Guest blogging for Scott WIlliams on Self Blame (and this on responsibility)

Scott Williams kindly asked me to guest blog for him yesterday, and this very morning there I am!

I wanted to say thanks to Scott for the invite, and also just add a smidge here to the post (which was long enough already!)

While love pretty much saved my life, one of the other central ingredients was responsibility. In my post for Scott I talk about the effect of bad parenting, but I think it’s important to point out that I don’t think we should blame our parents for our lives now.

It is easy to get stuck in a pattern of saying “my parents were awful and it’s their fault I’m messed up.”

Okay, so maybe they did mess you up, and maybe they are responsible for the bad childhood you had, BUT, you are now an adult. You now have the power to change.

This goes for everything, from parents to other traumas, from businessmen who ripped you off to lovers who ripped your heart out. Yes they hurt you, but you are responsible for recovering. You are responsible for not passing that hurt on. If you stay messed up that is your responsibility.

This might sound harsh, but it isn’t, because it has a flip-side.

You are responsible for you, which means no-one else has the power to stop you. Your parents cannot keep hurting you unless you let them, the businessman has gone, your ex-lover has gone. You are free of the people or things which hurt you. Now they live only in your head, in your memories, and in how you choose to respond to what they did. The only power they still have is the power you give them.

It is essential in our journey to health that we let go of things. Let go of those who hurt you, let go of the beliefs you have about them and about yourself, let go of your anger, hurt, sense of injustice, whatever is holding you back.

Holding resentment is only a way of keeping on giving power to those you need to leave behind.

You have the freedom now to be different, to be happy, and to find new ways of defining yourself.

AFTERWORD!

I wonder sometimes if people get bewildered with my Blog. One minute I’m ranting about clothes and threatening to soil myself, the next I’m proposing a way of restructuring government, and the next I’m writing poetry about my family!

I seem to have a head full of chaos – and some fulminating opinion about everything. I think it’s really important to be able to laugh sometimes, often about the more painful or difficult stuff. Yet underneath I have a very earnest side.

I’ve worked with people who are struggling to cope for almost two decades. I too came from some pretty painful beginnings. So I’ve learned a lot – and I’ve learned how much more I have to learn!

If the slightly schizophrenic nature of my Blog disturbs you I do apologise 8O, but I hope you will come to savour the unpredictability.