Video link: Why you blame yourself for everything - Therapy in a Nutshell
I decided to watch this video and take notes in order to understand why I am often so self-critical of myself.
- Your brain subconsciously takes mental shortcuts often to save time and energy. However, some of these shortcuts can be quite harmful in the long run, just like how a suspicious shortcut near the road can hurt your feet and stuff. Self-blame is an example of such a shortcut and childhood trauma can be a big factor behind this
- Blaming myself for everything is an easy mental shortcut to take over trying to figure out all the mental and emotional gymnastics involved in this process. I’m not thinking “Was it really my fault? Why wasn’t it my fault? What were my parents thinking at the time when they were scolding me for a petty mistake?” because addressing those thoughts feels like pulling a 10-ton weight, so I choose the quicker and easier solution - self-hate. I believe “It’s all my fault, I’m useless and a POS for making a silly mistake like that!“
- The brain's interpretations aren't always correct. It takes cognitive shortcuts called automatic thoughts that we usually don’t notice but we can definitely train ourselves to be more cognizant of them.
- Catastrophizing - We assume the worst, when in actuality, it isn't the case. For instance, “if I choose to talk to this person, I am afraid they will yell at me or cause a scene, making me feel humiliated and depressed, and society will shame me. I am such a brick”. It’s a lot like making a slippery-slope argument against ourselves
- Overgeneralizing - We see things in extremes. If 1 bad thing happened among 10 events, we assume all future events will be bad
- I blame myself when it's actually not my fault
- Such people tend to take full responsibility for every situation. I don’t even need to take all of that and yet I do
- They believe they should have saw it coming
- They make it about their own personal deficiencies
When something unfortunate happens that is out of our control, our brains feel a strong need to conjure some explanation to fill in the void and experience a reward. I think it’s a lot like satisfying a food craving. We need something to satiate our craving and in that process, we will take anything and the next tempting thing that’s in front of us is a bag of crisps. The brain’s happy
Trauma is what happens when we experience a situation that is too much for us to mentally and emotionally handle. The stress is way too high or our cognitive resources are limited to parse the situation at hand
When we are fresh, energetic, and aren’t carrying any load, we take the longer sidewalk. When we are exhausted and are carrying a heavy backpack, we prefer taking the grassy (and thorny) shortcut
- Self-blame tends to give me a false sense of security and control. After all, by doing so, we are filling the void with an explanation and we believe that the situation could have been different if we had intervened in a different manner
- [f] Self-blame happens to preserve peace in relationships we don't want to hazard. This is really important because I do this a LOT. Just to ensure my parents or relatives feel at peace and they don’t get angry or take stress, I shut up and take the blame upon myself. In reality, I’m just ignoring the fact that even they could be wrong. This connects with the idea that we blame ourselves to make sense of what’s happening to us. How? In this particular example, we may blame ourselves and suppress ourselves from seeking the truth because we like to believe our parents are doing this for our own good. Maybe they are but do they always?
- Blaming ourselves is easier than taking action. I can feel that so much! I could take steps to take control of my life by networking with people who have the potential of giving me a job. I could, you know, sit with my parents and discuss thoroughly what’s in my mind but I am not doing that because they are soul-sucking duties and experience has told me they only caused more harm than good. So, I end up taking the easiest route i.e. blaming myself and saying I’m good for nothing. I don’t know why but this particular point seems to make me feel mentally uncomfortable. Is it because it reminds me of people going into solution-mode and giving me advice? Or is it because I know it hit me in the heart and I’m not ready to accept it?
How do I stop blaming myself?
The key takeaway is that self-blame is an automatic process that is harmful to us. On surface, it seems right because we’re subconsciously making up explanations to feel in control and to feel secure but that isn’t the actual case
To break the automatic habit, it’s important to disengage the autopilot process and switch to taking manual control of my thoughts, This graph is important to remember:
graph LR;
A["Identify"]
B["Question"]
C["Replace"]
A --- B --- C --- A
I should identify my disordered thinking, question it and then proceed to replace it with something more helpful First off, if I notice I’m self-blaming myself (“I’m never good enough”/“It’s all my fault” etc.), I should zoom out in third-person and call out my own self-blame. “I am blaming myself!” ← This is called cognitive defusion. We took manual notice of something funky the mind’s doing and we observe it and thus, we defuse it. It’s like quantum superposition - If we aren’t observing a quantum event, it is in all possible outcomes at the same time. However, the moment we observe the wavefunction, it collapses into one wavefunction. We should aim to collapse the mental wavefunction into just one state and thus, detach ourselves from that belief, which we do so by taking a helicopter perspective
Do not entertain or oppose that thought
Self-blame and intrusive thoughts become worse when you entertain them. Don’t refute it, just notice the thought
The next important thing is to find out and take notice of what we're actually responsible for. What are all the factors that led to this event happening? Write them all down and assign due responsibilities on something like a pie-chart. In other words, do a neutral post-mortem and see where you really are at fault and where you really aren’t
The idea is, blame isn’t actually going to change anything
It’s all my fault. I am sorry, it’s my mistake → What can I do to make amends, or how can I learn from this experience?
- Can you see past the emotional reasoning and the lies that come with the mental shortcut of self-blame?
- Can you look at the big picture and allow others to be responsible for their part?
- Can you take a honest look at your responsibility?