I made peace with blaming others, something I used to do for the most part of my life in an attempt to restore justice to a conflict. I did it to feed my ego and to basically feel better for being able to fight for myself. When you screwed me, I wanted you to own up to it and accept the consequences. Has it helped me feel better? Did it make me feel seen or heard? Not in the slightest. Essentially, I was just reiterating the behavior of others around me, under the false pretense of making things right.
Blaming + shaming someone for their actions takes time and energy. But what does that accomplish for you? It accomplishes nothing. The hurt is still there, waiting for you to realize what you avoided so much…that it wasn’t about what they did. It is about who you thought they were/were not.
How can someone harm you? They can only do so if you make their path easier, and you do so by creating expectations around them. In your mind, you create these images of them and assign them a role (best friend, excellent lover, best co-worker, etc.). Those roles reflect your deepest, unfulfilled needs. As soon as someone is given a role, you expect them to behave in a certain way. As the relationship progresses, you continue to infuse that image with more qualities that you expect them to manifest in the relationship. When disappointment hits, it is because, in reality they have stepped out of the role you gave them. They were never who you thought they were.
To satisfy our need for love and belonging, we choose to love what is easy to love, what is readily available. We ignore the rest. This means we don’t love the whole person and what is real about them. We only love half-heartedly. And for the most part, we love the image we have of them, and we love the role they play in our lives.
Yet LOVE has room for everything. It welcomes everything in. And if we are not quite ready yet, we can step back and take a closer look at who they really are, and at who we really are. We always have a choice. And the best choices are those that make us feel lighter, at peace within ourselves, and always promote more LOVE.