t have anything to be thankful for, since the other person was obligated to respond to our demands anyway.

Pick up the arrows you shoot and you’ll grow

We don’t see the other person as separate from us. We see them as a slave who must satisfy our tyrannical needs. I command, and you obey my orders. And if you don’t obey them I’ll make you feel like my misfortune is your responsibility and your fault. This is our unspoken line of thought. 

The moment we pick up all the arrows we shot out, we’ll understand the situation and recover our sight. It was the center of all communication with the outside world, the center of our thought schemes. While we’re talking about a long-lasting habit that’s hard to break, it is possible to change it if we seek help.