Sam went into early retirement some years ago and is battling financially in making ends meet with his small pension. I’ve known Sam for several years and decided some time ago to shift him from friends to a distant associate.
Who is abusing you as an emotional garbage bag?
It took me a while to understand that spending time with Sam was emotionally draining because he spent most of the time blaming all that went wrong in his life on his family history. He is still dumping all his emotional baggage onto anyone willing to offer a sympathetic ear because unsurprisingly he has few real friends left.
Sam has spent most of his life living in quiet misery after a therapist told him that his authoritarian father and siblings were to blame for his depression. Over the years he spent a fortune on different therapies with no noticeable change to his mental health.
I have a particular gripe against a certain school of therapy that seems to absolve the client of all responsibility for the circumstances they find themselves in, particularly when it comes to blaming family circumstances, bosses at work, former teachers, and former marriage partners for everything that has gone wrong.
The blame game is meanwhile becoming a collective behavior pattern where the heads of government, educational and religious institutions, big business, and global organizations are becoming the targets for venting toxic emotions. The vile language in some of the social media chats is revealing of the culture of entitlement.
Just don’t take responsibility for your own life!
Divorce, separation, and early childhood trauma and neglect is almost everybody’s history. So what is the big deal? Get over it and move on and stop spending the rest of your life wallowing in self-pity like Sam. If you have suffered a major personal loss, the big question to ask is: What have I got left?
The first step in moving forward is acceptance
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
When famous British physicist Stephen Hawking was diagnosed early in his career with motor neuron disease that gradually paralyzed him, he did not fall into self-pity. All his mental capacity remained. When he was confined to a wheelchair and eventually lost his speech he could only communicate with a speech-generating device. Yet he continued traveling widely and working on numerous scientific studies. When Hawking died at the age of 76, he had become one of the world’s most renowned physicists.
With so many people at the moment suffering financial, health, and personal loss as a result of the pandemic, the first step is acceptance. Be true to yourself and accept that you are not responsible for external circumstances but very well responsible for your attitude toward those circumstances that are out of your control.
- What can I learn from the new situation?
- What resources, knowledge, networks can I activate?
- What is the first step that I can take today to change my situation?
- What are the things that I can still truly be grateful for?
- What habits, attitude, and mindset can I change that will improve my vibrational energy that will in turn attract from the universe what I need?
Gratitude, self-care, humility, and self-respect is the antidote to blaming external circumstances and going into entitlement. By blaming the abuser you are giving that abuser power over you that he does not deserve. By accepting responsibility for your own life you are consciously regaining your self-respect and motivational energy to move forward.
Reino Gevers – Author. Mentor. Speaker
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